The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for April 2009

Yom HaShoah- Holocaust Memorial Day

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Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day has begun and I find myself searching for the proper way to express my thoughts about the day.

It is of critical importance, this day. It is a time to reflect upon the horrors of the past so that we do not forget that they can happen again. One of the saddest truths about humanity is that we have ample examples from past and present times of the barbarism that man can exhibit towards other men.

There are a number of issues that surround this day that concern me. As more time passes and more survivors die it becomes easier for the world to forget and for the deniers to try to make their case.

I have often wondered how the deniers can claim that six million did not die and that it was a smaller number of only a few hundred thousand. Either number is incredibly hard to digest, to fathom, to understand. Is there any less horror in saying that only 100,000 lives were intentionally snuffed out.

The answer is no. But it would be wrong to allow the horror of those days to be diminished and wrong to those who perished and those who survived. So it is critical that we confront those who make these claims and show that they are false.

While I was trying to determine what I wanted to include in this post I reviewed what I had done in the past and noticed that I had mentioned Ahmadinejad several times. I don’t mean that in the context of having mentioned him several times in a post, but that I did so in more than one year.

Ahmadinejad was/is a constant in these posts, a Holocaust denier and antisemite who has called for the destruction of Israel. History has taught us that when someone in a position of power makes these sorts of outlandish threats you need to pay attention.

You don’t make label it as being flowery political rhetoric or make any sort of excuses for it. It would be dangerous and foolhardy to ignore these remarks or take them as anything less than a declaration of his intentions.

There are too many examples of what happens when people remain silent. Africa burns and the world ignores its screams. Darfur now, Rwanda earlier.

If we are to take the lesson of never again seriously we need to apply it today and tomorrow. The world has a very short memory of just how brutal we can be to each other. Watch and be dismayed. May we never see such things again.

 

Still Coping with Sick Parents

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flatteryFifteen years ago my uncle died. He was my father’s younger and only brother. He was 49. At the time I knew that was young, but it didn’t strike me as to how very young it was. It is really now that I am about to crest the hill and turn 40 that I see it as being half a life, but is related to this somewhat tangentially.

His death marked a turning point in my relationship and understanding of my father. I see it a bit as a benchmark for when I began to truly recognize that my father was just a man and subject to the same laws and science as all men are.

It was the first time that I really saw him in a light where he wasn’t our shining knight, protector of the family. I stood back and watched as he and my grandfather hugged each other. I watched as a father and son coped with their loss and tried to make sense of it. That was really when I understood that though he was my father, there was much more to him.

And now I find myself in a different sort of position than I did back then. Now I am more than a son and a brother, but a father as well. Now I understand the responsibility of caring for a family and trying to be the rock, even when it feels like the world around you is collapsing.

A short while ago I received a telephone call from my mother and let her fill me in on my father’s latest medical procedure. It was a good call. His health is ok, pooey, pooey, but it is not what you would call stellar. The man has a lot of medical challenges. There are some serious issues there and I find myself worrying about him.

Is it fair to call him a sick parent. I don’t know that I can say that because his health is certainly better than others I know. But, it is a precarious thing as there are any number of things that could send it in the wrong direction.

Most of the time it is not a conscious worry. To the best of our knowledge there is no reason to think that we are going to suddenly lose him, but then again it is not impossible either. Given the things that have happened, that history makes it hard not to be concerned.

I haven’t got any brothers, plenty of brother-in-laws, but no brothers. So if heaven forbid something happens to him I am the last male connection to certain things.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am not trying to buy sorrow early. But it is a bit surreal. I didn’t expect to really worry about my parents until they were somewhere in their eighties or nineties. Maybe that is ridiculous, maybe it is naive, but it was what I expected.

Instead I find myself sandwiched in this place where I worry about them and my family. So here I sit sharing these thoughts with whomever reads them. Here I sit thinking about how many of my friends have already lost a parent, many of them at a very young age. Here I sit with gratitude for everything, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling nervous from time to time.

It is a screwy world, but it is the only we have got so I suppose we’ll just have to make do. In the meantime I’ll share one more thought with you and that is this.

I wonder when my own children will go through this process. I wonder when I’ll cease being superman and become Clark Kent, just another ordinary Joe. I don’t really mind that all, I just hope that it doesn’t happen until they become adults. It would be nice to keep this going for a bit longer.

More on Columbine

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Today is the ten year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy. Since many of my readers were on vacation last week I thought that I’d follow up on that post with another.

As I said in my initial post I have always been bothered by the attempt to explain the actions of the perpetrators of this atrocity as somehow having been tied into bullying.

It is understandable that in the face of tragedy people try to understand why things happen. But I cannot accept an explanation that absolves these two monsters of responsibility for their actions.

More importantly if you read some of the stories that have come out about that day you will see that Klebold and Harris were not the victims of bullying. Still, even if they had been there is no excuse for their actions. The majority of the world does not resort to violence in the face of mistreatment.

“(CNN) — What do you remember about April 20, 1999?

If you recall that two unpopular teenage boys from the Trench Coat Mafia sought revenge against the jocks by shooting up Columbine High School, you’re wrong.

But you’re not alone.

Ten years after the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, there’s still a collective memory of two Goth-obsessed loners, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who went on a shooting rampage and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher, injured 23 others and then turned their guns on themselves.

Journalist and author Dave Cullen was one of the first to take on what he calls the myths of Columbine. He kept at it for a decade, challenging what the media and law enforcement officials reported.

“Kids had never been attacked in this kind of way until Columbine,” he recently told CNN. “I just had to find out what happened to those kids.”

Cullen’s book,”Columbine,” was released this month — just in time for today’s 10th anniversary of the shooting at the Colorado high school. While tackling popular misconceptions, Cullen also gives a riveting account of what happened that day and how the survivors view the event that marked their lives forever.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren’t part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren’t bullied by other students and that they didn’t target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn’t their initial intent, he said. They wanted to bomb their school in an attack they hoped would make them more infamous than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.”

If you think about it, that last sentence makes it all the more frightening.

A Warranty for The Warranty

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In general I am not a huge fan of warranties for the things that I own. I suppose that you can attribute this to a my feeling that the warranties are a marketing trick that is used to try and suck a few more dollars out of me and the fact that most are just inadequate.

Now I am not going to try and make a case for whether either of these thoughts are factually accurate. I’ll leave that job to Consumer Reports and other organizations that are dedicated to protecting consumer rights.

At the moment I am particularly irritated because during the past several months I have spent more time than I care to think about dealing with the customer service departments of various manufacturers.

All of these conversations start out the same way. I provide the details about why something I own is no longer working and my desire to see it fixed/repaired/replaced whatever. They in turn tell me what options exist for solving my problem and in many cases it has been a relatively painless process.

But not every time. On more than one occasion I have found myself wishing that I could figure out a way to crawl through the phone so that I might throttle the customer service representative on the other side.

Those moments find me staring at the phone trying to figure out what the source of the communication breakdown is. Maybe it is me. Maybe aliens have zapped me with some sort of invisible laser beam and I no longer speak English. Maybe what they are hearing is me speaking ancient Mayan and that is why they keep asking me to repeat myself.

On one occasion I kept waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and say that I was being Punk’d. He is lucky that he didn’t because I know that Demi prefers that he not be forced to use a straw to eat.

Let’s talk about cars for a moment. A while back I purchased a car that I had been leasing. During negotiations the dealer tried to confound me with BS about this and that and threw in a warranty as a gesture of good faith. I didn’t really care. We had already agreed upon the price that I wanted so it was nice, but nothing special.

Anyway, I had a small issue with the car recently. This all inclusive warranty was supposed to protect me from virtually anything, except the issue that I had was the one freaking thing not covered by the warranty.

Pretty nifty eh.

And the beat goes on. Last night I discovered that the glass on one of my exterior doors has cracked. It is less than three years old. Needless to say I wasn’t pleased. So I dug into my file and found the paperwork for its purchase and called Home Depot.

Mr. Doorman told me that I shouldn’t worry because it should have a five year warranty on it. Of course, they don’t cover that, the manufacturer does. So he gave their telephone number and told me that I should call them tomorrow morning and he was sure that they’d take care of it.

I asked him what happens if they don’t and he said, “don’t worry about it, I am sure that they will.” Easy for him to say and I hope that he is right. But even if he is, none of them are going to compensate me for the time that I have lost taking care of these things.

I suppose that I really shouldn’t complain, but it is times like this that I miss being twenty something and not having to worry about warranties. Back then when it died, it was dead and that was that. There was somethig kind of nice about knowing a quick garage sale would take care of disposing of all my crap.

On the other hand, there is something nice about having real stuff now too. I just wish that it would last a bit longer, or that I had a concierge who could take care of it all for me.

The Speech Nixon Never Had to Give

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This July marks the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Had tragedy struck President Nixon would have had to address the nation. This article discusses the speech that he would have given. It was entitled In the event of Moon disaster.

If Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had been stranded on the Moon, unable to return to Michael Collins’s orbiting Apollo 11 command ship, Nixon would have called their widows then addressed a horror-struck nation.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace,” he would have told the watching millions.

These brave men know there is no hope for their recovery but they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

“These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

“They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

“In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.”

The President would have added: “In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied but these men were the first and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.”

And in an allusion to Rupert Brooke’s First World War poem The Soldier, his concluding lines were to be: “For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”