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Anti-Semitic is a word that’s being bandied about lately, and according to many of the people I correspond with on Facebook, what I am, so I’d like to take this blog to discuss the word.
Oh, I’m not making the etymological argument, that semitic includes both Jews and Arabs, as in “Hebrew and Arabic are semitic languages” or “Hummus is a popular ingredient in semitic cuisines.” We all know that anti-semitic started meaning anti-Jewish decades ago, like at least 5 or 6 decades ago. If somebody wants to say they hate Arabs, they say anti-Arabic. People who hate both Jews and Arabs, while they probably exist, are too few to be deserving of their own word.
Did you know that ‘tell’ used to mean count, and ‘awesome’ used to mean terrifying? Well, you don’t actually have to, because they don’t mean that any more.
But to apply the word ‘anti-semitic’ to anybody who disagrees with Israel, or even more specifically, with Benjamin Netanyahu, is wrong. Completely, 100% incorrect.
There are a lot of Jews around the world, some even inside Israel, who feel quite strongly that what just happened is wrong. We are part of the ‘semitic’ part of the word ‘anti-semitic.’ Words can be flexible, but not that flexible.

It’s very strange for me to say ‘don’t blame the press’ because normally I’m ready to blame the press for almost everything. They mold public opinion and, as we can see from reports around the world, public opinion is filled with hate, short-sightedness, and a whole fuckton of ignorance and bigotry. Still, there are exceptions to every rule.
I’ve seen a couple of articles today talking about how much Princess Diana was ‘hurt’ by an interview with the BBC, I guess Harry said something about it, and I’ve seen quite a few people defending the BBC by saying the tabloids hurt her worse, which is probably true, the British tabloids are about as trashy as they come.
But, I don’t care. She chose that life, and she reaped the benefits of it, and she can’t have possibly thought, when she married Charles, that the newspapers were going to leave her alone. She was a rich girl, a British girl who hung out with a posh crowd, and she knew full well what marrying a prince was all about. Despite their age difference, his all around nerdiness, and the fact that in the looks department, she could have done better in any dance club, any night of the week, she married him. She wanted that role, the fame, the glamor. It’s not the fault of the press that things didn’t work out as she’d planned.
Sure, the newspapers may have hurt her. Happens to lots of celebrities. They can’t be blamed for her unhappiness. They certainly can’t be blamed for her death. That’s because her driver was going too fast in a tunnel and lost control, and she was undoubtedly telling him to go faster.
You could blame the paparazzi, I suppose, but I don’t. They’re just doing their job. Every celebrity has choices in how they deal with paparazzi. You can smile and wave and put up with it, you can live a secluded and mysterious life, or you can fight with them and try to outrun them, which is what she tried to do and it didn’t work out so well.
How many celebrities have said, before their deaths “Eh, we can fly in this weather, no problem” or “forget that warning sign, I ski this slope all the time.” Plenty. It’s as if they think the laws of physics don’t apply to them. Because those are the only laws that do.

It’s not the kind of headline you should see more than once in a lifetime, but we do. “World’s Largest Iceberg Breaks Off From Antarctic Ice Shelf.” It seems to me I’ve seen the exact same headline 7 or 8 times now. Maybe some times it was Greenland, but no matter. The extra water, a large mountain of it at a time, all goes into the same ocean. And this one, they say, is 70 times the size of Manhattan. It’s sort of like “Record Breaking Temperatures in July,” “Most Devastating Forest Fire Ever,” which seems to happen almost every year, and “Worst Hurricane Ever” which comes along every few years.
Admittedly, the article did say that sometimes icebergs break off from the ice shelf naturally, and that this was one of those kind. Not due to global warming, just a huge iceberg which broke off. But the water from this one, plus all of those which were caused by global warming, gets counted together when it comes time to raise the level of the ocean, which leads to hurricanes, and floods.
Ditto with the fires. Some are caused by arson. Some are caused by drought (which makes arson much easier) but, large and small and whatever the cause, they all reduce the amount of trees on Earth, which means more carbon in the atmosphere, which means we’re all going to die.
Because it’s all connected. And it’s all cumulative.

In the argument about whether or not there is a God, I look at it very much the same way I look at the Grandfather Paradox in time travel, i.e. there is no such thing as time travel, therefore there is no paradox.
Just assume, for a moment, for argument’s sake as they say, that there is no such thing as God. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Of course it’s possible to have starvation in a world of plenty, to have wars because some people make a profit on them, and for diseases to evolve quicker than mankind can find cures. Who’s to prevent it? It’s only natural that some young, brilliant people will die, and some nasty old war criminals and profiteers will live to be old, and wrinkled, and maybe even have stuff named after them. All within the laws of chance in a completely random, utterly indifferent universe.
It’s not necessarily a pretty vision. Certainly, there is beauty in the world, and even occasionally an admirable trait in human nature or two, but there is plenty of ugliness, too. As there would be, of course.

I like to write poetry, although some would say I write doggerel, which is fair. I tend to adhere to strict rhyme schemes, and my poems are often short. I’m cool with that criticism. I like children’s books, and advertising jingles. There is often a hard nugget of wisdom in a clever pun, or an unexpected rhyme.
I’m not a deep and sensitive person, I do not meditate, and my search for the meaning of life often takes second place to my search in the fridge for something to eat, or my search through Netflix to find something to occupy my mind. But, I do enjoy writing, and sometimes I fall short of ideas. Which affects this blog, of course. I don’t want to write about Israel’s war crimes every day, and I’ve kind of said what I have to say about universal health care, and the environment, and a few other issues. But, this blog is not about this blog.
When I browse through Facebook, or when I walk down the street for that matter, I am looking for the raw material for my next poem. Sometimes I will find it in somebody else’s poem because, as a writer, of course I have lots of writers among my 1500 odd (some odder than others) Facebook friends, and sometimes I will find it in a photograph or painting, which is perfectly legit. That’s called an ekphrastic poem. But often, somebody else’s poem will inspire me to write my own version, and I would like to call those ekphrastic poems as well (ekphrastic is an adjective that describes any work of art whose subject is another work of art), but sometimes other people might view it as stealing or, worse, as mockery.
I hope they don’t. If I write a poem inspired by someone else’s poem, I want them to take it as a compliment. But, it’s up to them, of course.