A Hypothetical - Purim 5786
Imagine that you belong to a misunderstood minority group living in a vast multicultural empire stretching thousands of miles. A new leader has come to power: a cruel, greedy narcissist with an entourage of toadying bigots, a misogynist who runs through his wives like cheap wine. The leader has boasted that he prioritizes vanity over the nation and rules accordingly. An astonishing percentage of your neighbors see no issue with this, as he ransacks his way through the empire’s treasury for his own profit.
It is awful, but your community has lived through hate before. The ruler parks his silent beauty queen wife in her seat and somehow life goes on for several years. More precarious than before but you’re treading water. And then…a new advisor comes to power. This man makes the ruler’s malice look disorganized and petty, a man with a plan to destroy you, specifically.
The new advisor turns the common propaganda about you into official state violence. We must confront those degenerate criminals, he says. They are ruining our culture, that perverted scum who steal from the taxpayer to pay for their coarse fashions and unholy rituals and false gods. They should be wiped off of the face of the earth, he spits, or at the very least purged from the empire. Also, he knows exactly how to get rid of you, if the ruler will only hand him the keys to to the treasury. The ruler agrees.
Suddenly, the empire has announced the date of your upcoming destruction. It has given your neighbors the license to kill you for the crime of being different. It has asked them to do so, and it will pay for your death too.
You are terrified and disoriented – how can YOU be the leech on the treasury when the ruler brags openly of his stolen riches?! – and your community is in crisis. People are divided on what to do: flee, hide, or fight? Fight with words or with weapons? Plan an escape route or barricade your street? If you flee, where can you go? The other empires don’t like your people either. The assassination attempts on the ruler have all failed. How hopeless everything feels.
The thing is, often the end of the story turns out to be the middle in disguise. Authoritarian regimes are weaker than they seem: a capricious leader can be distracted from civil war, genocidal policies can be blocked by protective ones, heroes can rise up where you least expect them, some of your neighbors may join you in turning mutual aid into mutual defense. The price will be paid in pain and blood and grief, yes. Death will come, but so too will the reckoning. Someday, that evil advisor will be sentenced and hanged on the streets for his crimes. His name will be cursed forever; your suffering, your near-destruction, will never be forgotten.
I hope so, anyway. I’m no prophet – I can’t see the end of our story yet. Right now I can only see the wave hitting us, can pray that I will last enough to survive and defy it. And I hope that you’ll be with me too, joining hands and swimming together.
Wishing all of you a safe, joyous Purim, Tumblr. May we see justice and peace speedily in our days.
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