Survival Isn’t Bloodlust, It’s What Israel Has to Do While Ricky Steals Your Mug

There is always a Ricky.

There is always a Ricky. There are dozens. Rickys are the office’s little weather systems — low-pressure fronts of bad breath and bad judgment that drift in from the copier and rain anxiety on your lunch.

Ricky works in an office that looks like an IKEA catalog vomited into a bank. He heats tuna in a chipped mug, frothing within the microwave. He steals pens. He has a mouth like a cave where bad old jokes go to die. He is every guy you secretly hate at 9 am on a Monday.

Ricky gleefully recounts news of another shooting, an overnight event the anchors are calling a “Tragedy,”. Some have suggested this is yet another “Isolated incident”. “A symptom,” they say — and they bring on experts who arrive with carefully stapled lists of causes and no cures. Meanwhile, the world beyond the frosted glass has a much older Ricardo with a crowbar and a different name: Hamas. They are the people who taught Ricky how to make a headline into an industry — how to turn explosives into a press release, how to turn children into bargaining chips and rampage into strategy.

This is the thing: when a group takes murder as policy, the rest of us get very good at paperwork and very bad at mercy. We tidy our rage into memos. We tidy our grief into positions. We buy insurance policies…