Margie, Hannah Arendt, and me

Margie gets a paper version of the New York Times every day, courtesy of her son the doctor, who lives in Manhattan. So she reads about Israel and Palestine, and she knows something huge is going on, but she can’t understand what it’s all about. She thinks of Israel as Palestine, the name of that land when she was a girl; so she thinks Israelis are killing Israelis. She has forgotten that there were “Arabs” living on the land when boatloads of Jewish people began arriving there in 1948, and she doesn’t know that the “Arabs” are called “Palestinians.” I have explained the whole thing to her before, but she doesn’t remember a word of it, and the newspaper keeps arriving every day. She asks her children and they tell her it’s too much to explain.

“I know it’s hard to get anything into my brain,” she says to me, exasperated with herself, “my brain full of holes. But if anybody is ever going to explain this to me, it will be you.” 

So I explained it. She was horrified. “And who is supporting Netanyahu?” Biden. “Why?” I say it probably has to do with money. “Oh no,” she groaned. “So this is what has become of Israel?” Yes. “And the United States is supporting it? What about the peace-loving Jews?” They are there, and they’re in the streets in Tel-Aviv and in the USA, and all over the world, waving placards, wearing T-shirts that say NOT IN OUR NAME. But they’re not in power.  I explain again and again. No, it’s not Jews killing Jews. It’s Netanyahu killing Arabs. But it’s breaking her heart, so I take it in a new direction. I ask if she remembers Hannah Arendt. “That name rings a bell,” she says.

Hannah Arendt wrote a book about Eichmann, Hitler’s henchman, and “The Banality of Evil.” She says evil isn’t some work of supernatural madness; it occurs when ordinary people are willing to do what they’re told, violating what they know to be right. Another of her books is The Origin of Totalitarianism. She describes Stalin and Hitler, but it sounds like she’s describing Trump. Margie struggled to hold this, but then I got to my point about Arendt. 

Humankind, Arendt says, will always survive totalitarianism because we love each other. We can’t help it. We’re social animals, and we care about each other. We form communities and we protect those who are vulnerable. So while many will suffer, and many will die, as a result of cruel charismatic people, those who survive will go on loving each other. That’s what we can do. We can love the people we love. We can do that right now. Fiercely.

I didn’t make a photo of Margie today because it felt intrusive. So instead you get me, standing in her hallway waiting for the elevator to go home, broken hearted, holding the book I left with her last week, Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon, illustrated by JonArno Lawson, story by Nahid Kazemi. We read it together last week, and she kept it to study the illustrations but left it where I would see it and take it home with me this week.

I recommend reading Hannah Arendt. It might be a way out of despair.