From Palestine to the U.S., the politics of Israel have increasingly become a language through which political actors process defeat and project frustration.

This week, Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman of Kentucky’s 4th district, has become the latest in a long line of actors whose political defeats have been followed by intensified efforts against Israel.

In May of this year, Massie lost his renomination bid to Ed Gallrein, a former U.S. Navy Seal who had the backing of President Donald Trump as well as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent $37 million supporting Gallrein. Massie candidly labeled AIPAC “very persuasive.”

Since his loss, Massie has targeted AIPAC, demanding foreign lobbying groups be labeled as foreign agents (which would restrict their ability to donate to candidates), and this week sent a bill to the House that would cut off $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel in 2027.

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Massie was the only Republican supporting his bill. If anything, the legislation provided a platform for Democrats who have hardened their position against Israel in light of its war in Gaza, where U.S.-made weapons have aided in leveling cities and the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans in what many are calling a genocide—an accusation which Israel denies.

Thanks to Massie’s bill, the split in the Democratic party over support for Israel is palpable. The fracture itself took shape during the 2024 presidential election, when Democratic candidate Kamala Harris lost to Trump.

Many in the Democratic party blamed progressive Democrats for that defeat after they rejected Harris over her support for Israel during what they see as the Gaza genocide.

Either way, the Israel issue became a flashpoint dividing the Democratic party. A recent poll showed that 58% of Democrats believe that Washington supports Jerusalem too much, and favorability of the country has plummeted in recent years.

Ironically, then, punishing Harris for rejecting punishment of Israel over war efforts in Gaza is also a signifier for political frustration. I.e., progressives are punishing Israel through a proxy—moderate Democrats.

In a sense, the crux of the current issue was Israel’s response to October 7, 2023, when Hamas decided fatefully to invade Israel on the morning of the Jewish festival of Simchat Torah, killing over 1,000 Israelis.

Many analysts suggested that Hamas launched the attack to derail warming relations between Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel because the issue of Palestine was frustratingly being sidelined.

While failing to torpedo the existing Abraham Accords, the attack did stall further ties between Israel and Arab states. While Hamas achieved that goal by channeling its frustration into an attack against Israel, the question remains at what cost to itself?

Gaza lies in ruins. Its strongest regional ally, Hezbollah, has been pushed north of the Litani River and is being chased by the IDF through Beirut’s southern suburbs. Hamas’ most powerful ally, Iran, has faced brutal attacks by the U.S. and Israel that have killed dozens of its senior political and military leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei. The Islamic Republic is now tied up in a standoff with the U.S. over the Strait of Hormuz.

Now, Hamas has announced it will dissolve its government, which has been in power since the last Palestinian elections in 2006. Viable Palestinian statehood, meanwhile, has failed to advance in any substantial measure.

What Massie’s show vote this week reveals, then, much like Hamas’ October 7 onslaught, is that supporting Palestinian self-determination and targeting Israel as a vehicle for political frustration are different political acts. One seeks liberation. The other signals political grief.

By Eliezer Sherman

It goes without saying that most people’s fantasies about Southern California involve a beach: lounging, surfing, sailing, or cruising along routes 1 or 5 with the top down. Children squealing while building sand castles and digging holes to be filled in by rising tides*. Volleyballs and frisbees flying. Smiles, beach towels, sunshine, and palm trees swaying in a cool Pacific breeze in 70-degree temps with almost no humidity.What could possibly interrupt this idyllic fantasy?

Fifty years ago, on Amity Island, only a frenzied great white shark could do that. Today, unfortunately, it’s turds.

This Fourth of July weekend, authorities across Southern California are warning beachgoers to stay out of the water due to elevated levels of bacteria from runoff and sewage that could make swimmers sick.

Impacted beaches include shores from Santa Barbara to San Diego County—in Topanga Canyon, Malibu, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, San Pedro, Redondo Beach, Coronado, and, infamously, the California-Mexico border town of Imperial Beach, whose beaches have been officially closed for well over 1,000 days due to toxic runoff from the dirty mouth of the Tijuana River.

The malfunction of a sewer line pump that sent 2,000 gallons of sewage into the water led officials in Orange County to close a half-mile of Laguna Beach. Yes, that Laguna Beach—where a two-bedroom cottage near the shore was recently asking $18 million.

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Personally, I was shocked just the other day to smell raw sewage at Mission Beach in San Diego and to find it stuck in beached seaweed just above the tide where my dog was digging. Needless to day, my experience of the sunset was sullied.

The last time I walked over the pedestrian border crossing from Mexico to the U.S., I was nauseated by the intense scent of raw sewage in the Tijuana River canal running underneath the bridge toward the slough in California. I was there for a dental consultation, and in the end, part of my decision to get the work done stateside was related to that experience.

Residents and visitors to Coronado—a literally impeccable resort island replete with mansions, luxury apartments, and an iconic hotel—have begun posting pictures regularly on Nextdoor of murky tides, ostensibly from the Tijuana River runoff. Recently, U.S. Marines training on the island were getting sick from the pollution.

Just this month, someone’s dog became sick at Ocean Beach in San Diego after it ingested effluent that contained methamphetamine. Online, a commenter on the story noted a dog had died from doing the same.

Separately, a large sewage spill in Mission Bay caused runoff that temporarily closed the Ocean Beach Dog Beach entirely.

Ironically, the city of San Diego is currently weighing the closure of public beach restrooms as part of budget cuts despite these issues with pollution.

Further north, toxic runoff continues to leech into the ocean from the rubble of the devastating fires of early last year in the Palisades and along the Malibu coast, possibly feeding algae blooms.

While not related to sewage, I previously reported how along the coast in La Jolla and Pacific Beach, San Diego, dozens of dead seabirds have been discovered along the shore. Scientists are blaming, in part, warming ocean temperatures that drive the birds’ food deeper.

And in Oceanside, just north of San Diego, the beaches are literally disappearing because of old military installations.

I was born and raised in San Diego. Many of my earliest memories are from playing in the sand and surf at Mission Bay and Mission Beach. I see it as our responsibility as Southern California residents to ensure future generations have access to the same opportunities, contamination-free.

The acute environmental deterioration has broad economic implications as well. Studies show that 74 percent of Imperial Beach business have been negatively impacted by the crisis that sees up to 70 billion gallons of untreated wastewater flow into ocean annually. Thirty percent of businesses were forced to lay off staff. The small city of just over 25,000 is losing close to $2 million in property taxes and tourism revenue as pollution in the water and the air drives people away.

It appears as though any meaningful solution to this massive problem is going to take a lot more than volunteer trash collection, though that’s still an important effort.

Despite statements, memorandums, and budget allocations, it appears that neither the Trump EPA run by Secretary Lee Zeldin, local governments in the cities and counties along the coast including in Baja California, nor Sacramento have demonstrated the ability to effect real change.

This is not to say that remedying the problem is impossible. Cities like Boston, MA and Sydney, Australia have undergone major transformation that dramatically reduced beach closures and human-driven pollution on the shore through upgraded treatment plants, extensive monitoring, and deep ocean outfalls.

Southern California's challenge is substantially larger. The region is a massive agglomeration of cities and towns with at least 24 million residents and millions more visitors.

The issue is complicated by longstanding cross-border pollution which multiple administrations in the U.S. and Mexico have attempted to confront, but with limited success.

The encouraging part is that the basic engineering solutions already exist. Southern California and its Mexican neighbor, Baja, are going to have to tackle this issue in a truly concerted fashion before future generations lose one of the region’s greatest assets—and a crucial part of the Southern California identity—to literal crap.

*Digging holes in the sand is now illegal in Del Mar, CA.

By Eliezer Sherman

When the U.S. and Israel launched attacks against Iran at the end of February, Israelis saw it coming, but many in the U.S. were flummoxed.

As the war appears to be winding down this week with a “digitally” signed Memorandum of Understanding, the opposite seems true: Americans get it and Israelis are scratching their heads—somewhat aggressively.

When the war began, many Americans asked (knowingly, perhaps) why the U.S. was fighting a war against Iran when we hadn’t been attacked and no new evidence had emerged that Iran was on the cusp of or had already developed nuclear weapons. The attacks were compared to former President George W. Bush’s launching of the war against Iraq in 2003 over WMDs that never existed.

Also, why was the “peace president” starting a new war in the Middle East?

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As punishing air strikes ramped up in Iran without congressional approval, Trump officials offered a slew of rationales that one analyst compared to paintings by Jackson Pollock—a barrage of splatters looking for meaning.

In the end, the message that really stuck with Americans came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the U.S. had launched attacks because it was aware Israel was on its way to do the same.

In essence, Rubio implied that Israel’s decision-making on Iran had forced its hand.

What followed was the sentiment that the U.S. was fighting a war on behalf of Zionism. Ergo, hundreds of billions of tax dollars would be spent and Americans would be dying on Israel’s behalf.

Regardless of Trump’s stated goals of removing Iran’s ballistic missile threat, destroying its naval capabilities, and neutering its nuclear weapons ambitions once and for all, most people didn’t buy it.

Quickly, oil prices spiked and the suspicions of fighting a war for Israel were compounded by the cynicism of yet another war on behalf of global oil barons and weapons manufacturers who would rake in profits.

The truth is, the West is far less concerned about a nuclear Iran than Israel believes it should be.

Unfortunately for Israel, recent polls indicate that the world may be less concerned about an existential threat to Israel’s status quo than Jerusalem is willing to believe. When Minister Bezalel Shmotrich complains that the Iran deal is bad for the free world, many (most?) are wondering why he believes he is authorized to speak on the free world’s behalf.

Europe was never interested in this conflict. China is quietly waiting for opportunities to unfold once it’s over. Russia was happy to get sanctions relief during the war but didn’t seem to care which way it went. And the rest of the world remains deeply suspicious of Israel following the decimating war in Gaza, its destruction of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, and settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank.

For Americans, U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians dying now in another long and costly Mideast war is more important than what is seen as an ambiguous nuclear threat from Iran. For Americans who despise Trump, supporting any of his policies is seen as riskier than denying Iran nuclear weapons.

The fact that gas prices surged at a time of economic pressure and rising inflation was the straw that broke the camel’s back—resolving the war on the home front was likely going to become a matter of elective politics.

So, for Trump, looming midterm elections and the face of America’s 250th anniversary celebration may have added pressure to his decision to sign off on opening Hormuz now, despite the potential costs of appeasing Iranian tactical leverage. Mounting frustrations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which Trump expressed through a variety of aspersions, in any case indicated the president was determined to wrap things up.

Now, Trump is heading to the G7 Summit to sit with global leaders in high-profile meetings and may well receive a hero’s welcome on the global stage—after all, he ended hostilities, appeared to have brought Iran back to negotiations, and proved willingness to rein in Israel.

For all these reasons, the Iran war is ending the way it is, with a few signatures and enough money to keep the Iranians quiet. For now.

By Eliezer Sherman

There’s a joke trend circulating on social media sites from X to Reddit (and probably Threads, but I don’t actually exist there).

It goes something like this: a user posts an image of a place and classifies it under another place which faintly resembles the place in the image.

For example—a user on a subreddit for Laguna Beach, CA, posts an image of crystalline blue waters, jagged rocks offshore, and a vaguely Mediterranean beach under the title, “I love Laguna Beach!”

Only thing is, the picture in the subreddit does not depict Laguna Beach, but another beach, perhaps one in Spain or in Ohio or wherever. The true identity of the beach in question remains unexpressed.

In another example, a user (perhaps human, perhaps AI) will post, Be Honest—what do you think of this city? followed by the image of the skyline from Chicago or Boston or wherever. Commenters then write something like, Beautiful Toledo, OH—even though the image is obviously neither Toledo nor even the Buckeye State. The commenter knows this, but ha ha.

What appears to be blatant silliness—what Sigmund Freud identified as “the coupling of dissimilar things” in his treatise on jokes and the unconscious—underlines a much more serious proposition: that the picture of the place is not the place in the picture, but merely a symbol.

Thus the very truth of the picture of the place relies on a symbolic categorization, subject to symbolic destabilization exemplified by its social misclassification, while the place in the picture, off somewhere in reality, persists regardless of its symbolization here on the screen.

Truthfully, one can classify any place in reality however one desires too—a place-name is just a signifier. Misclassification fails to alter the existence of the place itself, because the reality of a place is its territory—water, rocks, vegetation, fauna, architectural material, etc. The people who occupy a place are the ones who imbue it with meaning, but that meaning is necessarily bound up in the people themselves.

The symbol itself is futility, requiring ongoing reaffirmation by people who die, while the territory persists senselessly.

Regardless of what one believes about a given territory, such as its symbolic identity or the integrity of that identity, the territory goes on existing. The rock of Sisyphus is a rock whether he’s rolling it or not. For the rock to remain Sisyphus’ rock, he must keep rolling it up that hill, else the story moves on.

On the flip side of such a banal existential threat to places in general, the joke “over the coupling of dissimilar things” like the image of a place and its commonly agreed upon identity begs the question: is such misclassification a joke, or a serious attempt at erasure?

Since it is a joke (one chuckles, “That’s not really Laguna Beach, stupid”)—why is the nonsensical joke over the coupling of dissimilar places in territory funny in the first place?

Lastly, since the image does not in fact depict “Laguna Beach,” what has actually been misclassified by the joke: the picture of the place, the territory depicted therein, the signifier that represents the depiction of the territory, the signifier that represents the territory, or the very classification process itself?

At its most fundamental, such misclassifications of dissimilar things mark a difference of difference, which is kind of funny. I.e., that’s not really that, because it’s actually this, which also isn’t that, but represents something else.

If I post a picture of San Diego, CA and you write—“Newark, OH 4life”—surely you understand that the image I posted is of San Diego, CA. The Giant Dipper Roller Coaster or the Coronado Bridge is right there!

In misclassifying the image, I reaffirm the existence of several things at once: San Diego, CA and Newark, OH as commonly agreed upon places in real territory and their symbolic representations. That relatively few people have developed abstract notions of Newark, OH is irrelevant when you look at the map and the words “Newark, OH” are right there.

Doubting the accuracy of a map containing Newark, OH, is another proposition and you’d have to bring that up with Newark residents. That Newark, OH does appear on a map guarantees there is at least some common agreement that that territory includes the place commonly known as Newark, OH.

Fifty-one thousand residents in the Licking County, Ohio, city of Newark certainly agree, though there are likely at least a handful of Newark residents who doubt Newark exists at all.

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In the end, the crux of most jokes, including this pesky misclassification one involving a fake Laguna Beach, revolve around the concepts of this and that. For example:

A: What do you call a Muslim on the moon?

B: …

A: A Muslim astronaut, you racist.

The joke here is that what’s hidden in the punchline is the lack of a joke about Muslims.

Freud would call this “bringing forth what’s hidden.”

What was hidden was the racism of the joke-listener anticipating something funny about Muslims.

That Islamophobia is not technically racism notwithstanding, the punchline of this joke is both the receiver of the joke itself and the very society in which she unwittingly lives—perhaps an Islamophobic one.

This is not that joke, this is that implicit bias of yours and your society. The jack-in-the-box here—and all jokes are basically jack-in-the-boxes—really contained the joke-listener’s own head. This punchline was really that head of yours.

(Recall the infamous scene at the end of the film, Se7en, where Kevin Spacey’s serial killer, John Doe, plays a horrific joke on Brad Pitt’s detective, David Mills, putting his wife Tracy’s severed head in a box for Mills to discover—I.e. “you’re not just a detective, nor a victim—finally, you’re a criminal.”)

Another joke*:

A: What is the difference between straight beer and gay beer?

B: …

A: Gay beer comes in a can.

In the joke above, “can” is the this that is also the that, which provokes laughter because the meaning of the sentence changes retroactively and the listener is left with contrasting differing cans and the things that come in them, despite the signifiers being exactly the same.

A difference of meaning is the joke itself—all the better for the gay undertones that no doubt straight people too enjoy, though perhaps less obviously.

Incidentally, the meanings of beer, difference, straight, and gay in the joke never change for most joke-receivers, though certainly straight and gay have other meanings.

The joy of jokes like this comes in getting the punchline. The tension that builds around the lack of knowing how the joke will end—what the very words in the joke will mean—is released through the understanding of difference and the passive acceptance that dissimilar meanings revolve around things that are the same, themselves composites of smaller parts.

Therein lies the punchline of the misclassification joke, one that is particularly salient in our heavily mediated reality and one in which getting things right is so important.

Not only is the picture of the place not the place in the picture, but whatever desire we’ve projected on the image of a fabulous beach or an epic skyline is also the false premise of an authentic sensation whose meaning provides only the vaguest of satisfactions that never quite escape our understanding of these images through symbols. The sensations we experience through the images and words on the screen are influenced by symbols borrowed from material reality, which itself is like a screen on which we project meaning from our own and shared understandings.

In reality, the image of Laguna Beach on our computer or phone is not Laguna Beach or Spain or even Ohio, but various plastics, software, and electrical parts working in the room in which we’re sitting, which could be located anywhere, even a room in Laguna Beach.

A deeper reality is that the place known as Laguna Beach is not really that either, but territory that cynically persists regardless of how the people who roam it classify it. This place is not that territory. This place is just our desire for a place.

*I lifted these jokes from Brian on TikTok who tells lewd jokes to an older woman, ostensibly his mother, who is perpetually shocked by Brian’s vulgarity.

By Eliezer Sherman

I’ve been a writer my whole life.

Recently, people have been leveling accusations against my writing—claiming it’s AI.

Their proof? I use em dashes—which I learned to use as a journalist—as well as other stylistic choices like a negation statement followed by an affirmative one.

But the accusations are not just irritating, “liar, liar pants on fire!” stuff. They’re uncanny. They trigger the anxiety of Imposter Syndrome, unleashing repressed memories of alienation and isolation, of speaking and being denied.

Have any other writers experienced this?

It feels like being gaslit, like one’s soul has been tethered to electricity and the tactile fingers of a programmer like Sam Altman. Statements you believe are authentic to self are being cast as the products of a deliberate, statistically-informed computation.

Of course, AI learned to “write” by co-opting real writers’ styles—both through training on existing data and through reinforcement learning done by human writers and content specialists. Many believe the former constitutes theft on a grand scale—particularly as AI companies rake in profits while providing writers whose work has been incorporated by models zero compensation—while the latter has drawn writers away from creative work toward training their automated replacements.

It’s a most bizarre circumstance—to be accused of sharing artificial text when it’s your authentic writing.

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Many authors are already producing botched texts to defend themselves against such accusation. “See! Would AI screw this up this bad?”

Meanwhile, I’m out in the Social-Media-Verse, reporting on my experience and being called a fake.

One commenter responds with a GIF of a robot making an obscene “suck it” gesture.

Another says he doesn’t want to read through a paragraph of AI crap.

My subjectivity is bullied away and buried beneath the signifier of inauthenticity, a signifier which became a political weapon in the age of Fake News, a signifier which decides whose facts and opinions are genuine and whose represent special interests or ulterior motives.

And are these acerbic commenters real or AI, anyway?

It wouldn’t be the first time writers have been denied the rights to the authorship of their writing. Shakespeare has been accused of being a phony. And plenty of people don’t believe God wrote the Bible.

Who knows, maybe God used AI.

And perhaps Shakespeare apprehended his material from unknown ghostwriters. Maybe there was no Shakespeare at all, Hamnet be damned… again.

This conundrum begs the question—how important is authorship when it comes to the transfer of meaning?

What gives the author the authority over the consequences of her dictation?

How much responsibility is even hers?

After all, meaning never actually escapes the subject—whether they’re a writer or a reader. Meaning is merely referenced through externalized words, gestures, expressions, and affects.

Objectively, words are scribbles and differentiated collections of phonemes that influence behavior but only because someone else, possibly oneself, understands.

While a subject is represented by his words, understanding happens on the side of the receiver, even if that receiver is oneself, as in the case of a writer who is the sole reader of his own work.

But the consequences of words are up to the subject, i.e. the understander of the words.

Consider the manifestos that accompany mass shootings or the words that have been scrawled on bullets by the killers, words whose linguistic payload is delivered to the psyche and not the animal’s body.

Libel is injurious not because of what the words themselves mean, but because of how people understand them and what that understanding entails for the plaintiff. Did words kill the plaintiff’s reputation, or people in whom those words become understanding?

Quite simply, accusing a writer—an anonymous social media user—of using AI is just a pretext for denying the message itself, of precluding understanding.

This is no different than any claim of Fake News. But in the case of Fake News, another subject, one with an ulterior motive, is implied, while in the accusation of AI writing, the subject of the writing itself is claimed to be absent, automated AI.

Legitimately, AI produces slop that can be cringey to read and irritating to decipher. But its tokenized words do produce meaning in receivers (or inference, in the case of AI) and the one who posts these words, if they’re human, has signed off on a message meant to be understood.

But I didn’t use AI, even if elements of its style have seeped into my own via osmosis. And sadly, this is just another unfortunate instance of peevishness many of us have grown to expect in the hyperreality of digital discourse.

The author’s recent book, Happy Stars Club: Hand-Typed Poems about the Lack of Anxiety, is available on Amazon Kindle.

Article and Photographs by Eliezer Sherman

Many of us have been feeling the pinch lately as gas prices climb and the cost of living is higher than ever. This is especially true in San Diego—which studies say is now the most rent-burdened city in the U.S.

But San Diego is also blessed with abundant sunshine and a bevy of adventures for even the most budget-conscious. Here are some of the best low-cost activities I’ve found around the county.

Free Balboa Park museums on Tuesday

Every Tuesday, Balboa Park offers a selection of museums and attractions free to verified city residents. Last week, I enjoyed the San Diego Automotive Museum and the Museum of Us. Previously, I visited the Japanese Friendship Garden, the Mingei International Museum, and others.

The automotive museum showcases an international array of historical cars, motorcycles, and internal combustion engines and is currently featuring F1 vehicles.

The Museum of Us is a treasure of anthropology featuring a vibrant exhibit on the history of beer brewing—from ancient Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica—alongside galleries on race in America and Egyptian sarcophagi. Visitors can also purchase a ticket to climb the California Tower above the gorgeous cathedral-like structure and behold 360-degree-views of Balboa Park.

To gain free entry, simply show ID. There are multiple free parking lots for city residents who have completed a two-step permit process online.

Helados at Tropical Ice Cream in Logan

Sometimes, I need ice cream—and San Diego has no shortage of options. I recently stumbled upon this no-frills commissary of sweet Mexican treats in the historically Latino Logan neighborhood of San Diego and I was pleasantly surprised. I purchased a tart, refreshing pomegranate popsicle for a price so good in San Diego, I won’t write it down. The mural of Frida Kahlo facing the street out front was the cherry on top.

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The Indoor Bazaar in National City

I’d passed the Price Breakers Indoor Bazaar in National City before but never went inside. On a recent stop, curiosity got the best of me.

The indoor mall was immediately transportive for someone who’s traveled to Latin America or Asia. Rows of stalls and booths offered everything from locally produced graphic tees to formal attire, veladoras, statues of Santa Muerte, wall hangings, electronics, and gold jewelry, all at bargain-busting prices.

Congregate with the seals at Point La Jolla

It’s the most famous option on my list, and for good reason. Displays of abundant wildlife at the coast of Point La Jolla will amaze just about anyone.

From La Jolla Cove to Boomer Beach, there are ample opportunities to enjoy the spectacle of sea lions lounging in the sun and playing in the tide, their animated barks echoing off the rocks and into Pacific sea spray. In the water are kelp forests and seasonal migrations of marine biology including leopard sharks, bioluminescence, and gray whales. Dolphins surface just beyond the waves and flocks of cormorants, pelicans, and terns congregate on boulders in the ocean.

Viewing the wildlife from a respectful distance with a community of onlookers is one of San Diego’s most iconic spectacles—and it’s totally free.

Get out of dodge on Mount Laguna

The Laguna Mountain Recreation Area is the perfect day trip for San Diegans that is both transformative and close to home.

Located at 6,000 feet above sea level, Mount Laguna is among the highest points in San Diego County. This is the southernmost section of the Pacific Crest Trail, which travels from the Mexican border all the way to Canada. Pine forests and craggy peaks mark the border between the scrubby chaparral of the western coast and the arid wilderness of the Anza Borrego Desert State Park to the east.

It takes about an hour’s drive up the Interstate 8 and winding Sunrise Highway to reach the trailheads.

All you need is water and a $5 Adventure Pass to park, available online or at kiosks in the park. Dress accordingly—temperatures are colder and more variable at elevation.

By Eliezer Sherman

Three generations of Americans have lived without a serious defense-related existential threat.

It’s been decades since the Cold War ended. The worst ravages of terrorism remain abroad. No one believes Tehran when it says, “Death to America.”

Conflicts in Ukraine, the Levant, and Iran do not challenge this reality, even as millions have died in these wars.

Instead, many see our military—the strongest and most expensive in the world—as a political cost of choice rather than necessity.

Other issues, like the cost of living, health care, or housing, are the real existential threats. It’s the economy that’s trying to kill us, not Vladimir Putin or the Ayatollahs.

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Still, Republicans are unmoved.

The Trump White House recently requested $1.5 trillion for the biggest defense budget yet. It continues to slash funding to the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Premiums have spiked and more Americans are back on the street, increasing pressure on financially struggling cities and stretched law enforcement to maintain order.

Trump ran on an economic platform. He promised to lower costs for American consumers. But the price of gas, food, and living expenses contradict his campaign.

Instead, Republicans are seen as the party that uses the military to decapitate other governments while seizing their wealth on behalf of billionaires and their industries.

They are seen as the party that eschews diplomatic processes like the nuclear agreement with Iran for costlier alternatives like wars of choice—wars in which Russia, Israel, and defense and oil companies appear to benefit more than ordinary Americans.

And they are seen as the party that brutally deports hardworking immigrants, breaking up families and killing Americans who get in their way. All for questionable gains.

So when Americans go to the polls this November, the real threat on their minds will be the GOP economy, not Tehran and not Latino immigrants. And they’re not going to let the Gulf of America, certainly not Israel, and not even Ukraine get in the way of that.

By Eliezer Sherman

A cat in the jungle

The other night, I stumbled upon a cat in the jungle.

Well, I didn’t, but my dog did.

We’d gone for a walk at night. It’s been so hot in San Diego lately — above 90 degrees in March — that I decided it was safer and better for her to walk once the sun was set.

Unfortunately, one part of our walk was completely dark. I couldn’t see anything. The path goes over a small hill near a canyon filled with trees and brush. Coyotes often prowl nearby.

Anxious about walking blindly, I pulled out my cell phone and ignited its handy-dandy flashlight.

After a few yards, my dog suddenly froze. She was staring. I heard a rustle. I pointed the flashlight into the dark and I saw something. Fear rushed through my body. I felt prickles in the nape of my neck and tingles in my shoulders.

But after less than a second, I saw what it was I was actually looking at: a fat orange tabby cat standing on a log, its spine curved upward and its head pointing down. Poor thing looked as startled as we were.

Once I realized the potential threat was merely a house cat, my body relaxed and the prickles subsided.

I began to pull my dog away from scene. I was becoming anxious about a confrontation. One of the animals could get hurt. Though she’s stubborn, I managed to negotiate my dog away from the situation and we ambled on.

How fear unfolded

The encounter with the cat in the dark unfolded in a series of events both internal and external. As we kept walking, I began to consider what had happened.

First, my dog froze and I saw her staring. Anxiously, I pointed the flashlight in the direction of her gaze.

Then, I must have perceived a figure that frightened me. The object was ambiguous to me, but its form was enough to trigger the second event: a fight-or-flight response of real fear. Before identifying what I was afraid of, a part of me knew there was actually something there to fear.

Next, I endeavored to identify the thing. I soon understood what I was looking at was a house cat. The fight-or-flight response dissipated upon this discovery. Instead of fear, I became anxious about removing my dog from the scene lest a confrontation occur.

Throughout the event, anxiety and fear kept trading places. Various bits of information and lacks of information influenced their tango.

What Freud might say

Early 20th century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote that the difference between fear and anxiety is an object.

Fear, he said, is a response to a clear and present danger—say, a mountain lion standing in front of you, a tornado touching down in your yard, or the sound of someone breaking into your home. You have to perceive a real threat to be afraid.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is a “free-floating” state of apprehension regarding an unapparent threat. For Freud, anxiety’s object is internal.

The content of intrusive thoughts or the motivations behind the hand-washing rituals of an obsessive compulsive disorder are examples of the objects that cause anxiety. Past traumas can also influence the development of anxiety; Freud discovered this working with people who developed what we know today as PTSD.

More commonly, people ruminate over anxious thoughts: a plan that could go wrong, the obstacles that could impact a project or deadline, potential interactions with strangers, the likely consequences of current events. In the case of PTSD, past traumas inform these symptoms.

For Freud, anxiety is tied to potentialities and likelihoods. Fear, however, is tied to a present occurrence with an apparent danger.

For example, one may choose not to go hiking because of the potential encounter with a mountain lion. This potential hiker is not seeing an actual mountain lion, but ruminating over the likelihood of an encounter.

But if you go hiking and you stumble on a mountain lion, then you actually have something to fear.

In another example, a potential homeowner decides she won’t buy in Oklahoma because of her anxiety about potential tornadoes.

Someone with PTSD may keep a gun in his home because of his anxiety about the likelihood of a future violent encounter that is based on previous trauma. While his anxiety is real, the actual occurrence is not happening.

Ironically, being prepared and responding to anxiety are so similar that they may look identical. Nobody would have reason to prepare if we did not anticipate negative future events.

Sadly, people often become so consumed with anxious thoughts that they freeze, becoming afraid of the world as it is. The world becomes a dark place and anxiety is the only light they use to navigate it.

Like walking in the dark

In fact, anxiety is a lot like walking in the dark. In lieu of sight, one’s beliefs about what could be out there take precedence.

One helpful step for overcoming anxiety then is to analyze the potentials or likelihoods that are motivating our anxious thoughts.

What do we actually think is out there and what would actually happen if a given event unfolded?

How likely is the worst case scenario?

Why do we think this scenario might occur—because of a previous trauma or because I saw it on social media or heard someone talking about it?

Maybe I don’t know where my belief about this scenario came from and it’s just instinctual. If it’s instinct, is the instinct based in logic or fear of the unknown?

Fear of the unknown is the essential feedback loop of anxiety.

Let’s do an example of breaking down anxiety.

Perhaps you’re anxious about visiting a foreign city. Rather than focus on the anxiety, you begin to write down why.

You discover a variety of reasons: you’ve been taken advantage of traveling before; you watched the Claire Danes movie, Brokedown Palace, and became anxious about being falsely accused of drug smuggling; while peaceful now, the city in question was recently a war zone.

Once we identify the causes of our anxieties, we can discover the tools we need to counteract the worst-case scenarios, e.g. learning a bit of the foreign language and common prices, purchasing travel insurance and keeping an eye on our luggage, talking to people online who’ve recently traveled there, following the news.

When I became anxious about walking in the dark, I took out a flashlight. Using the flashlight helped me to prevent a situation in which my dog got into a tussle with a cat. I also avoided stumbling on a rock.

Being prepared for likely scenarios is more advantageous than leaving it to anxiety and fear, or, on the flip-side, overconfidence and unintelligent risk-taking. If possible, learning to use anxiety is better than allowing it to become a disabling force.

As a Jew who grew up in America, I feel that I know very little about Christianity outside the religion’s superficial presentation in media and the marketplace—e.g., Christmas lights, the Easter Bunny, Mariah Carey Christmas specials, decking the radio halls with carols, Halloween candy, Santa Claus, painted eggs, Charlie Brown specials, panettone, and Starbucks holiday cups.

Christianity is an unmistakable presence in American secular culture. Our seasons revolve around Christian festivals like Christmas, Easter, and All Hallows’ Eve (cleverly rebranded as Halloween). Holiday decorations adorn everything from retail shops to public parks—such as the immensely popular December Nights festival at Balboa Park in San Diego. I go to holiday parties hosted by my neighbors. I find myself decorating for Christmas and Halloween, though I possess no religious connection to either holiday—I simply enjoy participating with lights and festivity.

In this way, even in the slice of liberal America where I live, Christianity is like an impulse, even if the religious motives are blurry and the faith itself mostly unspoken. In liberal America, Christianity haunts our calendar and casts its patina over our retail spaces and homes while the religion is largely absent from public discourse and its invocation occurs within pleasantries alone.

Publicly, liberals prefer to draw their values into speech from secular principles like democracy, republicanism, philosophical ethics, and the law. One’s adherence to overtly biblical or religious principles is largely maintained in community settings. That is, if one doesn’t belong to a religious community, one may get the impression that liberal Americans are almost entirely nonreligious. As a Jew who grew up in a very Jewish community, I know this not to be true.

In Israel and Egypt, religion is widely discussed, and people ask strangers about their faith. “Are you Jewish?” “Are you Muslim?” These are common questions among strangers in the Middle East I traveled to. Nobody in the U.S. has ever asked me if I’m Christian, though my name, “Eliezer,” attracts a lot of “Where are you from?” or “Where’s that name from?” kind of questions. (Eliezer is a minor character in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis; I was born in San Diego.)

But in the U.S., Christianity cannot contain itself around the Big Three—Easter, Halloween, and the climax of Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Day. As a Jew, Passover, the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are almost entirely absent from the public. Hanukah registers the most despite being a minor holiday.

But on Christmas Eve, I kept my Christmas lights off and let the Hanukiah in my window blaze with nine colorful candles. The eighth day of Hanukah fell on Christmas Eve. I resumed the Christmas light display the following night. After all, I enjoy falling asleep on the couch in my living room under the display glinting through my Venetian blinds.

I only recently discovered that there are two Christmas-light camps—those who hang white lights and those who decorate with colorful ones. I hung both in parallel lines, with the white ones underlining the colorful ones.

I witnessed a bevy of carolers on Christmas Eve this year singing in my neighborhood, and it dawned on me that “The Twelve Days of Christmas” shares a cumulative song structure with a traditional Passover song, “Echad Mi Yodea?” (“Who Knows One?”). I asked myself, unironically, “Which came first?” It was quite a spectacle to see dozens of carolers hollering “FIVE GOLDEN RINGS!” repeatedly outside a women’s recovery center. Several women dotted the porch, but they were paltry in comparison to the crowd of carolers.

While I know it’s a bit taboo in liberal America, I wished many of my customers a “Merry Christmas” this year. Many responded by saying “Happy Holidays.” Then, when I would say “Happy Holidays,” I’d hear “Merry Christmas” behind me. Some people didn’t respond at all. They just said, “Thanks.”

My family members wished me a “Happy Hanukah” over text, and I sent a few friends the same message. On X (formerly Twitter), many users bemoaned the U.S. usage of “Happy Holidays,” accusing promoters of the generalized well-wish of being hateful to Christians.

On Christmas Day, some folks wished me a “Merry Christmas,” and I found myself unresponsive, nodding and smiling instead. Adam Sandler was right—I felt a little lonely (I didn’t put on a yarmulke).

Yesterday, Donald Trump wished terrorists in Nigeria a “Merry Christmas” as the U.S. Department of War led airstrikes against the Islamic State group there. On Christmas Eve, Trump included “Radical Left Scum” in his holiday well-wishes, drawing a parallel between two of his declared enemies. (Trump didn’t publicly wish Venezuelan drug cartels a “Merry Christmas” this year, to the best of my knowledge.)

A friend of mine sent me a holiday card this year like she often does. I don’t know if she’d count herself among Trump’s “Radical Left Scum,” even though he may count her there simply based on another of her characteristics. She doesn’t like him very much, but besides that, I don’t really know what would make her a radical leftist. She owns a condo.

On Christmas, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out a “Merry Christmas” and that we Americans are “blessed to share a nation and Savior” (its capitalization, not mine). Secretary Kristi Noem’s PR team did not specify the “Savior” in question. Like the “December Nights” festival in Balboa Park, Noem was tactfully implicit. Christianity in America often winks rather than shouts from the rooftops. Donald Trump shouted about Christmas, but he shouts about everything.

As for the Jewish Christmas tradition of gathering Chinese food, I failed this year. I arrived hopeful in National City, CA, on Christmas Day, but every restaurant was swamped—certainly not with Jews, but with other Chinese folks, Filipinos, Latinos, Black and white Americans, and everyone in between. I walked into Golden Chopsticks, saw the line, and immediately left.

While I was willing to take a rain check on the tradition this year, social media was relentless. Every other thread in my Threads feed was a joke or picture about Jews getting Chinese food on Christmas. I felt like I’d let my community down—worse than declining to light the Hanukiah on the sixth night.

So, like the Maccabees, I didn’t give up—I went a day late instead, to the Great Wall Express for takeout. I don’t think the timing of this sacrosanct American Jewish tradition matters as much as the intention behind it—a lesson I learned in Jewish day schools about Jewish rituals in general. The word in Hebrew for intention is Kavanah. I approached the take-out bar with a heart full of sincere intention. Instead of Christmas Chinese food, this American Jew got Christmastide Chinese food on Boxing Day. I wished the cashier a “Happy New Year” and she smiled and told me, “Thanks.” I should have leftovers to last me at least through Shabbat.