I've been dreaming more than doing

[sabotabby]

There was a type of small, red flower that would kill me if I touched it. I spent much of my life carefully avoiding it, which wasn't hard because I live in a city and thus it's easy to avoid flowers. But I was up north, and there was a forest, and if I walked along its edge, I could see the flowers blooming among the trees. But I was always careful.

At the grocery store, an old woman was struggling with a walker. There was something malicious in her face, but I'm never one to turn my back on someone who needs help. She pointed to the bottom of her walker. One of the wheels had come loose. "Can you get it back on?" she asked, all innocence. As I bent down to fix it, I noticed that the gingham apron she wore was splattered with a familiar shade of red.

She came closer.

Woke up. Then:

I was at some sort of a teachers' conference that included a large, tabloid publication full of articles and ads from sponsors. On the inside of the front cover, there was a paid ad by B'nai Brith about how great Israel was. It was a flow chart of photographs that started with the Holocaust, went through a series of (what I thought were actually kind of anti-Semitic) photographs about Jews doing well in business, and then ended with tourist photos of Israel. A pretty blond girl next to me was gushing about how well done it was.

"Actually," I said, "It's pretty horrible. I mean, where are the Palestinians in this? It just goes from the Holocaust to Israel without mentioning that there were people living there already who were dispossessed."

She immediately accused me of being One of Those, so I carefully explained my political position, giving historical context and my own personal history. I told her about my old friend N. who had been kicked out of her home in Jerusalem when she was 12, and then forced to flee from a refugee camp in Lebanon to Syria. I wasn't sure if I was getting through to the girl, but at least she was listening.

Comments

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Eek.