Can't Keep Quiet: 100 Columns and Counting

This is the 100th Raffel Ticket weekly column I've written. How the heck did that happen?

The underlying explanation has to be my discomfort, my anger, my frustration with the world we live in. I love my family, adore my friends and delight in my students, but I am far from happy with a world where hunger, violence, poverty, callousness, authoritarianism, racism, antisemitism, inequality, violence and unfairness flourish.

As a first resort, I tried to escape from this world. Writing novels transported me to fictional realms, where justice (usually) triumphed and I had (some) control over what happened.

But in the end, writing fiction just wasn’t enough. The ancient sage Rabbi Tarfon said: “The work is plentiful. … It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.” Calling to me from 2,000 years ago, Tarfon was saying that even though the world will never be perfect, I had to do something about improving it.

So, I felt compelled to do more than pen novels. It was time do some writing cemented in the real world, not the imaginary one inside my own head. I started submitting occasional opinion pieces to newspapers, magazines and websites, which addressed topics such as gun deaths, the wisdom of women voters, rampant careerism among students, Trump’s pro-Russian past and the importance of studying the humanities.

Then I decided I wanted to do more still, something more regularly. I bundled up those dozen or so columns published over seven years and sent them to Creators Syndicate. They offered me the opportunity to write a column every week, this weekly column, and here I am.

Friends asked how I was going to come up with enough ideas to write a column every seven days. Credit — or blame — Trump and his disciples, their Democratic opposition, the Supreme Court, Hamas, American education and Silicon Valley for ensuring there’s never a shortage. I have a 99-page file on my computer called “Column Ideas.” I will not live long enough to address them all.

After two years of column-writing, I have a rhythm. On Tuesdays I compose a first draft, often pretty rough. On Wednesdays I edit and polish the piece and submit it by 1:30 p.m. The writing process helps me grapple with how I feel about the problems of the world. In essence, I am thinking with my fingertips. As the brilliant novelist and essayist Joan Didion explained, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Me, too. And without those two days of articulating my concerns and frustrations, of ranting, I think I would burst. Now that I’ve started, I can’t shut up.

So, the column might provide therapy for me, but what is it doing to make the world a better place? Has it stopped gun deaths, terrorism in the Middle East, government roundups on American streets, corruption at the highest levels? The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Beware of spitting against the wind!” Sometimes it feels as if that’s exactly what I'm doing each week.

Little frustrates me more than ignorance of the past. Americans, including those who live in the White House and work on Capitol Hill, don’t seem to know much about historical events such as the American failure to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, the role the Smoot-Hawley tariffs played in causing the Great Depression, Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, the American roundup of citizens during World War II and the Arab rejections of a Palestinian state in 1937, 1948 and 2000. As the Roman philosopher and orator Cicero said, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.”

I do take some solace when I see my columns shared on social media and read responses to them in letters to the editor. It doesn’t matter much whether the column is praised or criticized as “intellectually embarrassing” as last week’s was by a reader. What matters is that the columns are reaching people and maybe even making them think.

Thank you, reader, for celebrating this centenary with me. We form a partnership. Without you, I would indeed just be spitting into the wind.

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