A NOTE OF APPRECIATION FOR MS. RACHEL THAT HAS
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH MY SMALL CHILDREN

Thank you to Ms. Rachel, who saw the banality of evil etched between each and every 
protruding bone, a stark ribcage displayed in tragic bas-relief against the withered body of an 
innocent, while baby formula is seized at the blockade and the ghost of Hannah Arendt looks on 
like a soothsayer. 

Thank you to Ms. Rachel, she of YouTube fame, a former theatre kid with more than one 
advanced degree in the art of schooling children to her name, an influencer and a teacher and a 
personality and a mom, a girl boss who carved out a six-million-dollar platform from 
unforgiving silicone with her own bloody fingernails and a trained educator who knows her 
fucking shit. 

Thank you to Ms. Rachel, who could spend her time singing ditties and rolling in profits, who 
could enjoy the cult of celebrity without any responsibility, who could embrace willful ignorance 
as a worldview lest honesty impact her bottom line, who noticed instead only 2,000 hospital beds 
remaining for a population of two million souls, entombed in the husk of Hippocrates’ worst 
nightmare, while children endure amputations without anesthetic and the powers that be wield an 
accusation of antisemitism like a McCarthy-era threat. 

Thank you to Ms. Rachel, with the unshakeable bravery to speak up, with the capacity for 
empathy to feel what mothers in Gaza feel, with the honesty to recognize her quiet and all-
encompassing rage, with the audacity to declare that none of this is ok, with the talent to ensnare 
the world’s attention through the medium of their children and with the temerity to then speak as 
loud as she can, because her legacy will be more than the Ms. Rachel dolls the Neflix 
merchandise shop cannot keep on the shelves.

Thank you to Miss Rachel, who risks losing it all, enduring hatred and vitriol and blatant death 
threats amidst a roiling sea of zeroes and ones, forcing all of TikTok and Instagram to witness the 
shrapnel of genocide and the magnitude of its ripples, amplifying the cries of a captive populace 
charged only with drawing breath in the wrong place at the wrong time and condemning in 
perpetuity the Machiavellian governments that choose to starve babies as a political point.  
Thank you to Ms. Rachel…because when you have a platform, you are morally obligated to use 
it for good. 


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Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of “Through the Lens of Time” (2026), a fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things” (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Pithead Chapel, Nimrod Journal, and elsewhere. Shannon’s passions include Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-racism, the Seven Summits, the Hamilton Soundtrack, and acquiring more cats. Find her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com. Bluesky: @shannonfrostgre; Insta: @zarathustra_speaks