Jews’ Long-Term Sentence
Although maniacal denial
makes people seem to be a fraud,
with optimism it’s a style
that causes people to applaud.
If pessimistically you should
admit your weaknesses, you merely
confirm what they already would
have known. That’s if they love you dearly,
for if they don’t, why bother with
denial? No one cares the least
if what you say is true or myth,
not preacher, president or priest,
for all men want to hear from you
is words that do not make them sad,
some happy words that, though untrue,
make them feel in the short term glad,
claiming the Jews’ domicile
belongs to so-called Palestinians,
while telling lies about the Jews,
denial leading to opinions
supporting people who accuse
the Jews of crimes which are committed
by non-Jews (typically less blamed
for actions to Jews not permitted)
and wrongfully accused, defamed
for doing what most nations do,
while in denial they all lie.
That it is hard to be a Jew
is hard for Jews now to deny.
That this sad fact continues true,
tragedies these days confirm;
a sentence nearly every Jew
experiences in the short long term.
In “Caught in the Doom Loop of Thinking Short-Term,” NYT 8/17/25, Ben Rhodes writes:
In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.
In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society. His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness.