Wednesday Walk: Don't Be Mike Brady
Israel bombards Rafah, choosing sides in a protest, and gifts from our soon to be former yard
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
Rafah
My heart continues to break for the Palestinian people. They have been following the direction of the Israeli forces again and again only to find their lives threatened at every turn. This pattern has been repeated many times over the last seven months, but it’s still angering every single time.
In case you haven’t been following along, the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt has now been seized by Israeli tanks, which is predicted to effectively cut off any outside aid to the people still living in Gaza. The Israeli government is also launching an offensive against the Palestinian people living in Rafah.
Rafah had been one of the places where people from across Gaza had sought shelter and more than 1.3 million people are now living in the area.
As it has been for the last seven months, the videos coming out of Rafah are gutting to watch. In one that’s quite graphic, four men dressed in street clothes clear rubble from a house with their bare hands while the lifeless faces of children are visible, seemingly crushed by concrete.
Perhaps equally as chilling is the lack of videos that I seem to be seeing on my feed now compared to late last fall. Part of this is undoubtedly because Meta has been censoring Palestinian voices while also suppressing political content.
But it’s also simply a function of less reporting happening on the ground. According to conservative estimates, at least 100 journalists have been killed since October in Gaza. That doesn’t include the unofficial citizen journalists posting to social media who have also been targeted and killed.
We are seeing less and hearing less out of Gaza simply because those doing the sharing are no longer alive.
When viewing maps of how the territories belonging to Israel and Palestine have shifted over time, it seems clear to me that Israel’s intent is not simply to retaliate for October 7 and free the hostages. They will not be satisfied until every last part of Palestine is indisputably a part of Israel.
The attack on Rafah feels like another step in that direction, and unfortunately for those of us outside the region, it is difficult to ascertain just how brutal these attacks are and who is surviving. Pay attention and please support the journalists risking their lives to bring us all the truth.
Brady Got It Wrong
When I think of past injustices in this world like the Holocaust or the fight for Civil Rights, I like to cast myself on the team of the good guys. I like to imagine that I would be one of the people standing up against the bad forces in this world.
I think it’s a natural inclination for many people. When we write the story of our past, we tend to frame people as heroes as though that status was an inevitability. But often, in the moment, the people standing up for justice are the least liked and the most feared members of our society.
We are seeing that in the current treatment of student protestors across the country, certainly by the police but also by the general public. There seems to be the sentiment that these protestors are just spoiled kids without a firm grasp on reality. In truth, these students will be the ones changing the world and remembered for altering the course of the genocide in Gaza.
How do I know? Because we’ve been through this before.
When I was in school in the 1990s, it was generally acceptable to lionize the hippies that protested the Vietnam War in the 1960s. They were seen as heroes who helped end a pointless war. Images like the student placing a daisy in a gun barrel were iconic, and my peers grew up imagining ourselves as those hippies someday.
But during the 1960s, the students protesting the war on college campuses were seen by many adults as lazy and entitled.
I was reminded of this seeing a simple exchange of dialogue on The Brady Bunch the other day. As you may have heard when I interviewed Maureen McCormick, I had grown up watching Brady reruns. My daughter recently found an old DVD set I had of some episodes and asked to watch it for the first time. I decided to sit with her and watch two episodes, since I hadn’t watched the show in over a decade.
In the second episode of the first season entitled “Dear Libby,” there’s a scene where newlyweds Mike and Carol Brady are seated reading the newspaper and discover a page in missing. Here’s how the exchange went:
Mike: Honey, do you have Section B page 5?
Carol: Well no, I thought you had it.
Mike: Maybe it got mixed up.
Carol: Marjorie Mac’s wedding was continued on that page.
Mike: I was right in the middle of a battle on a college campus.
Carol: Over what?
Mike: What’s left. Probably demanding classroom credit for rioting.
Carol: Now now, dear. Your generation gap is showing.
This episode aired on October 3, 1969. This would have been one year after the protests at Columbia University and a few months before the National Guard would kill four students at Kent State University.
Were it not for student protestors, the Vietnam War may have continued for much longer than it did. It was student protestors who helped change the general sentiment about the war.
Yet there’s Mike Brady, comfortably seated in his easy chair, making jokes about the students and their “rioting.”
In this moment, those of us who are not on the front lines as students have a choice. We can support this movement, knowing that someday the history books will be written in the favor of these protestors. Or we can be Mike Brady, smugly undercutting the movement, only to ultimately lose anyways.
Parting Gifts from Our Land
Those of you who have been longtime readers of this newsletter know how important my backyard has been to me. It’s where we have tapped maple trees for the last four years, where we have taken our canoe on rides around the brook, and where we rode sleds in the winter. This was also the yard where my wife and I got married fourteen years ago.
As you probably also know, we are in the process of moving, and saying goodbye to our yard is going to be difficult. We now have a buyer for our home and are closing on the sale on our kids’ last day of school, so a number of chapters will be closing all at once for us.
We have about six weeks left in our old house, and it seems that our yard is playing all of its greatest hits, putting its best foot forward one last time.
During COVID, we happened to find quite the stash of morels growing in our yard (I wrote about it at the time). For a few years, I have been on the lookout for more, but never had quite the harvest like I did that first time.
Well on Monday, I was walking our dog in the yard and looking down at the ground when I noticed a little surprise. There was a morel hiding right in the fallen leaves!
I excitedly called my family out and my daughter eagerly came to help me harvest them. She and I had discovered our first morels when I was her homeschool teacher and we were throwing a frisbee around in the yard. She was a second grader then, she’s now a fifth grader.
It was magical walking around the yard with her at sundown looking for morels. We ended up harvesting a half dozen or so, but they were camouflaged well, so it took some work to see them all.
Oddly enough, these morels were not in the place where we used to find them. They were on the other side of the yard, under one of the maple trees that we tap for syrup and at the bottom of our sledding hill. In an odd way, it felt like our yard was giving us a bit of a sendoff, strutting its magical stuff for us before becoming part of a new family’s journey.
If that weren’t enough, yesterday morning, I noticed that our oriole had returned to our crabapple tree. Last year, I wrote about how the tree is a bit haggard now but I am reluctant to cut it down because an oriole visits it once a year for a few days in the spring. Right on cue, the tree was in full bloom and the oriole was back.
It’s these little moments that make us human and that connect us to the natural world. They are moments that I will miss dearly in this old house of ours.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.