Carol Bergman

 

 

 

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.

 

― H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

 

          

 

Out of curiosity, I went onto the United States Department of Education site and found the message that became the title of this blog post. I tried to imagine what it felt like to the employees of that federal agency when they realized that their site had been scrubbed. Scrubbed clean. And that their ongoing projects had also been scrubbed, or expunged, as had the employment of some of their colleagues, or each other, or themselves. The offices must have been in trauma turmoil. Therefore expungement is a better word to explain what has happened—and  is happening—in Washington DC. 

 

In other words, the UFOs have landed.

 

A word, then, about UFOs. There is a woman I know—a  sweet, generous, educated woman—who  "believes" in UFOs, believes they exist and that they are the cause of much of our distress right now. I am at a loss to disabuse her. She reassures me that she voted "right," not right on the political spectrum, just sanely, shall we say, even though she was afraid to go to the polling station on the day of the election in the event of disturbance, or worse. I suggested she play it safe for her own wellbeing, which is fragile, and vote by mail. I obtained a mail-in ballot for  her. She filled it out in the privacy of her home, but it didn't work, the wrong people were elected, she said. Someone had obviously not counted her ballot. "Next time," I said, in an effort to reassure her, and myself. But she was not content with my reply. "There is the possibility that the results of the election were generated by AI," she continued. "What if the UFO's have departed and left their AIs behind? Have they already infiltrated at ground level?"

 

"Unlikely," I said, before saying goodbye, and taking a long walk in the sunshine to restore my equilibrium and emotional sobriety.

 

 

 

The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me personally. 

 

-M. Gessen in the NY Times 3/17/25

 

Bullying paralyzes all conversation, or obliterates it. Think Zelensky in the Oval office. How did he feel, or try not to feel? Ashamed? Humiliated? Angry? Frightened? Silenced?  A mature man, a President of a nation at war, Zelensky seemed frazzled, but maintained his dignity. Still, the semiotics were clear for all to see: Trump and JD Vance tried to break Zelensky in a public display. Some observers have noted that the encounter was saturated with antisemitic tropes.

 

Carolyn Mackler was in 7th grade when she experienced bullying for the first time. Her secular family—her father Jewish, her mother not Jewish--had migrated to upstate Brockport, NY from New York City where Carolyn had enjoyed feeling different—because of her height, because of her intermarried family, perhaps.  "I was a free spirit in elementary school," she says.

 

But then one day, a Brockport classmate drew a swastika on his notebook, showed it to friends, and the bullying began. Kids called her "loser,"  sang what they thought were Jewish songs, and dressed as Nazis at Halloween.

 

The teachers remained silent.

 

"Kids are sneaky," Carolyn says, "and even after my parents went to the school to complain, the bullying didn't stop. I shrunk into myself and started feeling insecure. Finally, when I got to high school I decided to pretend I wasn't Jewish. If someone said something, I told them they were making a mistake."

 

Now, at 51, and a successful Young Adult novelist, with two grown sons, Carolyn decided to tackle bullying, and her own experience, in a book for 5th, 6th and 7th graders, Right Back At You. An epistolary novel, letters appear in Talia and Mason's closets across time; Talia lives in 1987 and Mason in 2023. The narrative device works well and  will surely appeal to middle-schoolers. But I wonder how parents, or educators, will process an underlying message: bullying is too difficult for adult intervention to make much difference.  There are so many well developed approaches to tackle bullying these days that I find it hard to believe this is true. That said, prejudicial bullying—bullying because of race, gender or ethnicity—is so callous that it is particularly challenging.

 

Like so many other books for adults, children and teens, Carolyn Mackler's novels have been banned from schools, a badge of honor. Scholastic is the publisher of Right Back At You and it is to their credit that they are taking a chance on what some consider a controversial topic. When Carolyn told her editor, David Levithan, what she wanted to write about, he gave her the go ahead without reservation. "With over 10,000 titles being banned or challenged in the last school year (per PEN America's tracking), and with titles such as The Diary of Anne Frank and Beloved being banned, it's hard to imagine publishing books that won't be threatened by censors," he wrote in an email.

 

Now that the book is published, Carolyn has started an ambitious Pen Pal Project. She asked Scholastic to provide stationary and started contacting school districts throughout the United States. The Sylvan Park School in Nashville, TN and the Lopez Island School on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington State will be the first two participants. 6th and 7th graders will read Right Back At You before a virtual visit with Carolyn. After the discussion, they'll get paired up as Pen Pals. 

 

Will they be able to create community and empathy across a geographic divide? Will the bullying in their schools stop? Will they come away with a deeper understanding of antisemitism and other hatreds? 

 

Stay tuned.

 

If your local middle school is interested in participating in the Right Back At You Pen Pal Project, contact:   www.carolynmackler.com/contact

My Seattle cousin, Ellen—an educator and an activist—sent me a Guardian article yesterday about the Tesla Take Down Movement. I hadn't read much in the American press about it which, in itself, is interesting even though it's a movement.  My heart  soars as I write that word, worthy of a different, bold font.

 

I don't own a Tesla, but I have friends and family members who do own a Tesla. If I could have afforded one way back when, in the era before the American berserk—more later—I would have bought one, and bought stock in the company, too. Indeed, before Elon Musk started channeling apartheid fascism, or exposed his inner apartheid fascism for all to see, he was an a-WOKE environmentally conscious entrepreneur. So, it's sad and dangerous that the a-WOKE life-affirming impulse in him did not stick. He just couldn't control his arm at the Republican convention. Maybe it spasmed.

 

I think I have written here about a recent trip in a Tesla, if not my first, then one of my first. I was in the back seat of the car marveling at the technology and its intent—a cleaner, safer world. The car is a miracle of engineering. Even though there is a necessary reckoning at the moment, there should be no guilt among those who have purchased this miracle vehicle. After all, the fascist impulse was in hiding. I hope the boycotts and marches continue, though, and the movement builds and builds. Until what? Hard to say.

 

We are in the midst of a profound sundering, the "indigenous American berserk" as Philip Roth dubbed it in his masterpiece, American Pastoral. I recommend the trilogy—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, and the more recent, The Plot Against America, all prescient.

 

In the meantime I rest easy, without guilt, in the driver's seat of my 2003 nearly vintage Honda lovingly maintained by an honest mechanic in my hood. And though I don't have to make any immediate divestment decisions, I will reflect with enthusiasm on the Take Down Tesla Movement, and write about it.

 

                                              

 

 

 

 

The appetite grows in the eating.  

 

-Stephen Kotkin to David Remnick, The New Yorker Radio Hour 3/7/25

  

I have two Canadian cousins, one in Toronto, the other on Gabriola Island off the coast of Vancouver. Sherry, my Toronto cousin wrote to ask why I haven't written about Canada yet on my blog. Of course, I can't write about everything, but I was smitten; I hadn't been paying enough attention. Sherry had crossed the border to join us for "American" Thanksgiving in 2024 after the October "Canadian" Thanksgiving, and I wondered if she'd be traveling to New York in 2025. "The only time I'm going to America is to get on and off a cruise ship," she said definitively during a recent WhatsApp conversation. 

 

My Gabriola Island cousin, George, said something similar. He's not going to "step foot." Unlike Sherry, he has a US passport and a Canadian passport. Happily dual. But he is not going to step foot.

 

I am bereft that my cousins have, for the moment, given up on America, that they are postponing their visits.  I understand, but I am bereft. Even worse, #47 signed an Executive Order on January 20 targeting Canadians. They now have to register as "aliens" if they stay in the US for more than three months. This particular "order" slipped under my radar. 

 

I come from an Alpine skiing family and when I was a kid I had the good fortune to go skiing every winter holiday. If there wasn't enough snow in the US, we headed for the Canadian Laurentians, a 617 mile 17 plus hour car trip from New York City. My stepfather was an endurance driver but at about 2 or 3 a.m. we pulled over to rest in a motel. The next morning we "crossed over" into Canada.  I have no recollection of a border, a border patrol, or a presentation of passports. Either I was sleeping or the border was seamless, one country segueing into another. But, of course, this is an illusion. Canada has its own culture, history, languages, politics, mores and border control.  Indeed, there is much to learn and admire about our neighbors and allies to the north-- the settler population, the immigrants and migrants, Quebec, and the First Peoples of Canada.

 

Talking to Sherry I realized I don't know enough about Canadian history. I asked her to recommend a good book, and I asked my cousin George the same. They are researching, and if I hear from them before I post this blog, I'll include their recommendations here.

 

Sherry mentioned that the patriotic fervor among Canadians across the political spectrum, inspired by the threat of annexation, has taken everyone by surprise. It has not surprised me. I remember a summer I spent in Canada at Manitou-Wabing Camp of Fine Arts as a swim instructor. I was asked to model my sculptural face in the art studio when I wasn't at the waterfront, and because I had to sit still was able to listen intently to conversations among the teen artists. They knew I was an American and were careful not to insult me with their banter, but it was evident that what I had thought was an inferiority complex was thoughtfulness, manners, and Canadian chauvinism tempered by  an altruistic, internationalist spirit.  After all, Canada is still a member of the British Commonwealth. They never seceded from that union or fomented a revolution. In sum, we may speak the same language and enjoy a shared border, but we are not the same people. Canadians are distinct. Their nation is sovereign.

 

 

Stephen Kotkin (quoted above) is realistic about aging autocrats. They always become infected with a desire for territorial expansion, he says. Nice to know but not comforting for Canada, Panama, or Greenland. Indeed, such belligerent expunging of treaties threatens all of us.

 

And that's just the tip of the melting icebergs this week.

 

A Canadian historian recommends these basic texts:  Canadian History for Dummies by Will Ferguson [new edition 2005!], still viable in 2025 and Lower's Colony to Nation.

 

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.

   

― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom,  1941

    

 

In Shanghai during the extended Covid lockdown—as reported by Evan Osnos for The New Yorker—people  were singing on their balconies and also demanding supplies. Government drones hovered in the sky: CONTROL YOUR SOUL'S DESIRE FOR FREEDOM/DO NOT OPEN THE WINDOWS TO SING  they broadcast above the heart throbbing sound of resistance.

 

We are bloodied but unbowed I told an EU friend this morning when she called  and asked why we were not all on the streets protesting. Patience, dear friend, we are recovering from the trauma of the coup. Our soul's desire for freedom will not be eviscerated so easily.

 

I only speak to myself and for myself. I cannot answer for my neighbors, or the nation, or our politicians.  From my vantage, it's a calamity from close-up or far away, certainly. And it isn't the outcome I had hoped or planned for all my progressive life. "I will never believe my government again," a young person told me the other day as we discussed ICE raids nearby. "We were supposed to be the good guys. We weren't supposed to hurt civilians, men, women and children." 

 

Such cruelty is hard to witness. Yet many good people are working to help the detainees in my locale. As best they can.  And that is the most we can do right now,  as we still feel endangered.  In this chaotic moment, it is not difficult to imagine the worst.

 

Let's say, for example, that we own our home and the home is comfortable, capacious. We are affluent, comfortable. And one day an official in a uniform barges in and says, "This house is condemned. You have to evacuate."  So we evacuate. But there is no compensation, no assistance, and maybe there is nothing wrong with the house except that someone else covets the house. What do we do? Where do we go? How do we resist once we are homeless and incapacitated, weakened by our unexpected circumstance?  Or, an email arrives at our place of work and announces "termination," as though we were vermin infecting the office. In an instant, our  life has been hit with a wrecking ball.  How do we recover and move on? 

 

So, patience, dear EU friend. We are taking a breath, protesting as best we can in this moment. The citizens of these United States have faced many challenges over the years. This one is cataclysmic, worse than anything in my lifetime. But now that we fully understand what has happened, we will find the courage to open our windows and sing.