I was excited. My post “Confession” got ELEVEN likes! Then I realized I hadn’t written a post called “Confession.” Thanks for the brief “up,” guys. Must have been Nan’s Notebook or Nan Cohen.
OH oh oh! I DID WRITE CONFESSION! Seems that post must have been held up for more than a month (possibly being searched for any breaking of rules, since I mentioned others). If so, glad I made the cut, more than a month late. It was submitted on Feb. 1, 2024.
I DID WRITE CONFESSIONS! Thanks for the real Likes!
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WOULDN’T IT BE AWFUL…to have this kind of notice when we die?:
Gerald Levin, a former Time Warner chief executive, died at 84. He was an architect of the company’s failed merger with AOL, considered the worst corporate marriage in U.S. history.
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I LOOKED IT UP
Ten (10) staff members of a literary journal walked out when the journal published an article by a woman living in Israel, and the journal then retracted it. So of course I was curious, and found it and read it, looking for what could have caused the staff to walk out. I COULDN’T GUESS, MYSELF. If I had to guess, maybe it would be found somewhere in these lines…. [If so, it suggests to me that reason has become infected, maybe by long-term Covid?] Several paragraphs after the author wrote that she wished she was not there [in Israel] among people who used pronouns like us and them and ours and theirs. she wrote a Palestinian friend who had worked along side her at Newsweek: “How are you, my friend?” “Sad, sad,” her friend texted. And a few minutes later her friend texted her back:
“Ministry of Health
The water well and oxygen station in Al-Shifa Medical Complex were targeted
Dogs eat corpses dumped in a Shifa compound
The complex is subjected to continuous targeting
“I didn’t know how to respond. “Beyond terrible,” I finally wrote.….My own heart was in turmoil. It is not easy to tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides. But as the days went by, the ache turned into a dull pain in my heart and a heaviness in my legs. At night I lay on my back in the dark, listening to rain against the window. I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children and women, had any way of knowing the weather had turned cold, and I thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside tents supplied by the U.N. or looking for shelter. I stared up at the ceiling and imagined it moving closer and closer toward me. Not falling or collapsing but moving, like an elevator descending into the ground….
” There is a limit to which the human soul can stomach atrocities and keep going. On the other hand, turning away from distressing footage taken by Hamas terrorists, by surveillance cameras, and by people running for their lives or sheltering from missiles meant turning away from their pain. I couldn’t do it”….Joanna Chen
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It is no real secret that without work, without education, and without hope, people get into trouble. And the result is that tragically we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth including China.–an authoritarian Communist country with a population four times our size.”
–Bernie Sanders in His Own Words, 2015
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P.S. — The earlier disappearance of gravatars from my list of followers was a delayed thing–they have reappeared now. (I thought at least one of my followers may have died).
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