As per usual, I pulled down a load of things to watch from the fast hot work connection. Most of it I let run while I worked toward sleep last night. But I left one, partly because it was long, and partly because I could see from the title that it was an interview with a very thoughtful guy I’ve listened to many times over many years, a Vancouver addiction treatment specialist who has a lot of interesting things to say about trauma, economics, ‘crime’, and justice. I wanted to be awake for it, in a way I’m not at an average midnight, when heads talking politics are fine for lulling me toward uneasy dreams.

One quart into morning coffee, intending to get ready for the working day in earnest, I throw this last saved vid on.

Ten seconds into it, I am astonished.

I got the interview from a YouTube channel called the Grayzone. It has rotating hosts, but the main on is a guy I’ve also enjoyed listening to many times, a journalist named Aaron Maté. He says:

“Welcome to Pushback. I’m Aaron Maté. My guest today is Gabor Maté. He is a physician, an author, and also my father. Dad, welcome back …”

Holy shit. I never even came close to making that connection before. Two guys I really like, and they’re father and son. Wow.

So it’s very much worth digging out further material from them both, and watching their interview together, but I’m not spilling about the substance today.

I’m spilling about the fact that I used the word ‘zionist’ in a very harsh way yesterday, pretty much off the cuff. I stand by the usage in context. Modern Israel is an apartheid state, and what they’ve done and are still doing to their own indigenous tribes in the occupied territories is an ongoing generational war crime, no less racist and vicious than the one that occurred and is still occurring on Sioux and Navajo the Inca and many other nations in the nominal americas.

On the other hand, so many people I admire deeply, even with awed reverence, are Jews, embracing the label more or less. The two men mentioned above. Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow, and many of her guests. The Bern himself. On and one. These are people who really get it, up to and including on the question of Israel/Palestine.

There’s a pretty good chance that I’ve got a healthy dose of ashkenazi blood in my very own veins.

It’s a dichotomy that strikes me as very strange. So many brilliant people. And then Netanyahu and his band of thugs.

It’s very good evidence, to my mind, that the whole construct of race is a blind alley. What separates us most into groups as humans isn’t about who our ancestors were, or our chosen modes of sexuality, or even where we lie on the gender spectrum.

Rather, there are warm-blooded embracers of humanity, there are dead-eyed fish like the presidents of both countries, and what separates them into definable camps has nothing to do with their genetic heritage.

There’s something deeper than that going on.

I wonder genuinely about the nature of that something, and I think that I will continue to wonder about it the rest of my days.