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Springtime in a Scared & Angry Year

Barry Dredze
5 min readApr 22, 2022

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Zodiac floor mosaic of the Byzantine era Beit Alpha synagogue in the Beit She’an Valley in present day Israel. (wikiwand)

Together again! One night only! Good Friday and Passover in the month of Ramadan.

The liberation festival of Passover is observed this year by magavniks in Jerusalem storming worshipers at Al Aqsa Mosque. Easter has had its own issues recently displayed by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and former KGB agent Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, a passionate supporter of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, declaring in a sermon that the Russian assault is a struggle against “gay pride parades.”

Where I live and toil, it’s cold rain and snow for the third week of April. But at least we have been slowly if perhaps somewhat overconfidently coming out of the covid times. Civilization has the muscle to pull the strings of nature and history in any which way whatsoever until time is bent out of shape, creating a landscape of absurdity and allowing for audacious and ridiculous displays of public policy, like the busload of migrants that Texas Governor Gregg Abbot sent to Washington, DC and the proliferation of state laws prohibiting discussion of gender identification and sexual orientation in public schools. And, at the time of this writing, we haven’t even gotten to any midterm primary elections yet.

The confluence of definitively religious holy days only encourages the flocks to increasingly schnorr into civic life with their dogmatic…

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Barry Dredze
Barry Dredze

Written by Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.

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