How Can I Make This About Palestine?

by Patricia Elton, Thomas Alva Edison Elementary School Annual Bake Sale Chair

Effington, January 18 – This February will mark my second time in a row coordinating our institution’s biggest fundraiser of the year, but the first time I will bring to bear the sensibilities that I have finally internalized after a thorough series of diversity training sessions: I must find ways to center the experiences of the disempowered and the unprivileged even in the otherwise-mundane area of everyday life, and as such, I must now determine the best methods to center the Palestinian struggle as the whole town comes together to support extracurricular activities, after-school programs, and new classroom equipment. Palestine, after all, is the apotheosis of all progressive struggles.

Everyone looks forward to this event. My first four years working here, when I merely served on the Bake Sale Committee, I witnessed some of the overflowing kindness, generosity, and civic spirit that has made the people of Effington synonymous with everything that should make America proud – but of course I now know that nothing should make America proud, but that’s a lot to tell people all at once. Baby steps.

Now it’s my turn to step up. Last year I followed the same formula that has proved successful for more than two decades, and we met almost our entire fundraising goal in the space of two days. But this year, with my new awareness of what our priorities as a community and a society must be, I plan to depart from precedent: the flyers and posters will no longer feature red, white and blue, but green white, red, and black, the colors of the Palestinian flag; guidelines will include instructions to make cakes in the shape of historic Palestine and to accompany each cake with a short explanation of the Nakba, Jewish supremacy, and settler-colonialism; and a prize awaits whoever sells the most cakes – a certificate proclaiming that a sum has been donated in their honor to a Palestinian human rights organization run at least mostly by people not on any terrorism-funding blacklists.

I can’t wait! This year we’re finally going to do things right, after so many years of ignoring or dismissing the greatest injustice and human rights cause in human history – one that our community has unconscionably deemed irrelevant to its own values. Well, no longer! I’m sure I can get all of Effington behind this noble initiative, with the tried-and-true tactic of calling anyone who refuses enthusiastic participation a racist.

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