The other day I wrote about the importance of speaking up in the face of atrocities regardless of your own ethnic or religious background. I spoke up about the horrors of what the Israeli government and army have done in Gaza notwithstanding my own Jewish Israeli background, notwithstanding some of my family’s positions.

This is not easy regardless of where you stand and what camp you’re a member of. Everyone has a club, Bernie used to say. We’re all members of some club. That could be the progressive club, the Buddhist club, the MAGA club—it’s difficult to speak against it. So even as I lose respect for Republican lawmakers who bend both knees to Trump, I often reflect back to the Biden years and how many of us didn’t speak out when it was our turn.

I told my hairdresser that a few years ago, when so many meetings began with: “Let’s go around and share our pronouns,” I refused. The first time was a meeting of volunteers to take illegal immigrants to work. I was taken aback. All 20 of us have to tell our pronouns? Who’s to stop anyone, in introducing themselves, from saying their name and adding their preferred pronoun? Why does the entire group have to do that first thing? Not to mention that it’s a lot easier to remember a few people’s pronouns than 20. At the end I asked the facilitator about that.

“It’s to help people feel safe,” she said.

Good luck with that, I thought.

 Even as others began to post their pronouns on Zoom, I didn’t. It felt way too politically correct, way too groupthink. I was raised in an orthodox home, so I continue to rebel against orthodoxies of all kinds, including Buddhist. Hanging out with Bernie was no antidote.

Back to my hairdresser. She stopped what she was doing and stared at me. “That’s exactly what I felt, only I’d never tell anyone.”

“Why?”

“Because they’d call me a hater of anyone who’s queer, maybe a racist. I mean, look at where we’re living, who can you say that to?”

Where we live is the Pioneer Valley, that’s our club. The place where Smith College fired a janitor because he saw a student sitting in a restricted area and called his supervisor, as he’d been told to do. He reported “someone,” not African-American, not man or woman because it was fairly dark, and he couldn’t see who it was. But the student was an African-American woman who, in addition to accusing him of ethnic bias, also accused him of “misgendering” her.

Implicit bias, or insufficient sensitivity to structural racism, have been invoked as reasons for firing teachers in universities with no proof or justification, with an investigation often taking place after the firing or forced resignation, not before. And don’t even talk about the many speakers being canceled at students’ demands.

A friend of mine said there was something “brick hard” about the woke culture; it was hard to push back against various aspects of it. How many of us spoke up? I appreciate that schools now begin to rebel against Trump, but I wonder: Where were you previously? Why did you cave in to so many outrageous demands? Your cowardice then continued well into 2025, only this time you were cowardly vis-a-vis Donald Trump.

It’s easy to point out the outrageousness of what the other club demands, but what about our club? And who spoke up then to advocate for integrity and academic independence? Driving home after my hair cut, I wondered how many of us out here felt like she did, too intimidated to say anything, to challenge the moral orthodoxies of the day. How many of us limited our responses to a brief smile and a shrug, as if to say: Well, it does sound a little crazy, but that’s how it is. We may even take a breath and think: After all, we’re on the side of the oppressed.

There seems to be some vague consciousness of a class of world-wide perpetrators called colonizers, racists, and bigots of all kinds, usually composed of Western white men but also including big corporations, Silicon Valley (though not before 2020) and the oil industry, and they are opposed by a world-wide resistance movement. Obviously, you’re not a good person unless you’re part of the resistance.

I’m reminded of the head of a queer organization in Washington who joined a rally protesting the Middle East war which specifically praised Hamas. The next day he was told that half his board had quit. “Why?” he asked. “Aren’t we all on the same side?” That’s when he was told that people like him, members of the queer community, are thrown off roofs to their deaths in Gaza by Hamas.

Here in the Valley, it’s so easy to fall right into the truisms of the day, consisting of one big echo chamber. We’re all into No Nukes and abortion rights (even against last trimester abortion). We’re all against gas pipelines (even as many are also against big solar installations in our back yard). We love one another but don’t worry if the lack of affordable housing helps make diversity rare because rentals and home prices have skyrocketed. And of course, we’re all against greedy corporations and people who have yard signs for Trump.

“Not me,” groans Aussie. “But I’m just one dog against all of you.”

If we have reservations, we keep them private. If we think that some of these basic antipathies lack nuance, that what may be right for one country or state isn’t necessarily right for another country or state, that perpetrators in one context aren’t necessarily perpetrators in another, and the same goes for victims, we don’t talk of it. We’ll talk truth to power against Donald Trump, but against our own club? No way, Jose, as Aussie likes to say.

Then we’re surprised by how many ethnic minorities voted how they did last year, swinging the election Trump’s way. Aren’t they also oppressed? Shouldn’t they be part of the global resistance? THEY’RE VOTING AGAINST THEIR OWN INTERESTS!

Only they didn’t think so.