A million tiny acts of cowardice

The council brings a new level of shame to the city

Hello everyone! The scenes out of LA are very Godspeed You! Black Emperor-coded. In fact now that I’m thinking about it 2025 in general is off to a Godspeed sort of start. We’ve all got the Dead Flag Blues.

The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

Not a cheery start but let it stand as a warning: this is not a cheery post. The city council reached a new level of shameful on Tuesday. That’s the focus.

Please consider the fact that I wouldn’t be able to write what you’re about to read if not for paid subscribers that keep this newsletter in business! And the other, related fact that it’s entirely unlike any other coverage you’ll read on the matter.

Cowards on the council—If I must die—how do we make them pay?—Neo Nazi in Tatnuck Square—odds and ends

---

A million tiny acts of cowardice

We need to make them pay.

That’s the only thought I have right now. Only one that matters. When I got back at my desk after Tuesday’s four-hour council meeting it was the only thought. It remains the only thought two days later. The council was asked to make the simplest moral statement available to the modern world: it wrong to commit a genocide. They declined.

We need to make them pay.

Six councilors—regular readers will know the ones—sank a resolution in support of a ceasefire in Gaza Tuesday night. I am ashamed that we allow these people to govern our city, and have for so long. It’s with all the embarrassment I’ve ever felt for Worcester that I reiterate: six of our 11 city councilors couldn’t find a flicker in their icy hearts. Petty, Toomey, Russell, Bergman, Colorio, Mero-Carlson. The same ones as every time. But this is not like the other times. So much more vulgar, callous, intellectually and morally and spiritually repugnant. I can’t find the words. Wouldn’t matter if I could. These are not people who listen.

Moral is, they insulted us. We need to make them pay for that.

They did it in an exceptionally mealy-mouthed way. But we’ll get to that. How they did it isn’t the story. Our city council voted against a ceasefire in Gaza. That’s the fuckin’ story. They are complicit. We, thereby, are complicit. When the dust settles on this chapter of history it will be Israel’s genocide of Gazans that defines it. The great atrocity of our time. And our city council just gave Worcester’s answer to the ‘what would you have done?’ question.

The answer was: nothing, uncomfortably. We’d have made strange little excuses with thin tortured logic and then we’d have done nothing at all. Because that’s what we are doing—in this moment that future generations will look back on and ask themselves ‘how was that allowed to happen?’ And the answer will be a million tiny acts of cowardice like the one we witnessed Tuesday night. A whole nation saying what can be done about the thing while paying for the thing to be done.

I opened up my wallet and it’s full of blood

I’m not going to spend any time on the background. If you need a catch-up, start with "Shame on those with the power to act who choose silence instead" from October, and then “To hold the mirror of moral clarity” from this past Sunday.

Before the council decided we’d do nothing, hundreds of well meaning residents put on the best, most impassioned and organized campaign the council has seen in my time observing it. They stuffed the speaking roster with first-hand stories from Palestinians, pleas from medical experts, gruesome accounts from aid workers. They held up swaddled dolls to represent the dead babies. They held up a map of the Gaza Strip overlaying a map of greater Boston, for the scale of destruction. To say this is what it would look like. Boston to Wayland, leveled. They held a vigil, everyone dressed in black. Read names of the deceased. They had marshals in orange vests to make sure the small contingent of zionist counter-protestors didn’t co-opt the night. They kept everything in line so as to deliver the most effective message they could. They outnumbered the zionists many times over. And it didn’t move the needle. Not an inch. The vote was the same it was ever going to be. Six against.

Organizer Patricia Kirkpatrick32 speaks, to her left others hold up the swaddled dolls.

I knew it as soon as I heard Councilor George Russell open his mouth. He was one of the three possible swing votes (Russell, Ojeda or Pacillo), and it only took a few seconds to understand where he was coming down. Before, even, he used his Lebanese ancestry as a reason why he shouldn’t take this symbolic vote against Israeli aggression. He said “Lebanon doesn’t appear in this resolution.” He didn’t say “Israel” once. Too afraid to say the name of the mutual bad guy. I knew it before any of that. I knew it when he talked about the need for “guidance” from the law department—the go-to cop out of the cranks. In order to wiggle out of the current vote, he expressed regret at having backed a resolution a year ago from Bergman and Petty in support of Israel. The statements he made then “didn’t belong in these chambers.”

“And these statements here tonight don’t belong in this chamber, in my opinion, either,” he said.

The reason he’s suddenly overcome with contrition is obvious. Asked to make the smallest gesture of support for the Palestinian people, he opted to debase himself instead. Gnawing off your own foot out of fear there’s a trap somewhere you might step in.

With that we knew: The vote was going to be 6-5 against, with Petty as the swing. Same as ever.

And, of course, the vote they took was a procedural one: to “file” the petition, rather than vote against it directly. The idea being it gives plausible deniability to anyone naive enough to accept it. ‘Well I didn’t vote against the ceasefire, I just voted to throw it out before voting.’ That’s a vote against. To suggest otherwise is to insult the intelligence of the public. Just admit it: You got so mad at this coalition for showing up you sided with fascism. It was a decision that had very little to do with what is and isn't technically council business, but a lot to do with moral fiber. I wrote this on Sunday, two days before it happened:

After the de facto 5-6 vote the council took on this resolution in October, I’m expecting another “no,” stated as indirectly as possible. To plainly say ‘genocide bad’ takes a temerity unavailable to most of the council. Similarly, to say ‘genocide good’ is impolite and too honest for comfort. So they’ll squirm to get out of it. Expect a discussion mired in process questions so as to avoid getting too close to the actual question. It will look pathetic. It will engender secondhand embarrassment.

The future is easy to predict in Worcester because the present is reliable—always stupid in the same specific way. Every day a set of possibilities and every day like loaded dice Worcester lands on the dumbest one available. Snake eyes, forever.

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a leader of the coalition, pleaded with the council to do the moral thing. She invoked Worcester’s historical stances against slave catching and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Someone on the stream commented this current council would go 7-4 for slave catching. It made me laugh. For a certain fact they’re right. Petty, Toomey, Bergman, Colorio, Russell, Mero-Carlson showed us what they would have done in the slave catcher scenario because they did it on Tuesday.

We need to make them pay.

There is an election in November and they must be made to pay.

They have brought a great shame on this city and they must pay.

Only three of those six councilors even deigned to say why they would be voting no. To tell the people filling the gallery—some of whom with dead relatives and friends in Gaza, stories these councilors had just previously heard, if they were listening—they couldn’t make the simple moral statement that genocide is bad and should stop. Left with no other explanation, we’re to assume they think it’s a good thing. As Schaefer-Duffy said, “silence in this context is shockingly symbolic.”

The three that spoke didn’t make things better.

Moe Bergman was first of the three. He drew a thin distinction between the resolution at hand and the one he and Joe Petty filed in October 2023. That one read the council “does hereby condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.”

It passed 8-2 on the same night it was filed. There was no thumbing of the council rule book. Why should there be? After all, IDF press releases are copy-pasted into American papers of record every day. Planted propaganda lingers in the American discourse well after it’s been debunked. We’re a simple people, easily lied to, and we’re certain of our benevolence on the world stage. The big good guy supporting all the little good guys in their various good guy pursuits. Israel avails itself of this on a daily basis. It keeps the arms shipments coming.

So the majority of the council found it quite easy in October 2023 to condemn the barbarians planted in their imagination. The condemnation was all around them, in the air. We were whipped into our consenting frenzy back then. Like good Americans we hooted for blood. Like good Americans we rooted for the eradication of the inhumans. The bugs needed squashing, and the Worcester city council said “I’m doing my part.”

Information from Palestinian authorities, however, always comes to us with the critical distance, often mandated, of attribution that implies skepticism. For instance how many times have you read “according to the Hamas-run health ministry” directly after a reported death toll? You’d never read something like “The Israel-run IDF killed seven children today.” No, it would be “Seven children died.” According to Hamas, at least. So take it with a grain of salt.

It should come as no surprise then that the Worcester City Council would only pull the rulebook down from the shelf when it’s Palestinians they’re asked to support. These councilors are, after all, products of the American consent factory—and not especially bright ones.

So, to Bergman’s argument: The 2023 petition “never asked anything of any other government” but this one does. To ask something of another government, he argued, pushes it outside the council’s purview. I’m old enough to remember last summer Bergman asking the state legislature to take action on property tax reform for non-profits, in the wake of WPI’s hotel purchases. But ahhhhh that takes for granted this was a good-faith argument. It wasn’t. I’m not interested in parsing the legalese. To even go down that road lets him off the hook.

Ostensibly, his issue lies with the phrase “call on the U.S. government.” But, as a resolution, it’s a purely symbolic gesture. It’s not, under any stretch of the imagination, a mandate. Bergman’s order in 2023 “prays” whereas the multifaith coalition “calls on.” Same difference. The distinction Bergman is drawing out loud does not exist. The distinction in the subtext, however, is very real. His argument amounts to a tortured way of saying he doesn’t want to pray or call on anything in service of the Palestinian people.

Ever the troll, he said: “Had those here today asked for a resolution that addresses suffering and loss of life of the Palestinians it would've been the equivalent, more or less, of what was said in October of 2023.”

First off, that’s exactly what it addresses, the suffering and loss of life. Three hours of public speakers testified to that very thing. You just didn’t want to hear it. Second, that’s not what your resolution said! Read it again:

The council “does hereby condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.”

No mention of “suffering” or “loss of life.” Just the “barbaric and inhuman” actions of some Arabs, with no mention of anything before or after it. No word, for instance, on the open-air prison from which the “barbaric and inhuman” actors had momentarily escaped. While I’d have loved to see it, the multi-faith coalition’s petition makes no such judgement on the Israeli state.

Bergman saved the best for last: “Where were you in October of 2023?” He looks out into the crowd. “You talk about humanity tonight. Are Jewish lives any less valuable? I didn't see any of you here in October of 2023.”

What a thing to say—‘is my life not valuable?’—moments before co-signing a genocide.

If I Must Die

My copy of Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die came in on Monday. Alareer’s poem of the same name has become an international slogan, especially after Israel killed him in December, 2023. His poetry is excellent, but it’s the essays that had me burning through the 250 page book in two days. I finished it this morning. By the time I got to the council chamber last night, I was 160 pages deep. Each an onion layer. The lies we’ve passively absorbed here in the center. The sick extent of what the imperial order has allowed to transpire in this one sliver of periphery. For example this, from late October, 2023, around the time the council was passing Bergman’s resolution:

The shelves are empty. And I keep telling (my children), "drink less, eat less." This is where we are here. My older children can understand this. But how would you explain to seven-year-old Amal, who already survived three wars, and hopefully she will survive this fourth barbaric, genocidal war? ... This is an extermination. Israel long ago created the concentration camp. But this is now an extermination camp.

And this:

My grandmother would tell me to put on a heavy sweater because it would rain. And it would rain! She, like all Palestinian elderly, had a unique sense, an understanding of the earth, wind, trees, and rain. The elderly knew when to pick olives for pickling or for oil. I was always envious of that.

Sorry, Grandma. We have instead become attuned to the vagaries of war. This heavy guest visits us uninvited, unwelcomed, and undesired, perches on our chests and breaths, and then claims the lives of many, in the hundreds and thousands.

A Palestinian in Gaza born in 2008 has witnessed seven wars: 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, 2023A, and 2023B. And as the habit goes in Gaza, people can be seven wars old, or four wars old. My little Amal, born in 2016, is now a B.A. in wars, having lived through four destructive campaigns. In Gaza, we often speak about wars in terms of academic degrees: a B.A. in wars, an M.A. in wars, and some might humorously refer to themselves as Ph.D. candidates in wars.

Or this, from a 2014 essay describing the effects of a 2008 Israeli assault dubbed Operation Cast Lead:

Five years ago, Israel destroyed more than six thousand housing units. More than twenty thousand Palestinians were made homeless, some forcibly displaced for the fourth or fifth time in their lives. The war came after a long siege that Israel is still imposing on Gaza, a siege that has left almost all aspects of life paralyzed. Israel targeted infrastructure, schools, universities, factories, houses, and fields. Everyone was a possible target. Every house could be turned into wreckage in a split second. There was no right time or right place in Gaza. The whole of Gaza was the bull's-eye for Israel's most sophisticated military arsenal. It was clear as crystal to Gazans then that Israel was deliberately and systematically targeting life and hope, and that Israel wanted to make sure that after the offensive we had nothing of either to cling to, and that we are silenced forever.

It is insane that Oct. 7 is the accepted “start of the conflict.” It’s perhaps the foundational conceit of the prevailing narrative, at least as it reaches American audiences, and it’s a sly work of fiction. In it we see yet another example of “deliberately and systematically targeting life and hope” in Gaza. The spectacle erases historical context so as to serve an unknowable villain to the viewers at home, who reliably fill the vacuum with their diffuse grievances, saddling them all on the new bug that needs squashing. With delight, they tune into the squashing nightly. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement for the spectacle and the viewer, both feasting on the life and hope of the bug.

In Gaza, no one is safe. And no place is safe. Israel could kill all 2.3 million of us and the world would not bat an eye.

All morning and afternoon, reading Alareer’s brilliant work, chewing on thoughts like that, until the evening, when I took my functioning car from my warm, intact apartment on a 10 minute drive through the cozy center of this empire to a city hall that’s never been bombed, never been said to contain human shields, or harbor some secret villainous lair in its basement, to hear a mayor elected by 11,000 of the city’s 207,000 residents—who mostly live in the same small handful of landscaped and guarded and socially regulated neighborhoods, where each house has its own mailbox and driveway and has never seen war, never appeared on a drone operator’s monitor, never served as the test subject for next generation surveillance technology, never seen a rash of midnight raids with the black-clad men with top-of-the-line stealth kits dragging people from their families, never evacuated at gunpoint, never blanketed by leaflets, where the walls never rattle from the sonic boom of a low-flying F-16, where permission to travel is assumed, where the calories in arriving trucks are not tracked and rationed, where ambulances are a phone call away and won’t get hit with a missile, where no one keeps a go bag by the door or huddles their family each night in the smallest, safest room of the house, hushing the children in a total darkness, grieving the loss of their innocence, praying they survive—talk about “both sides.”

Here’s Mayor Joe Petty’s comment on the ceasefire resolution, and why he’d be voting against it, in full and unedited:

I just want to acknowledge everybody coming out tonight and thank you for your participation and your thoughts. And I would just start by acknowledging the error I occurred back in 2023 by placing an item on the agenda was an error on my part. And I'll be very clear too, there's nothing glamorous about war. Nothing. Unfortunately with... causes. War causes life altering damage to many people, not just death. It's a sense of loss, sense of property, sense of hurt, and we see that played out there in the Middle East.

Significant human crisis, humanitarian crisis is coming out of this, there's no question about that, but out of the city council control. My concern is the division in the city of Worcester and the council's ability to make national change. I hear what people are saying, but I also believe it's not the purview of the council. And that's how I will vote here tonight.

But I do wanna say that it was good to hear from people talking about the inhumane on both sides of this issue tonight. People recognized the inhumane part on October 7th, the inhumane part of what's going here since then, over the last 400, over 400 days. Thank you.

Cries of “shame” rippled out from the crowd as he walked back to his seat. A few people called him a coward¹. What other word is there for a man who goes to these lengths to avoid such a small task, one which costs him nothing at all and takes less than a second.

It was Petty who kept the resolution off the agenda in October. It was Petty who barred the speakers that night, forcing them to shut down the meeting. It was Petty who cast the deciding vote to file it last night. All of it a retreat. His cowardice manifest. He didn’t have to do any of it. He could have allowed the resolution to go on the agenda same as any other, like 13 other cities and towns in Massachusetts have done. There would have been a single session of public comment. The council would have voted (same way it did yesterday most likely) and we’d have moved on. It was his flailing to get out of it that made this a prolonged drama. He shut down two whole meetings, got the ACLU involved, made residents so angry they shouted down from the gallery. The shame falls squarely on his shoulders. Last night he said “my concern is the division in the city.” There’s one way of reading that statement in which he’s obviously failed, and another in which he was wildly successful.

If division is the goal, mission accomplished.

He put himself in a position where not a word of the following public comment, given by resident Mohammed Xhemali, rings false:

“...to the mayor who has been coming into our mosques trying to tell us how much he cares about the Muslim community and how important our voice is. While obviously our voices and our blood are not expensive enough to get you to care about making a statement on a ceasefire. All of this is about the weaponization of bureaucracy to shut people down, to continue oppression. And as you sit in these chairs, you do not do anything with the authority that you have, except that you continue the oppression.”

Nothing to add to that.

The other five

While Petty and his five horseman brought shame onto the city, it should be said that five councilors did not. Etel Haxhiaj and Thu Nguyen, who were credited by an organizer to raucous applause, Luis Ojeda and Jenny Pacillo, who voted no on filing it but didn’t speak, and Khrystian King, who offered the most compelling antidote to the old guard’s faux concern over “purview.” King said:

“Some folks had asked, what does this do tonight? What does it matter? And I've said this publicly and I'll say it again, Mr. Chairman. It's wind at the back of our federal elected officials.”

Our state and federal delegations are much more progressive than our city council, an especially curious feature of our curious political culture. Jim McGovern is a veritable national standout on Gaza, reliably much better than almost all his congressional peers, not that it’s hard.

So, as his constituents, we’re in the position of swaying one of the few congressman who isn’t completely captured by the Israel lobby, and unfortunately that is a rare thing. An affirmative vote on ceasefire from the council in his home city shows he has the support to keep pushing, and push harder.

It just came out AIPAC spent a record-breaking $42 million on Congressional races last year, much of it laser focused on bumping off members of the already-tiny coterie of progressives. Just about half was spent on defeating Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowmen alone, and it worked. If we’re ever going to see the grip the Israel lobby has on Washington loosened, it will start with the few, like McGovern, who aren’t lost to it.

In other words, the ceasefire vote is actually doing politics. It’s perhaps for that reason alone that the old guard protested. As I wrote on Sunday:

They didn’t take the job to do politics, they took it to look like they’re doing politics. Feel like it. Put the American flag pin on the lapel and see a proud statesman in the mirror on their way out the door, into the community over which they fancy themselves a responsible steward. Frolic around city hall like some pissy flâneur on a power trip.

To close us out, let’s home in on just one of the speakers, Aula, whom the council told to kick rocks in the same way they tell everyone who bothers.

My cousin's 7-year-old daughter, Iman, was shot by an Israeli sniper while peeking out of her window and bled to death at her home. My pregnant cousin, Saha and her husband's family were killed in a direct Israeli airstrike on their home. My family in Northern Gaza is trapped without food, clean water or medical care. Among them is my uncle who has endured multiple strokes and remains without the treatment he needs. Every relative has lost their home.

Just “snippets of the daily reality” in Gaza, she said. Bought and paid for by the United States and everyone in it, including here.

I am also a mother to a five-year-old Palestinian Albanian American who loves playing in your Elm Park and loves grabbing ice cream from Gibby’s. And as I watch him, I ache. For the children of Gaza that are trapped, terrified, and robbed of their childhood, do they not deserve the same safety and joy as your children and your grandchildren? What will it take for you to see us as human?

Six councilors voted against the ceasefire right in front of this woman. They sided, instead, with the speaker directly before her, Steven Schimmel, the city’s premier self-appointed Israeli propagandist. He vaguely intoned that support of Palestine comes with consequences. “Risky, reckless behavior,” he called it.

Steven Schimmel speaks, Aula to his right, waiting her turn.

His most garishly false claim was that every Palestinian in Israeli detention facilities is there on terrorism charges. The resolution calls for “the immediate release of hostages and detainees on all sides.” But he described it this way: it “calls those held in Gaza as hostage by the same way as those held in Israeli prison for terrorism charges.” (Quote left as is.)

In reality, there are thousands in Israeli prisons for no charge at all, held under an “administrative detention” statute that allows the state to jail Palestinians indefinitely without just cause or trial. Use of the statute was at a 20-year high before Oct. 7 and spiked considerably afterward. B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights watch organization, reported IDF figures showing more than 3,000 administrative detainees as of last June. Reports of the torture, beating and rape of these detainees are abundant and well documented.

“These are the talking points of Hamas,” Schimmel said.

This is who the six councilors sided with. With Schimmel, against Aula. Deeply embarrassing.

We need to make them pay for it. How to make them pay is the question of the moment.

How do we make them pay?

A thousand new voters in the upcoming municipal election and three of the six are gone. Easily. How hard could it really be to turn out 1,000 new voters? After all 1,500 people signed on to this petition. It would take half that number of new, progressive voters to end the political careers of Candy Mero-Carlson, Moe Bergman and Donna Colorio.

In these trying times, we have in front of us a tangible and realistic goal. One that would yield practical and spiritual results. So let’s keep the momentum.

The thing Petty et al want most—what they expect to happen—is the dissipation of the movement. It would be a shame to let that happen, what with this easily attainable goal of making them pay 11 months in the future.

I don’t have any answers, but I know it’s the thing we really need to be talking about most right now.

---

New Neo-Nazi Just Dropped

A Worcester business owner has been exposed as a prominent neo-Nazi. Anti-fascist organizers published an extensive report yesterday.

Noel Dalton, 61, of Brookfield, MA is a member of the neo-Nazi organization Goyim Defense League and is the owner of The Computer Hospital in Worcester, MA.

The organizers relied heavily on pictures Dalton posted of his workplace. They believe he’s likely involved in the flyers some councilors received as well as the rash of Zoom bombings the council saw last Winter. Probably, I’ll add, one of the nerds watching the City Council Death Squad stream hosted by the California Childhood Bedroom Nazis (CCBN), which I explain in “Oh No! It’s the city council derp squad!”

Flyer made by the organizers

In private channels he says a lot of stuff that reads like the exaggerated version of comments on the Telegram’s Facebook page. For instance: “I’m sick of going outside and seeing non-whites everywhere!!” Wouldn’t you believe it, he’s eager to see the deportations get going, a sentiment widely shared by our local cranks on pages like the Seven Hills Political Dialogue.

He also carries a knife and “should be considered a threat to those around him.” Do not engage.

The organizers have an encrypted contact form, if any of you have tips about Dalton or others.

---

Odds and ends

Thanks for reading! If you liked it, please consider helping us out!

Venmo a tip / Paypal a Tip / Send a tip on Ko-Fi / Merch Store

A few news hits to stay up on...

Joshua Levy, the state’s U.S. Attorney, is stepping down on Jan. 17. In a roundtable discussion with reporters he said he’s hopeful the DOJ’s WPD case will continue, but didn’t offer much more than that. We still don’t know who Trump will appoint to take over for him. Much hangs in that balance.

The strange, Skyrim-like totems placed behind City Hall were tagged and the police have arrested the alleged tagger, holding him in the Dragonsreach Dungeon at Whiterun, just behind Jarl’s throne. If the tagger is reading this he should know there’s a loose grate on the floor of the cell, and it’s not too hard to lockpick. Your spraypaint will be in the evidence chest.

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the towns of Holden and Millbury are being little pissbabies and must finally conform their zoning to the MBTA Communities Act.

Nurses at St. Vincent are requesting state monitors as health and safety conditions continue to deteriorate due to cost-saving measures taken by Tenet, the Nosferatu of the healthcare industry.

A new Washington Post analysis of RealPage, the algorithmic rent-setting tool that has dozens of real estate companies in court, including one that employs former Worcester City Manager Mike O’Brien. Within is a breakdown of multi-family properties owned by said companies. In Worcester, it’s just three percent. In other places it’s as high as 46 percent. But considering that “fair market” is an arbitrary figure based on what every landlord everywhere can get away with charging, rent juicing in one place means rent hikes in another. That is, of course, the point of RealPage.

Okay, lastly, story time...

Via a merch order I ended up connecting with some cool new-to-the-area folks, one of them a historian who wrote a whole book on the Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables.

One thing led to another and I got a signed copy of Michael Stewart Foley’s Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables book in the mail the other day. I’m 40 pages in, and loving the thesis that the record is best understood as a powerful protest document at a particularly dismal time (1980) for American protest movements.

Foley’s deep connection to Jello Biafra’s work is made clear. It reminds me of the way I feel about Dom Mallary, singer and lyricist of Worcester hardcore band Last Lights. A brilliant mind, taken from us far too soon. I never met Mallary, but his lyrics and poetry had a massive effect on me as a young man. And, like Foley writes, my relationship to it changes as I age. It becomes impactful in a new way. This morning I revisited No Past No Present No Future, the band’s 2009 release. In “Everybody’s Working for the Weak End” Mallary sings:

Every morning I wake up looking down on a day so shallow that I can’t even drown. Tell me, is this all there is?

I was 18 when I first heard that line. A pure electric shock. I felt seen. A specific kind of sadness I thought I harbored alone, like some chronic undiagnosed disease. Mallary’s words made me feel not so alone. Set me on the path to recognizing the feeling as a social condition rather than a personal flaw. Now, 33, I identify it as a beautifully articulated political statement. And it makes me consider how much more shallow the days have become since 2009—how much harder it is to drown, and how much more important it becomes to ask is this all there is?

Talk to you soon!

1. including my Outdoor Cats co-host Chris Robarge, who was so angry, rightfully so, I was half expecting an arrest.