Trauma and taxes

But for the massive brain trauma my father suffered due to land mine shrapnel removing a piece of his brain and paralyzing half of his body back in November 1951, he would have been ninety-seven this week. He was barely a statistic, a blip on the documentation of an already-forgotten war, but the injuries he received as a young twenty-four year old who had just graduated from college and was hoping to go to medical school reframed the structure and trajectory of his remaining fifty-four years when, after decades of anti-convulsant drugs and a row of pills he took daily, and a weakened body wracked by atrophy and compensation, he succumbed to sepsis, which quickly moved through his body and ended his remarkable and tragic life, in which he met and married my mom, had their first two boys – honeymoon babies – Francis and Howard, who died after a premature birth, went on to have eight more children, all of whom are alive and well, went to law school and became a lawyer for the marginalized and disenfranchised, all the while living with a debilitating war injury to which many others would have succumbed, either physically or mentally.

And I share this personal information because, as wars rage around the world and our tax dollars support various sides and causes, one of the first things we do is forget that every single person involved in a war, whether on your side or not, carries with them generational trauma that affects an enormous number of people. Here we are, seventy-five years after one land mine exploded and injured my father, and I and my siblings still live with his scarred legacy of volatile mood swings, erratic emotions, and very little mental capacity for reflection and contemplation. And remember, he was just one young officer on patrol in Yanggu Province. What happens to the people of this current war in Gaza whose whole world is destroyed in front of them? When we care about people, empathize as fellow humans who live and grow in a community of friends and family, we remember their smiles, their passions and dreams, the things that make them human. But, when foreign policy decisions and irreparable differences between governments and states turn these people, who probably celebrate their children’s birthdays just as we do, into enemies, none of those human attributes and frailties matter. Instead, filtered through language and images that dehumanize the side that is on the receiving end of America’s bombs and bullets and logistics and supplies, we call an entire people fundamentalists, extremists or terrorists, forgetting that until bombs dropped on them, they were boys and girls who played with imaginary friends and laughed and played together.

Every victim of Hamas’s attacks on Israel last year has been remembered for what they brought to this life – the joy and hope of a generation. They were school kids and grandparents, fathers and university students, young lovers and doctors, and all of them are dead. The loss of each person should be mourned and their lives remembered. But how is it that in these United States it is hard to find a story of a child in Gaza who was killed by a bomb or the weight of a concrete building collapsing on her, and learn of her humanity, her dreams, her hopes? And why is it that if I, as a US taxpayer, disagree with how my government is allocating its resources and which states it supports, I run the risk of being labeled antisemitic? Is it not possible to disagree with a state’s actions and policies and activities and not hate, demonize, or dehumanize the citizens and civilians of that state? Throughout my life I have protested and criticized my government, and still I call myself a deeply patriotic American who loves his country. I should be able to criticize what our government is doing in Israel in the same way – argue about what our tax dollars are supporting, and not be labeled a lover of terrorists, or an anti-Semite. And I am not passing myself off as a Middle East expert, but I have a right and obligation as a concerned US citizen to engage in discussion about what we support with our taxes. And it feels like the lobby that argues on behalf of US support for sending weapons to Israel is as focused as the NRA – it brooks no dissent and has an influence that goes well beyond what it should.

I support Israel’s right to defend itself, and if the US continues to support Israel’s Iron Dome defense network, I will gladly see my tax dollars flowing in that direction. But Israel is no longer merely defending itself, and its continuous bombardment and destruction of Gaza in the past year has now spread to Lebanon and beyond. In one year, Israel has killed nearly fifty thousand Palestinians – which is as many deaths as the US suffered during the entire Vietnam War, and if I raise my voice in opposition to this, someone may very well reduce it to a pat slogan and say that I hate Jews. No, I resist that label because I don’t hate Jews or want to see the destruction of Israel, but I also do not want my tax dollars paying for weapons that kill civilians, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in Palestine are civilians – the very moms and dads and kids and grandparents who are the hope of the next generation. I wrote about my father because I wanted to point out how much trauma one person suffers over the life of an injury. What happens to the Palestinian people, who are facing a relentless orchestrated effort to destroy them? What will happen to their trauma and how will it ever heal?

For the past year, the US has paid for and provided an endless supply of bombs and bullets being used by Israel to annihilate the Palestinians living in Gaza, and one small thing Americans can do is allow for a space where we can discuss this, and be able to criticize our government – or Israel’s – and not be accused of hating Israelis or Jews. We have a right and obligation to argue about our taxes and foreign policy – it’s about as American as buying a bagel in New York or dipping a warm piece of torn bread into an olive oil-and-garlic-laden hummus. Peace.