For the Sake of Tomorrow

In the blustery cold of today’s noonday sun, I stand holding a sign amongst a group of people with similar signs. The cold makes me feel like Winter is wrapping her long spidery fingers back around the glimmer of hope she showed us this weekend that made it feel like Spring. In the wind, my hair, still damp from my shower, blows cold and icy tendrils across my face. My sign reads, “For the sake of tomorrow.” To my left, a woman holds one that says, “Let’s talk,” and to my right a man holds high a billowing flag of Palestine. The wind dances through my hair and the flag, spirals and gusts and pirouettes. Stop the killing, stop the genocide, we stand for DOE and healthcare and free press and the right to protest, read our signs!

The twenty or so of us stand alongside Main Street, talking in multicolored voices that rise and fall about our lives and fears and fears and fears. Trump brings different responses out of people: me and my fellow protesters are laughing in despair, crying as we listen to each other’s stories, and standing still, letting the wind and our signs do the talking. Some people driving my avert their eyes from our words: if I can’t see it, it isn’t there. Others honk their horns, give us thumbs up, smile. Twice someone rolls down his tinted windows, screaming,

“Trump 2025! Trump!!!”

When will he realize that Trump won’t solve his problems? We keep talking, swaying in the wind like the billowing flags of the people overhead and in our hands. A woman tells me she’s living on government welfare and taking care of her husband, who has cancer and can’t work or walk.

“If he was well,” the woman tells me, “He’d be out here with us, but he isn’t and I’m afraid neither of us will be once the welfare stops coming in.” 

I nod. Both of my parents have been impacted by Trump II, too. My mom does work in green building but she hasn’t had a job since Trump came into office. My dad is a scientist, and the government has stopped funding his grants altogether. He’s been waiting since January for a grant to be reviewed, which will fund his research and keep food on the table. I fear that if my parent’s jobs aren’t secured soon, they won’t be able to retire. Even with scholarships, they still have to put me and my little brother through college. Mom waits for a job, Dad waits for his grant. We wait.

Talking, waiting, change! We won’t change minds from being out here, but we will turn heads, and even if we weren’t on a busy road, being in each other’s company is good and necessary in a time like this.

Once, a driver shouts something at us in Hebrew. 

“L'chaim!” I retort. I don’t speak Hebrew fluently so I don’t know what he said, but his red eyes bore lightning sparks into the chai around my neck. To life, I think, that’s why I’m here. And then, a man in a blue car screams from his window,

“You fucking Nazis!!! Anti semites, FUCK YOU!!!! Fuck you antisemitic PIGS!!!”

“Not in my name!” I shriek back, but he can’t hear me though and I don’t really look Jewish with my blonde hair and western features so he wouldn’t know anyway. We look him in the eye as he rolls past, scream things, continue, wait for him to leave, some people shout back. We stand in horror, shock and fear, paralysis.

I am fifteen and I am Jewish. I am not antisemitic. Neither are the people on either side of me. It is NOT antisemitic to want the genocide in Gaza to end. It is NOT antisemitic to be anti-zionist, as I am. Being Jewish and supporting Palestinian freedom go hand-in-hand, like latkes and applesauce or Chanukkah and candlelight. Zionists, as defined by Morgan Bassichis in Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, believe that whatever violence is necessary to achieve a Jewish state with a Jewish majority on a land lived on and farmed for millennia by Palestinians, is justified. Today, most Zionists aren’t even Jewish, they’re Christian like President Donal Trump. Zionism uses the Jewish community as a moral cover. Trump, by calling pro-Palestinian protesters like myself antisemites, has weaponized Jews against Jews, for his own political benefit alone. To this I roar back in the man’s face as he rolls by in his blue car with his middle finger extended, 

“NOT IN OUR NAME!!!”

He passes, I catch his eye, he radiates anger. Anger. Anger. He wants to kill me. A Jewish antisemite.

I am winded in the cold March breeze. Mom hugs me from the side. I feel like someone has died. Leaves from the last year rattle across the street below the passing cars in a moribund funeral march, exposed by the snowmelt. The wind fades, a tear in my eye falls. Snow off a car’s roof. Silence. I am afraid to be alone with my thoughts. We wait, wait, wait.