They’re younger than the TikTok teens who trolled the Trump campaign so brilliantly, but they’re just as magnificent: the Brooklyn kids who’ve been turning out for marches and rallies in support of Black lives. The fence around P.S. 39 at Sixth Avenue and 8th Street has become an impromptu gallery for protest art, as you can see above.
A sampling follows. Continue reading
A gallery of recent street art and graffiti in Brooklyn. I have nothing to add in the way of commentary or insight, other than just to echo: Black lives matter.
A few more from the stretch of Fourth Avenue between Union and Sackett that also includes the image at the top of this post. Continue reading
You have, of course, read the “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” Op Ed in the New York Times. The writer assures us s/he is working diligently to protect us all from a volatile and incompetent administration . . . even as they work just as diligently to advance that administration’s policy priorities.
In order to continue that good work, they must of course remain anonymous.
Last night, Eric and I went to Barbès in Park Slope. (This may strike you as a non sequitur, but bear with me.) Continue reading
(Just in case there was any doubt where I stand.)
The bill that the Congressional Budget Office has already estimated would uninsure 24 million Americans over the next ten years got even worse today, when the Fake President agreed to allow insurance companies to sell fake insurance.
This was one of the key demands of the House “Freedom Caucus,” for whom uninsuring 24 million Americans in order to give a tax break to individuals earning more than $200,000 a year is not enough. They also want to give insurance companies the freedom to sell insurance that covers, basically, nothing. This morning, ace negotiator Donald Trump acceded to that demand.
For cancer survivors like me – and for anyone else with significant medical needs, or a significant likelihood of developing significant medical needs – this is a disaster.
Eliminating the requirement that all insurance policies cover essential health benefits would allow insurance companies to drop such frivolous benefits as maternity care or chemotherapy. The stated rationale: individuals shouldn’t be forced to pay for coverage they don’t want.
Let’s pause here for a second to let that sink in.
(Pause.) Continue reading
Is anyone honestly surprised that the steaming pile of poo being offered as a “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act would result in 24 million more uninsured Americans over the next ten years?
Let’s be clear: despite the Fake President’s huckster promises of “beautiful” coverage for everyone, repeal is not now and never has been about making health care more accessible and affordable.
It’s about deregulating the business community (congratulations! your employer can now drop your coverage with impunity! enjoy that Health Savings Account, sucker!), enriching insurance company executives (no more caps on compensation, yay! total freedom to use your premium dollars for salaries, not medical care!) and – first and foremost – cutting taxes for the very rich (wait, do you think this means you? hahahahahahahahahahaha, that’s so cute that I ran out of “ha’s”). Continue reading
Yesterday, Yemeni bodega owners across New York City went on a half-day strike against the Fake President’s Muslim ban, shuttering their stores at noon. (If you’re not from here, a word of explanation: bodegas are small neighborhood stores that sell groceries, sundries and quick eats, like the bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches that fuel city mornings.) You can read about the action – which drew thousands to a demonstration and prayer service outside Brooklyn Borough Hall – here.
This morning, the window of the bodega at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifth Street in Park Slope was plastered with messages of support from school kids, other Fifth Avenue businesses and neighborhood residents.
I went in and bought a 4-pack of toilet paper, just because.
These are scary times. But even as the rhetoric from the White House gets falser and crazier, I’m hopeful. I was moved to tears by the enormous gathering that filled Central Park West from Columbus Circle to 67th street the night before the Fake President’s underwhelming inauguration. And I was beyond moved – stunned, really – by the mass movement of cars and buses down I-95 early Saturday morning; by the commandeering of half the men’s room at the Maryland House rest stop by women in pink pussy hats, aided and abetted by a middle-aged, white, male security guard; by the lines that snaked around the parking structures at the Shady Grove metro station; by the spirit of cheerful cooperation as we made our slow way through the outside line, then the inside line, then onto the train; and, of course, by the Women’s March itself.
I’m also finding hope in small acts of decency that show how different we are from the Fake President’s dystopian vision. Continue reading
In one of life’s little ironies, this National Day of Action to preserve Americans’ access to health care coincides with the ninth anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis.
January 15, 2008 was a Tuesday, and I was sitting in my office when my secretary put through the call from my doctor. I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, what I did afterwards, or much else, really. Quite a bit has faded over the past almost-a-decade, even in the two years since I wrote this 2015 post.
The important thing was that I was sitting in my office. Which is to say: I had a job, and it was the kind of job that comes with an office, someone to take calls for you, and health insurance.
So as I went through treatment – which involved too many scans and biopsies to remember, surgery, a fairly grueling course of chemotherapy and eight years of anti-hormonal drugs – I was cocooned in a security blanket of comprehensive coverage. Continue reading
Food for the long haul
With each desperate dispatch from Aleppo; with each revelation about Russian interference in November’s election; with each ethical breach by the Grifter-in-Chief and his progeny; with each horrifying cabinet appointment – the temptation to curl up in a ball grows. Some days, it’s overwhelming.
What helps?
Activism, I would say. Coming together as a community. Supporting one another. Fighting back. (And, for Syria, checks to Doctors Without Borders, the International Rescue Committee and the UNRWA.)
I list those things first, because I honestly believe them to be the most important . . . but also, if I’m to be even more honest, because they sound like the sort of thing one should believe to be most important.
Here, at the risk of sounding trivial, are other things that help:
Running.
Looking at birds.
Eating soulful, home-style cooking.
Which brings us to Ital Fusion. Continue reading
A gray morning: you can barely see it, but the Statue of Liberty is there in the distance
There’s not going to be anything about food in this post. Or birds. And hardly anything about running. It’s probably a mistake to write anything about the election on this gray and weepy morning after, but I’m going to anyhow.
My most enduring memory of last night (this morning, actually): walking home in the wee hours and seeing a lone figure crouched on the sidewalk outside the lesbian bar down the block, sobbing uncontrollably.
My most enduring memory of this entire election: learning after the fact about the white, rural, Trump-voting Ohioans who flipped off my (brown) nephew as he walked down the street with my (white) nieces during our family vacation.
I woke up early this morning and went for a long run, because what else was there to do? As I ran, I thought about what’s next. And what to do.
So here’s what I came up with. Continue reading
Not another Brooklyn blog 