My family had our seder yesterday, and the more I contemplated the meaning of the Exodus, the escape of the Jewish slaves from Egypt, the more I felt the comparison with Oakland, and how much we need to escape from the slavery of the wokes.
Just as Pharaoh held the Jews in captivity, so the so-called progressives on the City Council, in the District Attorney’s office, and in the Mayor’s office hold the rest of us. They control our lives, telling us whom we can rent our homes to, how much police protection we’re entitled to, and when it comes to racial issues, they’ve practically established a pattern of apartheid in Oakland, in which White people are discriminated against as “supremacists” and are gradually being forced to live elsewhere. They’ve decided that crime is good for their cause, and so they do little or nothing to stop it. They’ve decided that our tax dollars need to be siphoned off to sketchy “violence prevention” schemes that do nothing but enrich their cronies. They burden us with unfair taxes in order to raise the money needed to re-elect them and support their ideology. They embarrass us in front of the entire nation, which rightly sees Oakland as a failed experiment in socialism and a place too dangerous for civilized people to live.
Obviously we need to escape from this slavery! But nothing we’ve done so far has been enough to persuade the wokes to let our people go.
One of the features of the seder is the singing of an ancient Hebrew song that, on the surface, appears silly. It’s called “Dayenu,” which means “It would have been enough.” The song is about being grateful to God for all the gifts she has bestowed upon the Jewish people. In example, “If She had [only] brought us out of Egypt, it would have been enough for us to love her.” And “If She had [only] executed justice upon the Egyptians, it would have been enough for us to love her.” And so on, for fifteen verses. I used to love that little ditty as a kid, even though I didn’t quite understand its central meaning.
Nowadays in Oakland, I think of the Dayenu in more contemporary terms. It would be enough if we can recall Sheng Thao and Pamela Price. It would be enough if we could recall Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan, Dan Kalb and Nikki Bas. It would be enough if we can overthrow the whole rotten woke system that keeps Oakland downtrodden and dangerous. It would be enough to restore Oakland to normalcy. Dayenu!
But such is not the case, at least anytime soon. So, like the ancient Jewish people, we must continue our struggle against the modern-day Pharoah, against the slavery wokeism keeps us in, against the ignorance and stupidity of people who see everything in terms of a race war. One of these days we will be free, and then we, and our children and our children’s children, can sing, in the words of the old Hebrew spiritual, “Dayenu!”
Steve Heimoff