note to kids: because there is no smell-checker for drawings, and visual artists frequently are not the world’s best spellers, the word “pusillanimous”, meaning ‘marked by contemptible timidity, cowardice’, has been misspelled above. Sorry about zat. Always spell that shit with two ‘els’, kids
“The Book” itself, I realize now, turns out to be something completely different than any of those three hypothetical discrete, daunting book projects I laid out the other day.
For one thing, it has to draw all three themes together, for lack of time and because of the maddening specificity of the case it must lay out. Hatred, love, slaughter, mercy and play must be interwoven, weighed out chapter by chapter. In the end you will have to care about it, see the work I am trying to move forward as animated by something very real and pressing, or the book is nothing.
The Book, this The Book of Irv (Book of My Father), pieces together a tricky puzzle, tells each strand of the history to lay out the unifying theory. It is an attempt to explain the unexplainable, make clear things that are hazy at best.
You cannot understand hate until you experience it directly, cannot love until you’ve been loved. Simple idea, though complicated to explain well.
Everything we believe has been sold to us. Everything.
Our world is increasingly based on selling, from everything you can see with your eyes to the deepest beliefs you hold. If I can’t package and sell I’m basically through, and the thing I must sell is, above all, a compelling story of the theory that moves me. It’s got to move you, too.
The Book of Irv is equal parts beauty and horror; the fun and invention of play — the first and deepest mammalian bonding and learning– (and Irv was always playful with children and small animals) and the unspeakable horrors of hatred, the despicable civilities committed in the name of our American law. The devil is, as always, in the details. These historical strands need to be patiently, clearly set out, in order to give the reader the full context for consideration.
Irv as a unifying figure is ideally situated at the center of this explanation. His life began in dire poverty, a Jew born in a New York City tenement who moved with his family to a shit hole in Peekskill. He was an outsider consumed by outrageous injustice. He fought racism in America after returning from a stint in our occupying army in post-war Germany after that modern nation showed how muscularly racism could be flexed, if insanity actually ruled.
My father, for all his frailties, fought a fitful fight for social justice across decades, as he fought his kids, dominated his wife, quipped, raged at the inhumanity of the world. He imparted to his children deep and important values that would influence the course of our lives, to our great detriment. All this should be explained, the strength of this irresistible force that compels us both to work with the children of the fucked.
The principle is straightforward: poverty breeds despair, violence and fear. Poverty stinks worldwide, kills millions and shortens every life it touches. You want to heal the world? Start by working on eliminating poverty. Start with the kids.
In our modern world of unlimited wealth, poverty is a problem that can finally be ameliorated. It won’t be, but that’s another story. I suppose the thing that finally drove Irv to despair was his feeling of hopelessness. Justice does not prevail, except sometimes incrementally, for moments in certain lifetimes, and without a community of comrades it is impossible to continue the good fight.
Irv understood that the moral center of a society that can enslave millions solely to amass great wealth is indistinguishable from a culture that sends its believers scrabbling to cut their neighbors’ throats. The names of the atrocities change over the centuries: impaling, shooting, lynching, drowning, whipping, but the song remains the same.
The Book of Irv must walk the line on this side of rant, unreliable narrator or no. Play must be at the center of it, because play is the only dependable relief from the oppression all around. A tall order, friend, but while I am taking orders, why not?
“So you’re going to talk about this fascinating, all-explaining, theory unifying book you’re supposedly going to write, Dr. Bronner? Or are you going to knuckle down and start writing it?”
I’m going to knuckle down and continue to talk about starting to write it, at the moment. But first to get back to my long-stalled project to make some space in here.
So what is this book?
It is more than one book, actually.
The subject of each has been dictated by the world, each book is needed to demonstrate my point. These are entwined but distinct points that need to be separated out. Let me try to disentangle and prioritize them, make them less abstract, seem less the ravings of a madman.
Book One — to convince the reader of the obvious: how important careful listening, participating and empathetic feedback are in learning. Make the case for why I care about these things so deeply, why others should too.
This is a fraught book, perhaps more than the others. It is a do or die attempt to sell, more than my name or skills, a big idea I’ve already invented the machine to demonstrate and have put into practice dozens of times in classrooms in New York City.
The world has largely moved away from these quaint values of care and appreciation, at least on a mass level. If I’d make a business out of helping kids learn these old-time, hand-made type skills, I have to tell the story in a way that will engage and excite. I need to find the way to inspire a creative and caring sector of a world that values, far above everything else it also espouses, competition and the metrics of who is wining and who sucks.
Until I find the way to tell this story compellingly enough to get it funded, or finally give it up as a bad job and find something else to do, I continue to lose the only competition everyone readily understands. Quicksand, my friends, in which I swim in extreme slow motion.
Book one, the detailed and compelling case for wehearyou.net, (or whatever you want to call it) an interactive workshop where public school kids’ imaginations run the show as they work together to master the interlocking skills needed to produce original stop-motion animation. This is clearly the hardest of the three books to write.
There are two easier ones that come to mind– the easiest would lay out the devilish details, fleshed out by memory and imagination where the world has wiped away all trace, of the destruction of the roots and trunk of my family tree by centuries-deep hatred that finally had the technology to carry out its ultimate goal– killing every last one of the fuckers, everyone like me.
This had happened before, has happened many times since, has tangled roots and a million implications. It has haunted me since I learned of it as a boy, applies over and over as we read the news today. Who gives a shit about this story? Probably a few middle class people here and there. It is a story that will mostly have to wait, it would appear, or show up as a long article in some journal somewhere, along with my research into the unfathomably sad, sick history of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
The third book is the tip of the iceberg, really, the iceberg itself being the preceding book. Or, picture, instead of the iceberg, the fruit of the destroyed tree, if you prefer another cliché. To understand how somebody of great intelligence, humor and charm can act like a cornered rat, lash out viciously at loved ones, you need to picture the exact circumstances that put the rat into his dreaded corner. This would be the most interesting of the three, perhaps, and require the least by way of imagination.
But let me tell you a little story that might be the best way to set the stage for the first book, the story of my most tangible real-world quest.
In a region of Italy ravaged by World War Two, in a village called Reggio Emilia, the first thing the parents built, when peace finally returned, was a school. This school was built in a charred landscape, for children who had known only war. The parents wanted a better world for their children and their first priority was imbuing these poor devils with a love of life, a deep appreciation of the wonder of creativity and every hope for a beautiful future.
To that end they made the school beautiful, had the children plant and tend a garden to make the blackened earth blossom. When the plants in the garden were cared for, green leaves magically sprouted and their fruits ripened in the sun. These delicious ingredients were harvested and lovingly cooked. Kids and their teachers prepared and ate the things the earth produced, the things they had brought forth from the earth.
Colors, flavors, scents, everything that could excite the senses of young kids was brought into play. The childrens’ excitement guided the things they studied. Adults carefully listening to the children nurtured their creativity, childish intellectual curiosity and everything else that makes students into life long learners.
I was told of this program by a friend who’d encountered it in San Francisco. It reminded her, she said, of my program, since it placed adults listening to children’s ideas and discoveries in the forefront of education. She believed it was now a worldwide movement, that there was probably a Reggio Emilia school or two in New York City.
I was delighted to find a couple in New York City. You will not be surprised to learn who the children in these Reggio Emilia schools are– they are children whose parents can afford the $35,000 a year tuition for their kindergartner.
Below is what Reggio Emilia says about itself (see ruptured appendix 1). Here is what a writer for a major magazine has observed– a fairly obvious point about which children need this humanistic approach to education the most.
Which completely ignores the question of how these creatively engaged kids do on the life or death standardized tests designed by testing corporations to measure learning and guides us back into the crippling cul de sac that I must somehow leap out of if I am to proceed, if my long-stalled program is to go forward. In a world of limited resources, whose children will get the rare, difficult, precious thing and whose children will get the predictable, easier, more crippling one?
If you will excuse me now, I have to go bash fucking City Hall in the face and get back to practicing so I can find my way to Carnegie Hall.
More tomorrow, when I must somehow avoid writing anything in this vein, or this vein.
ruptured appendix 1
At the heart of this system is the powerful image of the child. Reggio educators do not see children as empty vessels that require filling with facts. Rather they see children as full of potential, competent and capable of building their own theories.
Children have the right to be … active participants in the organization of their identities, abilities, and autonomy.. . “better citizens of the world”… (this system) also credits children, and each individual child, with an extraordinary wealth of inborn abilities and potential, strength and creativity. Irreversible suffering and impoverishment of the child is caused when this fact is not acknowledged [my emphasis– ed].
“Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” Chinese Proverb
Nice people, while they may well actually suck, are a lot better, as a group, than mean people, a sour-smelling pack of unhappy assholes. Most of us are not strictly nice or mean. We swing both ways, according to circumstance. One good “fuck you” deserves another much of the time and the reciprocating can be done in every flavor from affectionate to sadist.
I was grown in a hothouse of rage. It took me decades to start to understand the obvious: that it’s better not to engage with insane anger. There are things you can do to become less angry yourself, to resist the impulse to engage with a person who is mad. But only if the pain of that pushes you to change the pattern.
One of the most important things is recognizing what is intolerable to you. This will help you stay out of situations where anger starts to look like the best option. Easier said than done, of course, in this often infuriating world, where the aggressive and unscrupulous always seem to have a much bigger say than the meek and kindly, but it is something you can work on. That’s all I’m saying.
My sister once gave me a great compliment, by expressing confusion that I wasn’t like either of our angry parents (although, of course, she noted that I am angry too, just not obviously like either of them).
“If the only option was being like one of them, I’d have bashed my own head in years ago,” I told her. It never occurred to her that there could be a choice beyond one from Column A or one from Column B. Given two bad options, she chose the seemingly strong one to model herself on and has done pretty well struggling against the mean side of what she learned from the Master.
It’s hard work, Brownie, to overcome deeply ingrained reflexes, but something that can be worked on. That’s all I’m saying.
So on the old “what is hateful to you do not unto others” tip we have the woman who told me the other day that it bugs her that the excellent writer she sends her work to usually writes nothing more than “nice!” in reply. “Sometimes not even the exclamation point…” she exclaimed.
“Whell, shoot,” I said, spitting a stream of terbaccer juice past my horse’s ass, “ain’t nothing wrong with ‘nice’, especially from an excellent writer.” I spat again, much more taciturn than I am in real life.
In real life I explained, in tedious detail and dispassionately, that I’d learned, after decades of aggravation, that most people you send creative things to are at a complete loss for how to respond. They think, incorrectly, that writing something like “nice!” is insufficient, perhaps even insulting. They figure they need to write more than that, the ones who even click on the link to see the unsolicited creative work.
And even if they opened the work in question and thought it was cool, not having the thirty second attention span it would actually take to make a comment more detailed than “nice”, they forget about it. Even if they were in that 5% that actually clicked the link and thought the thing was genuinely nice.
If someone has paid for the creative work, people are much more likely to understand why you did it and take thirty seconds to reply. “You’re so talented, glad somebody paid you for it. Good work, brilliant!” they will write of such things. But anything else? Good luck, kid.
Most people have no idea why anyone would spend time doing something creative unless someone was paying them for it. Just the Free World we live in, brothers and sisters.
“Nice is nice,” I told her. “Nice is excellent. Nice is all you need.” I neglected to tell her the excellent point some wise man made on a TED stage about the difference between a teacher who encourages and a teacher who discourages her students being one tiny, elemental thing.
Overworked teacher looks over the student’s work, searches it for completeness, hands the kid back the work without a comment. This is the way of the world and it is basically discouraging — all you get is a grade.
The other overworked teacher reads the work, searches it for completeness, hands it back with a small smile and says ‘nice’. Investment of time and effort– almost none.
But the second student’s work is no longer Sisyphic, as the man on the stage who described this said. That five seconds of connection and appreciation is all it takes to make the other person feel they are not talking to a wall, a fucking firing squad wall that stinks of the shit and piss (while mention the bile, blood and puke?) of everyone the commandant’s ever lined up there, the line of Nazi sharpshooters spattering their fucking guts on it. Can you dig that?
“Nice!”
My sister loved her dog, a pit bull named Tawny. My memory of Tawny is as an ageless lioness, limber, strong and perfectly formed. Sekhnet recalls her as a giant lioness. She was not small. She had boundless nervous energy, if you threw her saliva soaked white sock for her once you’d be obliged to do it a hundred more times.
The wet sock would be on your lap, at your feet, or next to you on the couch, Tawny, head cocked, staring longingly at you, at the sock, at you, making sure you saw her, knew the sock was there. Whatever else might have been going on, she had one concern, her paw up on you now, to focus your attention to the matter: throw, run after that sock and bring it back, drop it for throwing, repeat.
She was beautiful. She was gentle, too. She wouldn’t bite a hamburger, as the phrase goes. She was not cuddly, had too much energy for that, and her coat was not smooth and silky for petting, she wanted to move, to bring back the sock, a ball, whatever.
You could picture her on the savanna, with no fear of any creature, sitting under a tree gnawing a bone. My sister said that is how she died today, at the ripe old pit bull age of more than 13, deaf, unable to use her hind legs any more. Chewing on a bone, peaceful, as her loved ones sat around her and the vet administered the stuff to knock her out. Very gentle and very sad. My sister and her family are all crying tonight.
To those who have never loved a dog or a cat or other animal, I have to say, I am a little bit sorry for you. There is no love greater than that shared with a familiar, loyal animal whose life and warmth connect with yours. We are lucky who have experienced that kind of love with another human.
This love between humans and animals is not a new thing, either. The bonds between human and animal go back to earliest prehistory. The first friendly wolves who ran with humanoids, becoming the first dogs, defending the group, being rewarded with food and affection, a warm place to sleep by the fire. The pack was as familiar to dogs as to humans. Cats and other animals long ago joined into this most excellent arrangement.
398
Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written. We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.
“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.” This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves. History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.
Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves. Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake. Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.
Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment. Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.
We are free and we are in chains. Your government. The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want. Fairness and the world? A grimly humorous idea. Good social media skills in 2015? Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause. Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.
251
I heard the bit on the radio yesterday about the president pardoning a turkey. They do this every year, I’ve heard it many, many times over the years. I heard it before I was a vegetarian (or pescatarian, as a friend corrects) and every year for the seven or so since I stopped eating terrestrial meat. Though the bit annoys me every year, it was not until I heard about Mr. Obama’s scripted bit of mischievous mercy at the White House the day before Thanksgiving that the obvious bludgeoned me.
The two pardoned turkeys, Abe and his understudy Honest, were presumably picked out of a group of condemned birds. The rest of you butterball bitches, over to the slaughterhouse. Have a nice ride, boys! The good news was announced on the radio, coast to coast, Abe and Honest would be spared from having their heads cut off and would live out the rest of their lives on a nature farm. Children could smile at the heartwarming thought of these two lucky birds escaping the hatchet.
Something I’d never thought of before, in my general disgust at this lightheartedly sadistic ritual of symbolic mercy: if these birds got a presidential pardon, what capital crime were they on Death Row for? They’d been condemned at birth, true, but what was their actual crime? Then it hit me. They’d been found guilty of the crime of being meat. Not one had been on trial for so much as a second, outside of Abe and Honest in 2015, they’d been condemned by the millions before they were born.
There was no denying their guilt, even if they could have been given due process of some kind. There’s no defense, even if a genius turkey emerged and somehow made it through Harvard Law School. Guilty as charged: when cooked skillfully we are delicious. We can’t really do anything about it, my eloquence and accomplishments notwithstanding, we, as a species, are way too stupid. Even pigs, who are much smarter than dogs and cats, can do nothing against their executioners. No pig is ever pardoned, or if she is, we don’t hear about it on the radio between ads for great savings on Black Friday.
I’d heard a guy on the radio several years ago talking about how depressed pigs are when they are shoved into tiny pens too small for them to move around in and force fed. They understand quickly that they are in Auschwitz, that any plans they might have had regarding their life are now over. No more wallowing in mud, nuzzling the piglets, no farm kid’s affectionate hand on their bristly side. Just a horrible life in an industrialized killing plant until they are fattened up enough and then a frightening and brutal death, carried out by underpaid workers who have one of the world’s most gruesome jobs.
Nice that Abe and Honest got pardoned. It was the right thing to do, Mr. President. Kids need this kind of good news in a world where kids are slaughtered every minute of every hour. On the other hand, sir, what the fuck? I mean, seriously, what the fuck?
A guy like your predecessor, a likable idiot with some misguided and repugnant views about the world, well, he can get away with it. I suppose I have to let you off the hook, as a matter of basic fairness. I try not to ride a high horse just because my cat looked at me with great sensitivity as I was hearing about how depressed pigs get in their mechanized death camps.
He looked at me like “this surprises you? That humans are brutal, ruthless creatures who obtain their meat in the most despicable and highly profitable way? You look surprised. Pathetic. How about a treat, you guilt-ridden prick?”
Could not eat bacon after that, or cow, or even chicken or Abe or Honest’s relatives. Gives me no right to pontificate about it, I just lost the ability to disconnect the soul of the animal raised for the slaughter from the delicious once-living tissue on my plate.
“Don’t even think about that moral high horse, man. I got two words for you: Adolf Hitler, motherfucker.”
Yeah, I know. The psychopath who set the benchmark for evil was a vegetarian for the last twenty years or so of his hideous life. A flatulent one, if the accounts of people who didn’t like him can be believed. Supposedly did it in penance for the murder or suicide of the niece he was obsessed with, probably tried to have sex with. Too bad his penance wasn’t a bullet through the temple. Only tragedy about his death was that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier.
“OK, don’t change the subject. What about the souls of the sentient sea creatures you have no hesitation to eat? Less sentient than the ones who live on land? Too alien as a life form to relate to, as you can in your sentimental attachment to cute mammals, anthropomorphized birds?”
Well, I’m just happy as hell that Abe and Honest will be living out their full, bird-brained lives at some game farm somewhere. God bless this great nation, whose exceptionalness is more exceptional than the exceptionalness of any other people.
Happy Thanksgiving.
The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction. He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing. He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.
Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music. Any music.”
She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”
A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment. In another wink, the old man was gone.
I had originally thought of “vehemence”, but truculence, which has none of the better associations of vehemence and contains all the violence, cruelty, heartlessness and unyieldingness, conveys it better. Once you see truculence on someone’s face, it cannot be unseen.
I think of my father, whose mother affectionately called him “Sonny”. I picture looking at her through his indescribably colored eyes– hazel, maybe, a diffuse, pale greenish color like the sea in a certain stormy light, but always guarded so it was hard to make out any color at all. Those eyes, as an infant, had seen, too many times to forget, this little red-haired woman rising suddenly from her chair as a savage, whip-brandishing maniac. Not only did she brandish the whip, her face turned merciless as she vehemently brought the whip down on his babyish face, grunting and cursing and acting out an insane and unslakable rage. The pain of the whipping was only half of the pain, the other was that the mother who was supposed to be protecting and nurturing you was, instead, attacking you violently and as only an insane person could.
How could my father ever unsee this when he looked at his mother? He could not.
The role this kind of savagery plays in human life, it seems to me, cannot be overstated. How does a person kill another person (excluding self-defense situations) without having experienced this overwhelming feeling of betrayal, abuse, humiliation? It’s hard to imagine. Having seen the truculence of someone determined to do you harm, it’s easy to imagine why people buy weapons, insist on their right to carry them around, have no moral problems with war, torture, or any policy designed to kill, injure, starve or weaken potentially truculent enemies.
I was reminded of this truly vicious cycle by a dream I had the other night. In the dream a former friend was resolutely determined not to apologize, too niggardly, he admitted, though he also allowed that he owed me an apology. He told me that, considering he was being such an unyielding jerk about it, it would not be wrong of me to punch him in the face. I was unable to do so, each time I tried my fist would stop right before the moment of impact and just touch his jaw lightly.
Seeing me unable to punish him he laughed, mockingly, and began over-acting, the way a weak man goes about demonstrating what he thinks of as superiority. He may have said something unkind about me trying to be fucking Ahimsa-Boy, but whatever he said, that and the satisfied, sadistic expression on his face finally did the trick. I saw that merciless, unrepentant, provocative face and no thought or effort was involved– I punched it. Hard. The moment of impact was satisfying, but the moment after, quite bad.
It wasn’t so much that I had departed from my vow to remain mild, or that I’d given vent to a violent impulse. I saw I’d given him a black eye, and he was glaring at me, afraid and enraged. I pictured a likely outcome– an assault complaint, being fingerprinted at the police station, fees to lawyers, a long bureaucratic hassle for doing something I’d felt completely entitled to, had, in fact, been invited to do. I was angry at myself for letting my anger put me in this vulnerable position.
Think of human history. It is, as often as not, the story of armed bands of men attacking, starving, brutalizing other groups of people, taking their land, their livestock, raping, pillaging. How do people do this? It’s easy, it turns out.
We took a walk to a beautiful nature preserve built on the site of an ancient city and a fortress. The signs told the story eloquently. People lived here, built these walls to live in peace within them. In 490 BCE a violent group came, besieged the place for 36 days, sacked it, killed everyone they didn’t enslave and renamed it after their glorious leader. Next to indications of the year, perhaps a dozen or more times over the centuries, descriptions of the who and how the place had been besieged, sacked, inhabitants killed or enslaved, the name changed: glory to the victors. Romans, Crusaders, Muslim warriors, men of God killing for peace, paving the road to heaven with the bones of their faceless enemies, painting the signposts with their blood.
Hard to understand, any of it, unless we make it personal. Picture the implacable face of someone who has hurt you. Picture it trying to stare you down, make you turn your eyes away. It is a face you will not forget soon and, among all the faces you can imagine, probably the most likely to make you forget your vow to do no harm.
The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit. In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.
There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai. Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories. There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome. No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war. The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody. Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them! Make them pay!
Intellectual understanding only goes so far. I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence. I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up. Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far. Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.
In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus. If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.
There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency. I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.
I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada. It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood. Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners. History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention. I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.
