I haven’t posted anything on social media until now because I was—and still am—struggling to process and express my reaction to the hate-fueled, white-supremacist, anti-Semitic, assault-rifle-executed terrorist attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue in my hometown last Saturday. One woman was killed and three others were injured because of their faith--including Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, a man beloved and revered by many, including my father, who cherishes him as his friend. As the news cycle begins its inevitable turn, I am still enraged and engulfed in grief. And yet, I am also--brokenly, exhaustingly--not as surprised as so many seem to be.
Born and raised in "The City in the Country," I am grateful and privileged to have grown up in a town in one of the top-performing public school districts in a top-performing state, where I enjoyed a childhood filled with unsupervised bike rides around our pocket of suburbia with friends and watchful neighbors who were and are like family. With love and kindnesses and enriching extracurriculars and involved parents. With opportunities afforded to me because I happened to be born lucky: white and privileged.
Poway, too, is white and privileged, characterizing itself as an upper middle class community on its own website. And in addition to the elite school system, the median household income far outpaces the national average, the public parks, preserves, and facilities are numerous and nurtured, and its geography boasts proximity to nationally-envied southern California beaches, mountains, deserts, and cities like San Diego and Los Angeles.
Growing up, other notable cultural features of Poway included the “joke” at my high school about how the only black students were the sons and daughters of the MLB players living in mansions up the way. Or the “joke” about the Hispanic or Latino populations just there to make Mexican food at the ubiquitous taco shops or to do the landscaping and manual labor to keep those mansions looking nice. Or the references to the lower-income (yet still wealthy by national comparison) areas of the town as “the ghetto” (like Garden Road, where I attended a wonderful elementary school). Or any of the array of other racial, religious, homophobic, and sexually-violent “jokes” you could hear in the halls or read written in yearbooks. The teachers I admired and adults I trusted were and are by and large amazing, exemplary humans who did their damnedest to teach us empathy, equality, and a sense of right and wrong, but as a teacher who tries to teach the same myself, I know the uphill battle they fought against the world beyond their classrooms.
It wasn’t just kids. There are a multitude of examples of adult offenses, but one I’ll never forget is the well-respected, well-connected business owner—and my first boss at my first job at 15—who, despite his charity work and kindly nature, told me a joke where the punchline involved lynching newly-famous Barack Obama. He waited for me to laugh with an expectant smile. I never gave it to him, and while my stomach lurched, he grumbled his guess that he should watch what he said from then on.
That was my immediate world in the early 2000s. And that world now contains internet forums, unfettered access to weapons of war, and frightening propaganda acting as echo chambers where violent, extremist manifestos let dangerous ideas fester into lethal plans.
As for the teenagers, you might chalk up their behaviors to the usual poor choices of high school students anywhere in the country. But what about their parents who never discouraged them, whose silence condoned it, or worse, whose passing comments nurtured it? What about the authority figures who delivered sickening punchlines about racial genocide? What about the kids who graduated and, despite the abundance of students who then went on to broaden their worldviews while attending college, returned and resented the lack of prosperity to which they were groomed to expect and accustomed to be entitled? Who will they then blame?
Poway was never safe. Nowhere ever is. To say or think that any community, as small and friendly as it may seem to the majority, is spared from hateful rhetoric and immune to extremist narratives is myopic and irresponsible. It is devastating, but it is our reality.
The bright light that is so much of Poway and countless towns like it does not exempt it from having dark shadows. Our job is to make hate unacceptable by teaching not only tolerance, but acceptance, and even celebration of what has been “othered” for so long. Our responsibility is to hold ourselves and others accountable and to a higher standard of the love we love to preach but often struggle to practice. As Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein said, “We need to battle darkness with light, no matter how dark the world is we need to think of a little bit of light pushes away a lot of darkness. A lot of light will push away a lot more.”
Let not yet another shooting be a call to arms, but a call to light. Let loose the matches, the candles, the lanterns, the spotlights. Let loose beacons of hope and love so bright they blind those of us with our eyes still closed.
Let us light the way to change.
