The night before my father, Ronald Reagan, died, I listened to his breathing — ragged, thin. Nothing like that of the athletic man who rode horses, built fences at the ranch, constructed jumps from old phone poles, cut back shrubs along riding trails. Or of the man who lifted his voice to the overcast sky and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Time and history folded over themselves inside me, distant memories somersaulting with more recent realities — the 10 years of his journey into the murky world of Alzheimer’s and my determination to abandon the well-worn trail of childhood complaints and forge a new path. To be blunt, I had resolved to grow the hell up.

I can still remember how it felt to be his child, though, and how the attention he paid to America and its issues made me jealous.

Long before my father ran for office, politics sat between us at the dinner table. The conversations were predictable: Big government was the problem, the demon, the thing America had to be wary of. I hated those conversations. I wanted to talk about the boy who bullied me on the school bus, not government overreach.

In time I came to resent this country for claiming so much of him. Yet today, it’s his love for America that I miss most. His eyes often welled with tears when “America the Beautiful” was played, but it wasn’t just sentiment. He knew how fragile democracy is, how easily it can be destroyed. He used to tell me about how Germany slid into dictatorship, the biggest form of government of all.

I wish so deeply that I could ask him about the edge we are teetering on now, and how America might move out of its quagmire of anger, its explosions of hatred. How do we break the cycle of violence, both actual and verbal? How do we cross the muddy divides that separate us, overcome the partisan rancor that drives elected officials to heckle the president in his State of the Union address? When my father was shot, Tip O’Neill, then speaker of the House and always one of his most devoted political opponents, came into his hospital room and knelt down to pray with him, reciting the 23rd Psalm. Today a gesture like that seems impossible.

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“Our memories from the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple. “We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.” Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.”

“We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads. The problem with that assumption is that we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination.”

“ Memory gives an illusion of stability in a world that is always changing. Because if we look for memories, we’ll reshape them into our beliefs of what’s happening right now. We’ll be biased in terms of how we sample the past. We have these illusions of stability, but we are always changing. And depending on what memories we draw upon, those life narratives can change.”

“On the more intentional side, are there things that we might be able to do in the moment to make events last in our memories? In some sense, it’s about being mindful. If we want to form a new memory, focus on aspects of the experience you want to take with you. If you’re with your kid, you’re at a park, focus on the parts of it that are great, not the parts that are kind of annoying. Then you want to focus on the sights, the sounds, the smells, because those will give you rich detail later on when you remember it. Another part of it, too, is that we kill ourselves by inducing distractions in our world. We have alerts on our phones. We check email habitually. So you don’t remember being there, because to some extent you were never really there in the first place. If you set time with your child, don’t check email, and turn off your alerts. That’s the idea. Technology can be helpful for memory, but usually not in the way we use it. You’re not really there if you’re mindlessly taking pictures, because it takes over the experience. When we go on trips, I take candid shots. These are the things that bring you back to moments. If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.”

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The photojournalist Mohammed al-Aloul holding the body of one of his children killed in the war. NYT

Her parents killed and her aunt with her in Hospital, NYT

The photojournalist holding his surviving son, Adam, and comforting a niece. NYT

Ula Faraj fed her daughter Batool, 8, who also suffered severe burns after a strike. NYT

Excerpt from article NYT:

NYT;A toddler, a 12-year-old, a mother, a photojournalist.

Their lives were ripped apart in one of the deadliest and most destructive wars of the 21st century.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, now in its fourth month, is often conveyed in stark numbers and historical comparisons: Some 27,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry. Nearly two million are displaced and more than 60 percent of residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed in a territory smaller than Manhattan.

Yet the lives behind those statistics are often hidden from view. Internet and cellphone services are frequently cut; international reporters cannot enter Gaza except on escorted trips with the Israeli military; and dozens of Palestinian journalists have been killed in a military campaign prompted by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7.

Samar Abu Elouf, a photojournalist for The New York Times, spent weeks following a handful of Palestinians who seemed to have lost everything: a boy with charred limbs, a journalist who lost four of his children in an Israeli strike, an orphaned toddler who may never walk again. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/world/middleeast/gaza-photos-israel-war.html

Excerpt from Washington Post Article;

Washington Post Article On Michigan Arab Americans; Michigan’s Arabs and Muslims push to defeat Biden in critical state
As the war in Gaza leads to the deaths of friends and relatives, anger at Biden’s refusal to call for a cease-fire has turned into political organizing.
During a Friday prayer at the Islamic Center of Detroit last week, Imam and prominent civil rights activist Omar Suleiman lambasted the president’s repeated assertion that Hamas beheaded babies, arguing that it has put Palestinians in danger. He noted that a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Chicago was fatally stabbed in October.
“And then your president wants to come to your community and make sure that you’re still going to vote with him and vote for him in November,” Suleiman said during a religious sermon. “I hope you’ve sent him the right message.”
After the sermon and prayer, Abandon Biden co-chairs Khalid Turaani and Samraa Luqman made an announcement about the effort, urging congregants to show up and vote in a way that ensures Biden does not retain the presidency. Turaani told those gathered they had no right to complain if they did not make their voices heard.
Arab and Muslim voters said they see a rare opportunity to demonstrate their power as a voting bloc and force politicians to more actively court their support. They said that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, many Muslim and Arab Americans have been afraid to speak out, but the war in Gaza — and the calls for a cease-fire outside of their community — has helped change that dynamic. “For decades, we’ve squandered the power that we have here because [Democrats] were stringing us along, saying, ‘Vote for me, we’re not the other guy,’” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Lansing resident and an assistant professor at Michigan State University. “This is such a dangerous time that we’re finally willing to use that card, and [Biden] thinks we’re bluffing.”
Al-Adeimi noted the hundreds of thousands of people who have marched in support of a cease-fire, many of whom are not Arab or Muslim. “That gives us power to say we don’t have to be afraid anymore to express our views and our ideas about this,” she added.
“In America, we can just say, ‘We went against this guy because he went against our people, and we made him lose,’” Turaani said. “And I think that is just the way we market our campaign by saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

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Black congregants’ dismay at President Biden’s posture on the war could imperil his re-election bid.

As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month, a coalition of Black faith leaders is pressuring the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire — a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it.

The effort at persuasion also carries a political warning, detailed in interviews with a dozen Black faith leaders and their allies. Many of their parishioners, these pastors said, are so dismayed by the president’s posture toward the war that their support for his re-election bid could be imperiled.

“Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, the senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, which boasts more than 1,500 members. He was one of the first pastors of more than 200 Black clergy members in Georgia, a key swing state, to sign an open letter calling for a cease-fire. “We are afraid,” Mr. McDonald said. “And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.” The coalition of Black clergy pushing Mr. Biden for a cease-fire is diverse, from conservative-leaning Southern Baptists to more progressive nondenominational congregations in the Midwest and Northeast.

“This is not a fringe issue,” said the Rev. Michael McBride, a founder of Black Church PAC and the lead pastor of the Way church in Berkeley, Calif. “There are many of us who feel that this administration has lost its way on this.”

“Black clergy have seen war, militarism, poverty and racism all connected,” said Barbara Williams-Skinner, co-convener of the National African American Clergy Network, whose members lead roughly 15 million Black churchgoers. She helped coordinate recent meetings between the White House and faith leaders. “But the Israel-Gaza war, unlike Iran and Afghanistan, has evoked the kind of deep-seated angst among Black people that I have not seen since the civil rights movement.”

“We see them as a part of us,” said the Rev. Cynthia Hale, the founder and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

Still, six Black faith leaders who spoke with The New York Times said they or their colleagues had considered rescinding invitations to Democratic politicians hoping to speak during their Sunday services, or withholding public support for Mr. Biden’s re-election until his administration committed to a cease-fire.

“What they are witnessing from the administration in Gaza is a glaring contradiction to what we thought the president and the administration was about,” said the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes, the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas and the president and chief executive of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. His church has more than 12,000 members. “So when you hear a president say the term, ‘redeem the soul of America,’ well, this is a stain, a scar on the soul of America. There’s something about this that becomes hypocritical.”

Democrats, Mr. Bryant observed, have seemed to be “almost on cruise control and feel like: Oh, the Black people will come around. They’ll be forgiving, and they’ll go along with us.” But, he added, as the war drags on, “I really think that the ante is going to really elevate itself.”

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