The cost of living is not the worth of being alive

September 2, 2026 by Leave a Comment

 

                                                     The cost of living,
he would argue, is not the worth of being alive.
Richard Michelson, More Money Than God

In the past few days, two articles have highlighted the economic and existential difficulties of living as more than surviving, in this instance in Namibia. On Monday, two days ago, “Old people in Namibia are going into debt to pay for everyday costs – new report examines strained household budgets” relying on a new report, shared the “stark” central argument: “Disability is produced as much by environment as by the body. Manageable health conditions become crises because of failing housing, absent sanitation, unaffordable assistive devices and precarious income. It falls to unpaid family caregivers to absorb these crises.” One day ago, another report, “Namibians need N$44 000 salary to afford homes” had an equally “stark” argument: “70% of the population cannot afford formal housing because of low incomes and limited access to mortgages … The cost of putting a new house on the market is increasing faster than the cost of living for households hoping to buy one.” There it is, that phrase, “the cost of living.” A phrase that hides as much as it reveals and reveals its true nature in its acts of hiding.

The cost of living is generally defined as “the cost of maintaining a certain standard of living.” What exactly is this “certain” standard of living? On one hand, it isn’t exactly anything, in that it isn’t and never has been exact. On the same hand, “prior to the World War attention was directed by Mr. Seebohm Rowntree (Poverty, A Study of Town Life, 2nd ed. 1902) to the cost of obtaining in York (England) and elsewhere food, clothing, heat, light and shelter sufficient for a family to maintain itself in health and efficiency for work, when all possible economy was practised, subject to the availability of commodities and the legal requirements for housing, decency, etc.” Etc. This is “where the standard is a physiological minimum”.

In other words, from its early days, the cost of living was founded in class struggle, that is, the struggle of one class of people, workers, to survive. People of means do not have a cost of living, because they do not have a standard that is a physiological minimum. Put differently, the cost of living is the cost-of-not-dying is the cost of dying silently and unseen.

In Namibia, a senior in the capital, Windhoek, is having trouble breathing. The family calls the public ambulance, to no avail. They then call the Windhoek Ambulance service. It comes, with a charge of 800 Namibian dollars. The senior’s family doesn’t have the money. No problem. The city will add it to their utilities bill. The family still doesn’t have the money but needs electricity and water … and so they go into debt. The cost of providing care is increasing faster than the cost of living.

And the costs and cost of caring? Who measures those, and how are they measured?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Pedro Vorster, “This Space Is Vacant No More” / Imago Mundi)

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The uncounted, discounted turmoil of eviction

August 27, 2026 by Leave a Comment

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, a landlord targeted, harassed, and persecuted residents of his property. The residents were predominantly working class, Black women. He threatened them with eviction as part of a campaign of racial and sexual abuse. The women organized, went to court, and, after years and against many odds, won a landmark settlement. Over the next year, the landlord must pay $2.5 million in dollars in financial compensation to tenants and the state. Additionally, he must sell all his properties in Virginia and can never operate in the Commonwealth of Virginia again. All records of evictions and eviction filings will be erased. Additionally, the landlord is already serving a 17-year sentence in federal prison. So, this is a victory for tenants. And yet …

And yet many feel that the part of the story that goes missing is the emotional: the loss, the pain, the missing, the turmoil. Lorraine Patterson-Davidson is one of the residents of this story. Lorraine Patterson-Davidson is a widowed military-spouse with eight children. While pleased that she and her family will be able to recoup some of the money they lost, or better that was stolen from them, they mourn the loss of family history, the loss of the irreplaceable. In this instance, a family Bible that was over a hundred years ago, an object that was tossed on the street and lost during an eviction: “There is no money that can compensate for a Bible that’s over 100 years old. Nothing can replace that.”

Nothing can replace that.

Reflecting on the impact of the entire process, Lorraine Patterson-David mused, “I’m not sure I’m the same person. But (the Bible) says ‘be angry and sin not’”.

Lorraine Patterson-Davidson is teaching the world is that eviction is not merely a legal process nor a matter of housing. Eviction invades the person, and that invasion is part of the purpose of eviction. Eviction is turmoil, a word that historically has no beginning and yet persists and pervades. Look around, locally and globally. What do you see? What do you hear? What do you feel? Turmoil. Where is the turmoil, the emotional pain, in public policy concerning eviction? Where is the peace and emotional well-being in public policy concerning affordable housing? Lorraine Patterson-Davidson cherished her family Bible. Nothing can replace that. Who cares?

I’m not sure I’m the same person. Nothing can replace that. Lorraine Patterson-Davidson is teaching us that something cannot be replaced. Someone cannot be replaced. Lorraine Patterson-Davidson is teaching, but are we listening? Be angry and sin not.

(by Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Rashid Johnson, Untitled)

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In an age of exile … this is not your home

August 12, 2026 by Leave a Comment

In Cape Town, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is currently showing an exhibition entitled A Protea Is Not a Flower, which considers the works of Gerard Sekoto, Bessie Head and Don Mattera, apartheid-era artists who struggled with various modes of exile. Zeitz describes the exhibit as follows: “A Protea Is Not a Flower is a multigenerational conversation between South African artists and writers whose lives and works contend with the complexity of the exilic experience …. The exhibition explores the spectrum of personal and political expression, navigating themes of exile, identity, and memory.” Exactly what is the vehicle, engine or pilot that “navigates” exile?

Exile is not estrangement. Exile is, as it was from its inception, banishment, and although “self-imposed exile” is a common enough phrase, in fact exile is never self-imposed: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Despite phrases like “government in exile”, there is no return from exile. Exile is and always has meant banishment. The ancient Roman lawmakers understood this. For them, exile was an “alternative” to capital punishment, or, at least, that’s how it’s understood today. Actually, exile wasn’t alternative, it was synonymous. Exile came with an administrative decree, interdictio aquae et ignis, “interdiction of water and fire”. This decree declared that anyone who ran into an exile within the borders of the country was encouraged to kill him or her. That is not an alternative to capital punishment. No water, no shelter, no warmth, no hope. Exile today has the same design and intent as exile in the past, death-in-life.

The categories of exile are numerous, perhaps infinite, and growing. Refugees. Forced migrants. Internally displaced. Those fleeing persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations; “those fleeing” are those forced to flee. Forced to flee climate change, weather-related disasters, and other “natural disasters”, such as wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and the list goes on. Some are forced to flee epidemics. Others are forced to flee mass displacement caused by “development”. No one is fleeing, everyone is forced to flee.

This isn’t “just about” where you live, it concerns where you are, where you are yourself. Millions are counted as unable to return home. In an age of “self-deportation” and “self-eviction”, in order to avoid greater harm today and in the future, millions more who can’t return are uncounted, by the agencies, the State, the media. They are all in exile.

Gerard Sekoto was born in 1913 in what was then the Eastern Transvaal, in what is now Mpumalanga. From an early age, he studied to be an artist. He spent his early adulthood as a teacher and then devoted himself fully to the visual arts. In 1938, at the age of 25, he left for Johannesburg. In 1947, an accomplished artist, he fled South Africa, never to return. He lived and worked and came to renown in Paris, where he died in 1993. He never returned … because he couldn’t. South Africa, though in his soul and bones, was not his.

In 1942, the American poet Karl Shapiro, in the midst of World War II, wrote “Travelogue for Exiles”. The poem is three stanzas; the third reads:

Look and remember. Look upon this land,
Far, far across the factories and the grass.
Surely, there, surely they will let you pass.
Speak then and ask the forest and the loam.
What do you hear? What does the land command?
The earth is taken: this is not your home.

The earth is taken: this is not your home …

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Gerard Sekoto. “The Sharpeville Massacre” / BBC / Gerard Sekoto Foundation)

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How do we, as a society, in a free, democratic dispensation, address the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid

July 9, 2026 by Leave a Comment

On July 2, 2026, the Constitutional Court of South Africa issued a “landmark decision”, a decision that should be read by every housing, anti-eviction, labor activist as well as every city planner and elected official in Cape Town, across South Africa, around the world, dominated as the world is by the brutality and complexity, by the logic and practice of expulsions, of global cities on a planet of slums. The decision begins, “At its core, this case raises a fundamental constitutional question: how do we, as a society, in a free, democratic dispensation, address the enduring legacy of spatial apartheid? The submissions in these matters have highlighted the crucial distinction between merely distributing resources and ensuring that those resources are distributed in a manner that actively dismantles historical inequalities shaped by race and class along geographical lines. A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.”

A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.

Where do you live? What is your city’s architecture? How has that soul baring, soul bearing architecture changed in the last ten, twenty, thirty years? In the past half century or so, when the world economy spawned both a planet of slums and a planet of global cities marked by mcmansionsa and, even more, formally and informally gated communities? A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul.

The judgment continues: “In Cape Town, as in most, if not all, South African cities, that story remains one of division – where the echoes of apartheid’s spatial planning continue to reverberate through its streets and suburbs. Every morning, thousands of Cape Town’s workers board buses, taxis and trains in the pre-dawn darkness, travelling for hours from the city’s periphery to its centre. Their daily journey is not just a commute – it is a living testament to the enduring legacy of spatial injustice that this case glaringly exposes before this Court. The main question in this matter is whether the State, as custodian of public land, has a legal obligation to address spatial divisions within Cape Town, or whether, through its actions, it is perpetuating divisions without breaching any legal duty.”

While many tumble from bed into their home-based workspaces and others commute perhaps a half hour to an hour or so to work, around the world it is considered normal that those who work the most hours and are paid the least spend the most time, inordinate amounts of time, getting to work and returning home. The impact of those treks is, at best, deeply corrosive, for both individual and community. And, of course, the impacts of these dire conditions are worsened by gender. This is urban design, and the feeling in too many places has been, “Yes, it’s `unfortunate’, but really, what can we do?” The Constitutional Court answered, as did activists and organizers, from movements such as Ndifuna Ukwazi and Reclaim the City who have been organizing and mobilizing on this particular case since 2016. A wild patience took them to this decision.

The decision goes on to explain the concept of social housing: “Pervasive spatial inequality could only be combatted by housing schemes seeking to ensure that access to areas of opportunity is more evenly distributed across the population so as to cure the deep geographical divides. This includes subsidising people’s occupation in areas they were previously excluded from, thereby fostering integration and improving the prospects of occupants. Government could bring this about by acquiring, developing, converting or upgrading buildings for integrated housing schemes. By placing segments of the population closer to economic opportunities and social services, social housing is exactly such a scheme. It strives to ensure that well-located, affordable and quality rental homes are made available to segments of the public in locations that enable them to benefit from greater proximity to economic opportunities and to health and educational facilities and social amenities. The importance of social housing, therefore, cannot be understated.”

The importance of social housing cannot be understated.

From there, the decision enters into the details of the case, which I won’t go into here. The decision is here; summary responses are here and here. They’re all fascinating. The key is that the Constitution assures the right to adequate and dignified housing, and that means, among other things, housing that supports a dignified life, dignified in and of itself, dignified in the context of the general society. It’s not enough to build a house “somewhere”. The location matters … as a matter of law.

Further, pipeline plans and projects that [a] did not emerge from any consultation with the disenfranchised communities, [b] continue to stick social housing in the far peripheries of the city, and [c] generally don’t materialize anyway are “not in compliance”. Translate: mean less than the paper they’re written on. The City of Cape Town was told to get serious about providing real, affordable, dignified housing in “amenity-rich” neighborhoods, to provide detailed plans which will be monitored by the court, and to rethink its approach to housing and, perhaps even more, to those in need of decent housing.

The final point is that the right to decent, dignified and adequate housing is and must be a codified, Constitutional right. If it’s not … make it so.

A city’s architecture tells the story of its soul. What’s in yours?

(by Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Matthew Hirsch / GroundUp)

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Why don’t you go back …

June 28, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Stories change and yet remain the same, sometimes over time, sometimes in translation, sometimes just because, just because they’re haunting. Here’s an example, perhaps. In the 1950s, Baltimore, where my family lived, was deeply, though by that point largely “informally”, segregated. It was called “neighborhood charm”: White neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods. White neighborhoods were either Jewish or Christian. Then White Christian neighborhoods divided into White ethnic zones. I was six at the time of this story.

I lived in a working- to lower middle class Jewish neighborhood. I was playing with the girl next door, as we often did. We got into an argument … as we often did. At one point, I said something, I don’t remember what, that infuriated her, infuriated her so much that she trembled, looked at me, speechless, and then said, “Why don’t you back to where you came from?”

We had come from Europe, Holocaust survivors. My mother was Belgian, my father was Polish, I was born in Belgium. My parents “spoke with an accent” (welcome to America). I knew my neighbor had no idea where I came from and doubted she knew that Belgium existed. So, with that knowledge, I replied, “Where do you think I came from?”

Silence.

Silence.

Then her face lit up and she said, gleefully and loudly, “Africa!”

That’s the story.

Where did she learn “Africa!”? When did she learn “Africa!”? How did she learn “Africa!”? Those are the questions I’ve had for decades. But today, as I watch xenophobic movements, including on the African continent, rally and march, I wonder as well at the joy she felt, the deep, satisfying pleasure she felt, when she could say, “Africa!”

Some stories stay with you.

(by Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Ad Reinhardt, “Abstratct Painting” / MoMA)

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States of abandonment: In evictions, who abandons whom?

June 14, 2026 by Leave a Comment

“Zones of abandonment … accelerate the death of the unwanted. In this bureaucratically and relationally sanctioned register of social death, the human, the mental and the chemical are complicit: their entanglement expresses a common sense that authorized the lives of some while disallowing the lives of others.”
João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

This story is about a day in the life of Sherry Gudger, a resident of Halethorpe, in Baltimore County, in Maryland. Sherry Gudger is a single mother living with multiple sclerosis. On or around August 7 of this year, Sherry Gudger received a notice stating that she would be evicted on the 25th of August. According to Ms. Gudger, she “did her best to remove her personal possessions from her third-floor apartment”. She didn’t manage to remove everything. August 25th was the first day of school for her 8-year-old son. Ms. Gudger walked her son to school, returned to the apartment, and found that all her belongings had been thrown away. These belongings included “her passport card, clothing, work tools, her eight-year-old son’s bed, and other furniture.” The trashing of her estate was completely legal. Baltimore County has a “Placement of Personal Property” ordinance, which says that a tenant’s belongings removed during an eviction “shall be considered abandoned”. Sherry Gudger has joined a lawsuit challenging both the loss of her possessions and the law itself. The action was “lawful”, but was it right? Further, and really, did Sherry Gudger “abandon” her personal property … or was she abandoned by the processes of eviction?

These questions have already been asked and answered. In 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down a similar law in Baltimore City. According to Maryland Legal Aid, representing Sherry Gudger, “In that case, the court held that tenants are entitled to clear notice that they could permanently lose ownership of their possessions during an eviction and that due process requires a meaningful opportunity to determine whether property was truly abandoned.”

Sherry Gudger explained, “I became part of this lawsuit because I believe everyone should be treated fairly. A lot of people are going through hard times right now, and what happened to me and my family could happen to someone else. People deserve to know what can happen to their property and have a chance to recover the belongings that are important to them.”

People deserve to know, and people deserve a chance to recover. For residents, and often for neighbors and friends, evictions are an existential crisis. That crisis does not endow the State or any entity with the power to reduce them to nothing. That’s what was supposed to happen in Halethorpe. Management told maintenance to go in, grab everything and dump it. Sherry Gudger was supposed to simply disappear … but she refused and refuses to do so. She refuses to be a citizen of the state of abandonment, a zone of social death through forced and unremarkable disappearances. It’s just business as usual. People deserve to know. People deserve a chance to recover. I believe everyone should be treated fairly.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Julie Shields / “The things people told me“)

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From 1976 to 2026, neither peace nor ceasefire have ever been keywords. So what?

June 6, 2026 by Leave a Comment

“The blues remembers everything the country forgot”
Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson, “Bicentennial Blues”

What does it mean to forget the meaning of peace? Of ceasefire? Or, what does it mean to never have known?

In 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, the Welsh activist scholar Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Williams was careful to state, and repeat often, that his work was a vocabulary, not a dictionary, that it was imbedded in and woven through the social and political usages and tendencies of both his time and the times that produced his times, and the people that made and were made by, in and through those times. In 1976, Williams’ vocabulary included neither peace nor ceasefire. Nineteen words comprised the total of C-words. From capitalism to culture, C was the largest collection of words in his vocabulary. Peace did not figure in among the nine words beginning with P, from peasant to psychological. In 1976, no one gave peace a chance … and why would they? Has anything changed since then?

In 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, Gil-Scott Heron and Brian Jackson wrote and recorded Bicentennial Blues. The song investigates reasons the United States is the “home of the blues”. A few stanzas in, after the initial explanation, the song explains:

“The point is
That the blues has grown
The blues is grown now, full grown
And you can trace the evolution of the blues
On a parallel line with the evolution of this country
From Plymouth Rock to acid-rock
From 13 states to Watergate
The blues is grown
But not the home
The blues is grown
But the country has not
The blues remembers everything the country forgot

It’s a bicentennial year and the blues is celebrating a birthday
And it’s a bicentennial blues

America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition
The blues view might amuse you
But make no mistake, it’s a bicentennial year
A year of hysterical importance
A year of historical importance”

And here we are, 2026, a year of hysterical importance, a year of historical importance, a year, five decades later, in which the blues remembers everything the country forgot.

In 1982, June Jordan published “Apologies to all the people in Lebanon”. The poem opens:

“I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
of mankind isn’t that obvious?”

Here we are, decades later, and the “quest for peace” remains invasion, destruction, devastation, and death, and we continue to say, “I didn’t know and nobody told me and what could I do or say, anyway?” Where is the vocabulary, where are the culture and society, in which peace and ceasefire are keywords, words of critical significance, rather than invitations to say, “So what?”

The illustration below appeared in yesterday’s issue of The Guardian. How many more times will we see such illustrations? So what?

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Illustration: Fiona Katauskas / The Guardian)

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With “seclusion rooms” in schools, the war on children with disabilities continues

May 17, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Salmon River schools seclusion room

 

This week, NPR reported rampant abuse of Native American children in schools in a district in upstate New York: “Native kids with disabilities were held in wooden boxes. Sweeping reforms are coming”. The story is deeply disturbing. Schools built wooden boxes, “timeout” spaces”, and confined children with disabilities, children in majority Mohawk districts, into those boxes. Now the state says it’s going to do something, something `sweeping’, about those atrocities, about “seclusion rooms”. If history is any judge, they’ll need a big broom, one to cover the whole of the United States.

The story concerning upstate New York first broke last year. December 18: “Salmon River educators placed on leave over allegations that students were locked in box”: “Educators in the Salmon River Central School District have been placed on administrative leave, and the superintendent has been reassigned amid allegations that special needs students were restrained in wooden boxes at school. In addition, the district has shifted to remote learning for Friday.” At first, the Superintendent said the pictured box that was circulating on social media was not used to discipline children. Within two days, not only did he have to recant that, he had to admit there additional boxes. December 18: “Salmon River school admits to using wooden boxes as `timeouts’”: “Organizers said the box was designed for a specific 8-year-old student who is on the spectrum and non-verbal.” Faced with a child with serious needs, they bought a box to hold that eight-year—old. December 20: “A ‘Timeout Box’ in an Elementary School Draws Outrage: ‘This Is Not OK’”: “In a district in which more than 60 percent of students are Native American — and where schools sit alongside the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation — community members said that the episode recalled the well-documented harm and trauma that generations of Native American children faced in boarding schools.” In March, an “independent” study found “no abuse … but … many compliance violations”. The more recent study, by the state, has found that those breaches of “compliance” constituted abuse. Meanwhile, in New York State, seclusion rooms were already prohibited. But now that prohibition will have “sweeping” energies applied to it.

The story is disturbing in itself. It’s equally disturbing because it’s so unsurprising. Here’s some news from the past few months. March 11: “50 Minnesota school districts still using ‘seclusion’ rooms”: “More than 50 Minnesota school districts continue to use so-called seclusion rooms …. The 50 school districts maintain 194 registered seclusion rooms across 100 school buildings across the state.” Two weeks ago, in Amherst, Massachusetts, parents of children with disabilities urged their local school board to remove seclusion rooms, also known as “`reflection rooms’ or `blue rooms’ — padded isolation rooms”. At the end of February, the Virginia Beach School Board unanimously voted to limit the use of seclusion rooms. The change follows two years of discussion and “scrutiny” after the isolation of an 11-year-old student with autism led to his death: “Virginia Beach reported the highest number of seclusions among school divisions in Virginia in the 2024-25 school year.” There’s much sweeping needed.

Charles Bell, author of the recently published No Restraint: Disabled Children and Institutionalized Violence in America’s Schools, noted, “44 states have laws that limit the use of restraint and seclusion to emergency situations or ban it altogether. Minnesota, for example, bans the use of seclusion for children who are in third grade or younger. And 41 of these same states have laws that schools must notify parents each time their child is restrained or secluded. Various news organizations, such as ChalkBeat, have found that schools in North Carolina, Michigan and Illinois have violated restraint and seclusion laws. In some cases, schools use terms such as `quiet room’ and `timeout’ to circumvent laws that mandate reporting restraint and seclusion to parents and government agencies.”

What are these seclusion rooms teaching children, not only the children thrown into the boxes but also those who watch? We have asked this question since 2010. We asked in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023. It is too late to “discover” the atrocity and torture of seclusion rooms. The time for discovery is long over. Across the country, children with disabilities and children sitting with them are being traumatized and tortured, all in the name of education. What is the lesson here? What exactly are children meant to learn, the ones thrown into solitary, the ones watching their friends go into solitary? Why are we so invested in seclusion and restraint of children, generally, and of children living with disabilities, particularly?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo credit: Chrissy Onientatahse Jacobs / NPR)

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Empty words that empty us: ceasefire

May 13, 2026 by Leave a Comment

because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”

Today, The New York Times (finally) thankfully revealed the truth we already know and have known: “Russia-Ukraine War Shows Cease-Fires Have Lost Meaning Under Trump”. For the past few years, we have watched Israel establish “ceasefires” with one entity and another, only to continue the devastation. The same goes for Russia in Ukraine. The same goes for Israel and the United States in Iran. The only problem with this “discovery”, with this truth is that it ignores a history of devastation masquerading as ceasefire and of the devastating ceasefire masquerading as peace.

In 1982, June Jordan wrote “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”, first published in the Village Voice, July 20, 1982. This is the poem as it appeared in 1982 in its entirety:

“Apologies to All the People in Lebanon

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called      your apartments and gardens      guerrilla
strongholds.
They called      the screaming devastation
that they created       the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?

Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren’t so bad

You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.”

Later, an epigram was added: “Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.”

In 2024, Faisal Mohyuddin wrote “Ceasefire Haiku”. At the center of this sequence of haiku, these four verses:

“Shame: a legacy
Your descendants will decry,
Bemoan, be cursed by.
____

To remain silent
Is consent, is wrong, is more
Deadly than more bombs.
___

You can’t really see
Me, except as your conscience-
Cleanser, your blindfold.
___

When I condemn crimes,
You call me culprit, settle
My heart to scrub yours.”

Forty-two years separate those two poems. Easily half of Lebanon’s population have lived all of their lives in a “ceasefire” in which the guns never ceased firing and the bombs never stopped falling. In fact, easily three quarters of the world have lived their lives in the ceasefire, a ceasefire in which guns never ceased firing and the bombs never stopped falling. While Trump’s actions are egregious and worse and Netanyahu’s programme of genocide is a legacy our descendants will decry … they are not a new invention. They are merely the latest phases in this, the Age of Ceasefire. May peace be with you. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Aliaksei Lepik / Unsplash / LAist)

 

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On record-breaking: When you care enough to send the very best …

May 5, 2026 by Leave a Comment

 

“Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Day in Autumn”

Today, it is reported that homelessness in Western New York state hit “a record high”. The current level is “the highest recorded since data collection began in 2005, and 24% up from just last year.” Today it’s also reported that “England is facing its twelfth consecutive record high in the number of children living in temporary accommodation.” Elsewhere, it was reported, “The number of children who are now homeless and living in temporary accommodation in England is at the highest level since records began as the country’s spiralling housing crisis has left more people than ever without a home.” Finally, last week it was reported, “A quarter of the way through 2026, eviction filings in Minnesota are outpacing 2025, the highest year for filings on record …. In Minneapolis, where much of Operation Metro Surge was focused, filings climbed sharply between January and March, surpassing last year’s rate of eviction filings in the city. And statewide through mid-April, eviction filings are still above 2025’s record pace.”

What is a record? a record high? a record pace? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from its first appearance to today, a record is “the documentation or recording of facts, events, etc.” At its root, it meant “piece of evidence about past events, memory, account, story, discussion, negotiation, agreement, judgement.” Additionally, a record is “the best performance or most remarkable event of its kind; spec. the best officially recorded achievement of a particular kind in a competitive sport.” “To break (also beat) the record” means “to surpass the previous best performance in a particular activity”.

Month in, month out, somewhere “it is reported” that evictions or homelessness are breaking the record, are surpassing “the best performance or most remarkable event of its kind, the best officially recorded achievement of a particular kind.” On one hand, we have the situation in which evictions are not recorded. There is no national data base that records evictions or eviction filings. We have the great work of the Princeton University Eviction Lab as well as innumerable other local and regional dashboards. None of them records “informal evictions” and “self-evictions”, but they do great work, nevertheless.

On the other hand, what is the point of keeping a record if little to no substantive action emerges from the recording. We have records and no records, memory without a trace of memory, calls and cries without reception or echo. Every day, we surpass the previous best performance in the particular activity that is merely ourselves.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image credit: Guerrilla Girls, “What’s the Difference between a POW and a Homeless Person?” / Tate)

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