5SR - January 2, 2024

Hitha on gentle January, the child tax credit, and the state of the Middle East

Author

Hitha Palepu
January 02, 2024

Today’s curator is the founder of #5SmartReads, Hitha Palepu. She’s a consummate multihyphenate - CEO of Rhoshan Pharmaceuticals, author of WE’RE SPEAKING: The Life Lessons of Kamala Harris and How to Pack: Travel Smart for Any Trip, and professional speaker. Hitha is an unabashed fan of Taco Bell, Philadelphia sports teams & F1, romance novels, and is a mediocre crafter. She lives in NYC with her husband and two sons.

There were a lot of news events last year that deserved more attention from us that they originally got.

Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul in Israel’s Supreme Court is one of these, and I’d argue it was the most important one that has impacted Israel, the entire region, and global politics.

If the law stood, the Supreme Court would no longer be able to strike down government decisions and appointments on the basis of “reasonability”, and act as a key check to the Knesset should they overstep.

This law drew widespread protests in Israel during the spring of 2023, most critically from reservists and members of the intelligence and cyber/special ops units in the IDF (many who stopped reporting for duty).

“In the weeks before the law passed, Israeli intelligence services warned Netanyahu four times that the internal crisis around the judicial overhaul weakens Israel's deterrence and encourages its enemies in the region to consider attacking it.

Since the Hamas attack, many in Israel have claimed Netanyahu's judicial overhaul created a domestic crisis that distracted Israel's attention from external threats and led to intelligence and security failure on Oct. 7.”

This ruling could impact the fragile coalition government currently focused on the war, with the departure of Benny Gantz (the former Defense Minister who belongs to the opposition National Unity alliance). An unchecked Netanyahu and Likud party may lose the global support they still have.

Time will tell what happens. But this will impact the war - how so is anyone’s guess.

Gentle January Has Arrived (This Needs Hot Sauce)

Now this is a new year trend I can get behind (along with in/out lists):

“Gentle January is a tradition here, started by Karlee Flores. It seeks to make gentleness the guiding principle of January, a needed contrast to absolutes, punishing resolutions or anything else that feels too aggressive for the start of the year. Gentle January is about taking walks, lighting candles, getting enough sleep, saying yes (and especially saying, no). There’s no prize or points system. You can keep it going as long as you want to but thankfully, January doesn’t last forever.”

Gentle January is perfectly aligned with my focus on wintering these next few months. My home is filled with lots of flameless candles flickering all day, (faux) florals and greens in every vase I own and displayed throughout our house, and using my fancy coupes to sip a Ghia spritz or sparkling water in the evenings. I’ve begun declining events with a “that week is as full as I’d like it to be, so will have to decline with respect.” My only personal goal is to finish this book series this month (the hold it has on me!).

Thank you, Abigail and Karlee, for bringing Gentle January into my life. I can’t think of a more lovely way to ease into the new year.

In staying on top of the news coming out of Israel and Gaza, there’s one search term I enter every day: Iran.

The Islamic Republic has been the most critical player in this war with the most minimal coverage in the daily reporting. But they have been a driving force in Hamas’ October 7th attack and in their rise and consolidation of power in Gaza.

Hamas is not Iran’s only proxy. They also support and embolden the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and other jihadist groups in the region that could spark a larger war in the Middle East, if they continue to be left unchecked.

As always, it’s important to separate extremist governments and terrorist groups from innocent civilians who are sadly caught in the crossfire. No one says it better than Elicia Le Bon, and her words in this Reel say it better than I ever could.

Never have I clicked on a “How I Get It Done” interview faster, because this is the dream. And Tiffany Aliche - better known as The Budgetnista - is so beautifully vulnerable in this piece that I’ve read it a number of times before writing my commentary.

One of the biggest fallacies we’ve come to accept as truth is the concept of “then I can…” We wait for so many things in our lives - trips, breaks, career or personal life changes - for some undefined moment in the future where we assume we can do the things we aspire to do, versus considering how we incorporate them into our lives now.

This particular nugget, which Aliche learned from her therapist, is one I’ll be practicing during my Gentle January:

“She had me do an exercise where I wrote down what the perfect day would look like. It’s the reason why my day is now structured the way it is. I start work at 10 a.m. and I end at 3 p.m. I didn’t plan it out hour by hour because that felt too strict — I like a lot of flexibility within structure. So I wrote down a list of ten to 15 things that a perfect day would include: a walk, a nap, a phone conversation with someone I care about, eating something that tastes good but is also good for me. I review that list every evening. It helps me focus on the good things that did happen, not, “We didn’t hit our income goal for that project.””

I still have some hope that this administration’s Build Back Better plan - specifically in the care economy and elimination of childhood poverty - could find a path through Congress and end up on the president’s desk in a future term.

But until then, I’m heartened to see states take the mantle and pass elements of the plan, such as offering bigger child tax credits (which was one of the single most effective policies to reduce childhood poverty during the pandemic).

14 states have created or expanded child tax credits last year, with many of them made permanent. And in the states that have passed them, they’ve seen the unemployment rate drop and workers not having to juggle 2-3 jobs to help make ends meet.

When hope seems lost at the federal level, look at what’s happening in the states. It’s helped reaffirm my faith that we can and will build a better future.

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