Sean Yo (He/Him)🐀

I don't know how to describe what Jews are living through. It's a surreal mixture of shock and bone-deep recognition. To be suddenly snapped from a lifetime of peace and safety into a reality where people are trying hard every day to make our lives unliveable...menacing us in our neighbourhoods, threatening our children, assaulting elders on the street... all in the name of a literal blood libel, scapegoating and blaming us for things we have nothing to do with and no power over. AND watching people we've known and trusted all our lives turn a blind eye to it all, or explain to us that we're imagining it all, or suggesting that maybe we're doing it to ourselves, or asking us to stop complaining about it because it's not as bad as the evil things we are being blamed for. All of this, as I say, comes as a shock. But it's also so familiar. This is normal stuff for Jews. The aberration was the brief moment of peace and security. This is what I was raised to expect. It's like it's coded into my DNA to experience this... These are embarrassing things to write, much less put out in public. I'd rather you didn't know that somewhere inside I've been expecting everyone to turn on us for all my life. It sounds self-pitying or pathetic, like I'm pleading for sympathy. (I don't even know what to do with the sympathy when it's offered, it embarrasses me further.) Only thing I know how to do, and that I know I need to do, though I don't know what good it will do, is to keep a record.