Tuesday's postcard, and the courage of Ezra Klein

October 24, 2023

“Swim on dear father” From the Big Eddy Waterworks

Ezra’s drum

Today’s post in this space will not be long but it may help to preface it with a personal admission. The motivation to be here, to share writing and photography, could simply be about my love for my children and my hopes for their futures. That would be enough. But it’s more than that. I love several of my contemporaries, many of whom I haven’t met, and I love the curiosity, humor, and courage that—like loose cordage around an unruly package—hold my hopes for humanity together.

It’s hard though—hard to sustain hope for our path as a society when so many Americans have been self-afflicted with what is tantamount to political mad cow disease, taken in by a severely narcissistic and corrupt reality-TV buffoon.

I remember heading south with Devin on what turned out to be a 20-hour adventure, in August of 2017, to watch a full solar eclipse in central Oregon. To protect our eyes we brought with us the special glasses you can buy, on your way to a solar eclipse, to protect your eyes from direct sunlight. It is such an apt metaphor. I can find toxic tragedy in every direction, but there is wonder, also. It takes several forms, many of which emit or reflect light. But to see and appreciate it you also have to take care not to be blinded by tragedy or mired in hopelessness.

One of the writers I follow is Ezra Klein, the 39 year-old journalist and commentator who now hosts The Ezra Klein Show podcast at The New York Times. The breadth of his intellect and interests is remarkable but even more so is his honesty about his questions and his experience.

His October 18 episode/essay is not very long. It’s entitled Israel is giving Hamas what it wants. Lessons for Israel from the American response to September 11

I noticed it on October 19th, but purposely waited several days before I listened to it. Honestly, I just didn’t have room for it—I didn’t have the emotional space to absorb it at the time, in largest part because the Hamas attack on southern Israel seemed to me as dreadful in its brutality as what I feared, and still fear: that it will unleash-more violence, countless innocent lives to be lost, and a reaction that invites a broader war.

Klein is from a Jewish family. Here’s the opening paragraph to his piece:

The first thing that my mother asked me when she saw me after Hamas’s massacre in Israel was to promise that I wouldn’t write or talk about it publicly, that I wouldn’t make myself a target for some violent anti-Semite. I had that conversation with her just a day or two after talking to my friends about whether or not they were going to keep their children home that week because their kids go to daycare at a synagogue, and they’re worried the daycare would be bombed or that an armed shooter would open fire. That should give you a sense of what it’s felt like to be Jewish in recent weeks.

Israel’s 9/11 — that’s been the refrain. And I fear that analogy carries more truth than the people making it want it to. Because what was 9/11? It was an attack that drowned an entire country — our country, my country, America — in terror and in rage. It drove us mad with fear.

And in response, we shredded our own liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Our response to 9/11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It made us weaker. It made us poorer. It made us hated around the world. We didn’t pull our forces out of Afghanistan until 2021, 20 years later. And when we left, we did so in humiliation and catastrophe and defeat, abandoning the country to the Taliban.

Our politics still haven’t recovered from the ravages of that era. It was, in large part, the invasion of Iraq that discredited the Republican Party’s leadership class, leading directly to the rise of Donald Trump. 9/11 created a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid brutal things, and we are still paying the costs. Perhaps we always will be.

Whether you agree with Klein is not beside the point. It matters.

But what mattered most to me is that he wrote and spoke so honestly about such a tragic subject, so close to his and his family’s ongoing experience, and by extension, so close to our collective experience. I read several columns a week. I can’t remember the last time I read something as forceful and brave. It was like being drenched by a bucket of ice water. I recommend it.

—tjc