Author with State Senator Pat Jehlen and husband Alain Jehlen in Davis Square. Published 20 March 2024   Somerville Times here Another Jew for Ceasefire C.R. Spicer March 8 Yellow tulips for International Women’s Day were distributed to participants after thirty-five had gathered in Somerville at Davis Square to mourn the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. Alain Jehlen, attending the protest on Friday said “Ceasefire is the only way to be human.” “Already 1 percent of the population is dead,” Sen. Pat Jehlen said. “That’s thirty million Americans. 700 in Somerville.” “I’m so appalled,” said Nancy Murray, Cambridge resident who worked for the ACLU, She has visited all the refugee camps including Jabalia recalling the 2,000 lb. bomb Israel dropped there. As more than 9,000 women have been killed in Gaza, the death toll was dramatized by a reading of names and ages of Palestinian victims. “The names we just read included several families,” remarked Amina, a student wearing a Kafiya ...

Where is a middle ground in a polarization of the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair? How do ‘we’ feel about our consumption of breaking news about war?    “‘Surgeries have had to stop,’ said the hospital’s director, Dr. Mohamed Abu Salmiya. ‘Kidney dialysis has stopped and the neonatal unit is in a very dire situation. A baby has died because of lack of oxygen and electricity and heat.’ …The hospital has more than three dozen premature babies in incubators, Medhat Abbas, the director-general of Gaza’s Health Ministry, said in a text message on Saturday”–Raja Abdulrahim, Ameera Harouda and Alan Yuhas, “ Plight of Gaza’s Main Hospital Worsens as Israeli Defense Force Close In ” 12 Nov. 2023 New York Times.    In reality, as opposed to the social construction of discourses, war is not a topic of conversation among soldiers alone (take Brian de Palma’s Redacted for example of a fictional retelling of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as point of view shifts to interpr...

  I am flying. Tomorrow I visit the gates of Bangor Naval Trident Submarine base, the largest collection of usable deployed U.S. nuclear weapons, and challenged by Archbishop Etienne of Seattle in his Oct. 7 pastoral letter, "because the Puget Sound could be on the front lines of a nuclear war." The existential threat emphasized here is followed by his appeal to Catholics to renew their study to Catholic teaching, and cites Pope Francis's 2019 address at Hiroshima decrying the possession of Nuclear weapons. At the gates of savage dreams, where social death not triumph beckons, what if all the unmade roads, trains planes, if at the threshold of nuclear tolerance, all the civic unrest, the living dead, arose to alarm? "the loss that makes the world" –Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism Ornate or basic, thresholds do, architecturally speaking, what acts of recognition, ceremonies of acceptance, ritualize. The opening to a space is marked by the style in which the...