November 16, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-16

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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My family tells me of a quip going around the mental health community here: "From the river to the sea / Everyone's in therapy."

I can believe it. A lot of us have lost people we're close to or know people fighting in the war. Even those who don't are having trouble sleeping or are jumping at shadows. Some of the most solid people I know are afraid to go outside at night. And, of course, I can't imagine the present and future emotional states of the civilians caught in the tragedy across the border.

I see that two companies offering online help for mental health have offered free services to people here. Space of Mind, who call themselves an "AI-powered, anonymous group support platform for trauma," is offering weekly sessions.¹. And BetterHelp is offering “6 months of free therapy to those affected by the war in Israel.” That was somewhat clumsily announced by a tweet, from our country's official account. There was enough doubt that Snopes looked into it, and found that it was legit.²       

A local startup promoting its own therapy for PTSD talked about what they'd encountered since the war started.³

As I may have mentioned before (I'm losing track, and only started including links a few days ago, in footnotes that I still don't quite know how to work), our Health Ministry is recruiting people to address this "mass casualty mental health event."⁴ PTSD specialists will are training them in healing trauma.⁵

In the Psychiatric Times, doctors from this area gave a good rundown as to what was available in terms of hospitalization and other treatments about a month ago.⁶ A doctor from the World Health Organization reported on what he saw visiting health care facilities here.⁷

Some survivors of the massacre at the rave were forcibly hospitalized. (There's a commission within the Justice Ministry that handles that.) The national hotlines had a huge increase in calls. One said that, in the month following the attack, they received fifteen thousand calls. In most other months, they would average about fourteen hundred.⁸

The war is also having its impact on people in the States. In chatting with friends near Cleveland, one was afraid to say anything supporting our country, because she might be attacked by people in her community. Another said that he was similarly afraid to express concern for people across the border, because he might be attacked by his neighbors.

Their local NPR station did a broadcast earlier this week on the traumatic impact that our war is having on people in Northeast Ohio. I hope to listen to it over the weekend.⁹

I flash back to my own attempts at activism in Cleveland when I read about uses of similar social tactics here. The newspaper Davar has an excellent article on what's going on day-to-day at the hostage families' camp-out in the next city over. Even in Google Translate, the piece is at an "I wish I'd written that" level.¹⁰

The people there are succeeding at what we thought we were doing at Occupy. It helps that they know why they're there. We never quite figured that out. By the end, we were buttonholing passersby and browbeating them about credit default swaps. I saw and enjoyed The Big Short, but I still can't remember what credit default swaps were without looking it up.

An article this week claims that the best hummus in the country is at a place named "Badusa" in Netanya.¹¹ I've never been to Netanya, though I know people who live there, and I've passed through it on the train.

I have, however, had Bad USA hummus. It was in supermarkets in the States before I left. Americans will put anything into hummus. Chocolate hummus is a crime against nature.

On a tech note, it turns out the links are kinda working in my newsletter on the Web. If you click on the nondescript grey blobs in the text, they open pop-ups with the links.¹² I had to dig down several layers in the documentation, including routing around dead pages, to find this out. I'm now discussing it with Buttondown's tech support (who are a great team to work with; I'm getting to know them well).

I'm trying to stay awake at work while writing about things other than the war and daily life. Today, after writing a page for a manual on "Running the Software Locally," I wrote a headline on "Running from a Centralized Server," then dozed off. I quickly found myself dreaming of people fleeing a diner with a ten-foot tall waitress in the middle of the room. Her dozen arms, arrayed like those of an exotic goddess, were flinging plates of orders at the customers. It was scary. But the plates of enchiladas that zoomed past my head looked delicious.

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Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.