Editor”s Note: This week La Jicarita will publish some of the statements presented and some prepared—but not delivered publicly—at the Taos Town Council meeting on Tuesday December 12 in support of Representatives Bush/Tlaib’s Congressional House Resolution 786 calling for de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire in Israel and occupied Palestine.
This is the statement Opal McCarthy prepared for the meeting.
Good evening council members,
My name is Opal McCarthy and I live in Taos.
Thank you for your generous listening tonight and for your service. I know that you care deeply for this community and I’ve come here to ask you to extend that care further and call on our state officials to support House Resolution 786 for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and occupied Palestine.
I speak to you about care because of one video that pierced me in recent days, in this time when the most personal and intimate of losses have gotten swallowed into the spectacle, the tidal wave of violence. A young boy who appears to be sleeping, who appears as though his body is bruised from a fall on the playground. Being wrapped, tenderly, into a body bag. The arms available. The tenderness available.
For a decade I worked as a childcare worker and preschool teacher and so have rocked many “not-my-babies” in my arms. I have soothed the falls and tears of many “not-my-children.” And come to know deep in my heart and blood and bones that all children everywhere are entrusted to our care. That even if we find every way to numb the sensation, the violence against the people of Gaza is ALL of our responsibility. Inaction will destroy parts of our humanity we can never get back. Not to mention all the play, poetry, brilliance, and possibility that continues to be ripped from our world each day.
I now work with high school and college students here in Taos and recognize the issues facing our community—the housing crisis, under-resourced schools, and food insecurity—are, like the genocide in Gaza, traceable to colonial violence and white supremacy. I come here with honor for the resilience and interweaving of indigenous cultures including the Red Willow People, Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache, as well as Hispanic/Latinx cultures here in Taos, and the ways these communities have resisted and continue to resist violence and erasure.
In advocating for a ceasefire resolution I’m not asking you to turn away from these local realities, from cultivating this resilience, but to acknowledge that all struggles for liberation are woven together. Standing against genocide as a community is the kind of action that generates clarity and moral force and so liberates us to better work for justice here at home.
I have come here tonight because of care and grief and rage. Care for my friends who have loved ones in both Palestine and Israel. Grief for the murders, in particular of Gaza’s journalists and poets, whose voices have been silenced but whose indelible testimony lives on. And care and grief and rage for the dead children—at least 8,000 children whose laughter and calls no longer ring out. And for the living children in Gaza witnessing these atrocities and for what their lives will be. And for our own future children who will look up at us and ask what we did in this time of genocide. I hope we can say: we stood for justice and our shared humanity. I hope we can say: we broke the intergenerational cycle of trauma and violence. I hope we can say, and be truthful in our saying: we cared.
La Jicarita 
Stop the murder of innocent children. The Israelis are hell bent looking for Revenge and us wondering what drives a Christian nation to provide weapons to the murderous head of state. If Israel does not stop the carnage right now I chose to not vote for either Trump or Biden for president since both support Israel. I have no other means of protest except not voting for either of these individuals when the time comes for election.
Do not be swayed by the tragedy caused by the internecine internecine warfare playing out in Gaza. These two semitic tribes have been at it for at least 4,000 years that has been documented. The past 79 years is not an accident of history. Why do you think Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees about 2000 BC and took his tribes to the present-day Holy land. There is a new weapon of war today: the Internet and the News Media. Of course, it goes without saying that present conditions are deplorable, but Hamas is no different than cancer. They both are the cause of great pain and suffering and merciless death. The rules of ancient and medieval and present warfare are not the gentlemanly rules of War embodied in that high sounding term “The Geneva Convention”. But face it the Jews have been persecuted across the pages of history. They have suffered two major diasporas in the past 4,000 years. And, yet they have not lost their identity. They have turned the law of the ancient Amorites (Basis of the Ten Commandments, Roman Law, Romanization of all European legal systems in the 12th Century after the discovery of the Code of Justinian which is the distillation of 1,000 years of Roman jurisprudence, , European Law which was transported by our shores as colonial law, including Sir William Blackstone’s ( 1723-1780) Commentaries of the Law of England brought to our shores by English Colonists, which became the American law by the passage of the Judiciary Act at the First Congress in 1789). engraved by King Amraphel of Shinar (Genesis 14:1) (Ur was a major city in Shinar) and reduced it to the first five books of the Bible into the Torah of Pentateuch into a religion. The Judaic prayers since time immemorial includes the words “Next year in Israel”. Face it the world is overpopulated to the point that we have changed the climate on planet earth forever. Yes, we are saddened by the horribles of war. Thank your lucky stars that you live in America and applaud and support all that we do to support freedom loving people everywhere. Deplore the present political divergence at home that we have today. Remember where mankind has come from. It was Aristotle (384-322 BC.) who put his finger on man’s proclivity today when he said “Athropon politikion zo-on” (“Man is a political animal.) To this we must add Nietzsche’s admonition “”Moral man but immoral society.” Choose your path and preferences and weigh them carefully. Learn what you can change and what you cannot. Israel is the first and will be the last home of the Jewish People and only Ben Gurion and Netanyahu have the power and the will. It may be the last Armageddon. Sorry to be so blunt. I have lived in Israe. I was the first American into Gaza after the Six Day War in 1967. I have many Israeli and Palestinian friends and colleagues whose lives are under threat every day. This internecine conflict brings me to tears daily. Que sera, sera.
“Senator Bill” is William Turner, a New Mexico water engineer who’s worked in state government and now runs his own business. As an editor I can’t make much sense of this comment that rambles from Ur of the Chaldees 2000 BC to the Amorites to Aristotle and Nietzsche but fails to acknowledge a Palestinian homeland, only that “Israel is the first and will be the last home of the Jewish People and only Ben Gurion and Netanyahu have the power and the will.” As an American Jew, I blame the Zionist movement led by Ben Gurion and Netanyahu for the current death and destruction in occupied Palestine in which the United States is complicit. Not in my name.