Screaming

Yelling, shouting, shriek

I got yelled at the other day. I was in my local wine store and was talking to the lady who works there. I would say we are friendly, more than acquaintances, but not quite friends. That chasm between someone you would spend time with, and someone you don’t mind talking to when you run into them while you are out and about.

We always have interesting conversations and are generally on the same wave length, well for the most part, when it comes to views about things. Ok, when I say things, I mean politics, But not totally on the same wave length. I still vote with the question in the back of my mind whether the person running is going to support rounding up my children into cattle cars, and her first thought is abortion rights. (Yes, we are both Jewish. So its not like it was a religious war. Maybe slightly sectarian though. Zealots versus Essenes. )

By the way, the majority of Jews polled after the November election voted more about abortion rights than Israel or fighting antisemitism. So I guess I am a bit of an outlier for where I live for what is important to me. I think if I lived in a more religious section of the world, say certain parts of Brooklyn, there would be more people with my priorities, except unlike in those more hamisha* parts of NY, I voted for the guy (well lady) that lost. In truth, I didn’t vote based on anything other than who would be best for my family’s economic future. Yeah, kitchen table issues. As the hubby said, if the person in the oval office screws up our livelihood we will be worrying about politics living in our chevy.

Of course, I then joked that we would be one of those van life people who actually make a living detailing their lives living in a van. We would call it EquinoxLife, since our chevy is the equinox model. I have seen people make a fortune and save money to buy homes detailing their everyday lives on YouTube. I guess I would also need a TikTok account at that point, for business purposes, which might interfere with my chakra serenity. Ok, yes I know that it’s the odd person who does well enough to earn a living this way. But hey, if you are already living out of your car, why not give it a try. It would be a whole new business venture for us. It would be interesting

It could also be like those people who sell everything and become truckers. They haul goods cross country while living out of the back of their semi-trailers. Of course we would still have the boys and the dog, so it would be crowded. Not sure they make a hauling truck bed big enough to hold a family of 4 with a pet. So that would only work if we bought 2 cabs and hauled side by side. We would call it the Side-by-Side Trucking Family. (I know I have thought about this more than is healthy.)

Yeah, he just walked out of the room without saying anything

Meanwhile, my semi-friend at the wine store yelled at me after I told her I didn’t mind Trump defunding NPR or removing the people from the US Holocaust Museum committee.

“Why are you supporting this monster?”

“I’m not supporting this monster,” I yelled in an equally impressive decibel,” I just know that its all politics. It always has been. I then explained things to her.” (When I tell you I know about the Holocaust Museum, its because my father not only actually wrote the original proposal presented to Jimmy Carter, but was on the original committee as a representative of Yad Vashem. Only the people that wrote up the committee list called it Mad Yeshem. Don’t ask….In that proposal was also the request to set up a section in the DOJ which later became the Office of Special Investigations, that hunted down nazi war criminals living in the US. My father was a consultant as a expert on the subject. The most notorious cases brought being Valerain Trifa And John Demjanjuk)***

(By the way I don’t have a problem with the way the Trump administration is fighting antisemitism on college campuses. Read my previous essay for more on that.)

Well, she quieted down. And we went on our merry conversational way about other topics and ideas.

But what was with the yelling? Does yelling mean you are right? Does yelling accomplish anything?

I actually wonder what makes a person think they have a right to yell at someone else anyway.

You hear about people with hair trigger tempers. Those with road rage and those who need anger management. But really, what do you accomplish yelling at someone over politics? Is it going to change the outcome? Is it going to make your side of the aisle less, I don’t know, ridiculous? It won’t.

Yelling accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t make you smarter, wiser or more informed. I think it just makes you look like a bully. I also think that it can be abusive at times as well.

I don’t like yelling. It doesn’t make me feel good. It doesn’t do anything for my calm. It makes me nervous and antsy. I do wish people would learn to channel their anxiety or issues in a more positive way. How is it going to bring people to your side if you yell at them?

Case in point- well you can rest assured that after 18 months of the Hamasniks yelling that we who support Israel are all genocide supporters (PS there is no genocide happening in Gaza. Its brutal yes. But its simply war, and that is bad enough.), it really hasn’t made me change my mind that gang raping Jewish women to death, burning Jewish families alive, slaughtering people at a music festival because they are Jewish, taking/torturing/starving/sexually assaulting hostages, and strangling a 9 month old and his 4 year old brother to death is a net positive for the world, or some kind of vunderkinda resistance movement. Nope no amount of yelling is going to get me to join these proIslamist Jew-hating, America-hating, western civilization-hating nutters.

So you see, yelling doesn’t really accomplish very much.

Considering that we have 1354 **more days of a Trump presidency people are going to lose their voices if they yell, scream, shriek, tantrum every time Trump pisses them off. He also gets a kick out of how he triggers people. Why else would he put out on social media a picture of himself as Pope. By doing that he got exactly the reaction he was hoping for. He likes when people lose their shit over things he does.

Listen, fight the good fight. Go ahead. Lawsuits and campaigning to change the balance of power in Congress. Go for it.

But for the love of God stop yelling. It gets you nowhere. People who know facts and can debate honestly do not have to yell. As soon as you yell you have lost.

Yelling also proves the old adage that you should keep your mouth closed and let people think you are stupid rather than opening up your mouth and removing all doubt.

IT IS DAY 578 OF THE HOSTAGES BEING STARVED AND HELD IN THE TERROR DUNGEONS OF GAZA 🎗️

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*****

* hamisha- yiddish for more ethnically/religiously Jewish

**actual countdown clock of how many days Trump has left in office down to the second.

***more about my father-just some of the things he did with his life:

Operation Moses

Torturers Next Door (profile in Mother Jones magazine)

I don’t know what he did for the US government (he never told), but one day the FBI showed up and asked him to never request his FBI file, because if it ever got out what he did on behalf of the US, they really couldn’t protect him.