At the lake's edge: Dancing toward love and liberation

Hannah's Notes A few notes if you want to channel election anxiety into action!  Help us win the Fair Tax by signing up for remote text-, phone-, or friend-bank here . We always begin with a training. If you want a Fair Tax yard sign, sign up here .  If you want to defeat Trump with a method 102x more effective than traditional presidential persuasion conversations, call voters in Wisconsin on Mondays from 5-8pm with ONE People's Campaign or call voters in Michigan on Thursdays with Jane Addams Seniors in Action. Both our organizations are partnering with People's Action. Phone banks are remote. Finally, we also need to shift our expectations that we will not know the results of the election on Election Night or in the days immediately following . It will take a while to count all the mail-in ballots. Organizations around the country and at the local level are coordinating to respond in the event the election results are contested or Trump attempts a coup. He's said r...

So I've been feeling numb and paralyzed, been spending a lot of time in my head b/c I'm not sure what will happen if I let the real feelings be felt. I've got a lot of shock and awe and disbelief, fear and hope, gratitude and guilt swirling around, competing for space. But since w hite silence is consent , I'm going to put some ideas here despite my worries that I'm going to get something wrong, that my analysis isn't perfect, fears that I'll offend my black and POC siblings.  Here is what I want to say to my white peers -- If you are going to criticize or judge the violence I say this: violence breeds violence. So if you're going to judge the small minority of protesters that have employed violent tactics in their rebellion, I fully expect to hear you also judge the intertwined system of racial capitalism which is inherently a violent system. It depends on the use of violence to exploit workers' labor and quell their attempts to o...

Our first day home from the hospital. 2/25/20 On February 23, 2020, Charles and I became parents when we welcomed our healthy son, Aylan Chabetaye Gelder Dabah, into the world! I learned that in Judaism, as in many eastern traditions, there is a sacred 40-day period following birth. (It’s beautiful that this number of days mirrors the number of weeks of pregnancy.) I am now at the end of this time and wanted to mark it by sharing publicly my birth story and how I prepared for it. I don’t think we talk enough about birth in our society, and trends in our current medical system has made natural, unmedicated childbirth so much more rare. Currently in the US, ~75% of women have an epidural. 35% of women who use anesthesia end up with a c-section versus a 3% c-section rate for women who don’t have any intervention. Natural childbirth was the most profound singular experience of my life. TL;DR version: I invested a lot of time, energy and financial resources into preparing myself phy...