Now That I'm 62 Years Old

Now I'm 62 years old.   Saying that makes me feel "old".

In late 1973, over 39 years ago, I began working as a claims representative for The Social Security Administration.   One needed to be 62 years old (,along with other requirements,) to collect Social Security Retirement Benefits.    Though I've been retired from my paid employment for over six years, "62" still resonates with me in a way that feels a little uncomfortable, like I'm "aging".

It also feels good to be my age.   I'm learning to relax and enjoy many moments that would have passed me by, ignored in my franticness, in earlier years.   I'm trying to "grow up" in ways that feel significant to me.   I'm becoming more aware of when I feel anxious or otherwise irritated, and learning to stay in my discomfort and not to discount my feelings.   I'm trying to become a better listener and less of a "pontificater".   I'm learning how to be present with my mother and really be with her, despite how difficult it can be at times.   I'm trying to be a better life partner and father to my son.

Thanks!

Van Cliburn's Death - My Father - Many Years Ago

While visiting my mother yesterday, I told her of the death of the noted classical pianist Van Cliburn.   She added to the memories I have of an old story related to my father.

My parents went to see The Louisville Symphony with Van Cliburn as the guest soloist at the Elliott Hall of Music at Purdue University on November 11th, 1964.  (Prior to yesterday I didn't know of the soloist.)

The concert did not begin particularly auspiciously.  Because of my father's weakness, my mother suggested that they leave at the intermission.  Dad asked to stay, indicating that the remaining music would likely be much better.   They both enjoyed the second half of the concert very much.

My father taught his math class the next morning at Purdue University.   Because he was feeling very weak and sick, my mother took him to the hospital.   After various tests came back negative, it was suggested that because he had further tests scheduled for the next day, that he spend the night in the hospital.

Dad died in his sleep very early the next morning, the only night he spent in the hospital during the last six months of his life, at the age of 46.

Magic Sam - Happy Birthday!

Magic Sam - was a most incredible blues singer/guitarist who tragically died of a heart attack at the age of 32 in 1969.   Today would have been his 76th birthday (over 43 years after his untimely death).

http://ia700406.us.archive.org/21/items/MagicSamMandrakes1969OaklandCA/MagicSamMandrakes1969OaklandCA.wma?cnt=0

is an example of his genius.

Bob Koester of Delmark Records thankfully recorded two studio albums of Sam's work that are both masterpieces:  West Side Soul and Black Magic.   Other recordings have been issued since his death mostly of concert recordings.

You can easily Google him  and look on YouTube - for more on him.

Peace - Israel Palestine - An Interesting Perspective

In communicating with others about Israel and the Palestinians I often hear:

1.                 The Arabs/Palestinians can’t be trusted – look what they’ve done, and/or

2.                 I don’t like current Israeli positions but both sides are equally wrong  - e.g. – why are you so: “pro-Palestinian” ? and/or

3.                 Why are you concerned about Palestinians?   There is no real “Palestinian”.  People have taken advantage of things in creating something that isn’t real and/or

4.                 Israel does its best in difficult circumstances.

I find this very frustrating.  

It is obvious to me that some Palestinians and the leadership of neighboring Arab countries have made serious mistakes.   As World War II ended, Palestinians and neighboring Arab leaders should have accepted and supported the idea of  proposed  Jewish and Arab states in Palestine.   Jordan’s King Hussein made a huge mistake in getting involved in the June, 1967 War in support of Egypt.   

I am troubled, though, by the continuing message which says essentially:  “Israel wants to make peace, but there are no Palestinian leaders to negotiate with”.  

I’ve found after reading numerous books and other writings that the reality has been more like:    “Israel wants to make peace as long as its proposed partner has  guaranteed in advance that the terms will be overwhelmingly in Israel’s favor (e.g.  unacceptable for lasting peace with the Palestinians)”.    

Yasir Arafat could have agreed to several Israeli peace proposals.   It is unclear what good this would have accomplished if his leadership would then have almost immediately been overthrown (or if he would have been assassinated) as being a traitor to his cause.

In The Bride and The Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War  (Yale University Press, 2012),  Avi Raz speaks effectively of the aftermath of the 1967 war.   His deeper message clearly is shown at the end of the book:

(p.282)   Though the June 1967 War had catapulted the Palestinians onto center stage, Israel had refused to recognize their emergence as an independent political factor – a nation with a legitimate claim to statehood.  It took more than three decades of occupation and five years of Intifadah  for Israel to concede its momentous mistake.

However, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process failed, and in 2000 a second, much bloodier Intifadah erupted.    A serious study of the peace process and its collapse awaits sufficient historical perspective and access to the relevant official records.  But it is already clear that the failure is largely rooted in the pattern set by the Israeli government during the early days of the occupation.  While Washington insisted that Israel should return to the pre-June 1967 War borders, the Israeli aim was – in the explicit words of Premier Levi Eshkol – to retain the “maximum of territory.”  This line was pursued by subsequent governments.  It was underpinned by Jewish settlement in the occupied territories which the Eshkol government had instigated early on.   The settlement construction in the West Bank never stopped; in fact it increased sharply after the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had got under way.  Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister between 2006 and 2009, stated in 1988  that the “policy of expanding Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria…was designed to block any possibility of pressure for Israel to withdraw from these areas.”  It took Olmert another two decades of intensive building of settlements to acknowledge the inevitable territorial price the Israelis must pay for peace.

On 6 June 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, Abba Eban said at the UN Security Council that “men and nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”  Eban reiterated the same aphorism in articles and speeches in later years, always referring (p.283) to the Arabs.  He and his government colleagues never thought of themselves in this context.  Only when Eban was no longer a member of the cabinet did he admit privately that “the [Israeli] government sometimes makes the right decisions but not before trying every other possibility.”  Indeed, throughout the four and a half decades that followed the June 1967 War, it has been Israel that has time and again proved the validity of Eban’s maxim.

The policy towards the Gaza Strip is yet another glaring example of a fatal mistake that took Israel nearly forty years to correct.  As we have seen, the Eshkol government decided to retain Gaza, and subsequent governments built civilian settlements there.  This blunder was not corrected until the premiership of Ariel Sharon, one of the prime movers of the Israeli fait accompli approach and the godfather of the settlement project.  In the summer of 2005 Sharon finally yielded to the intolerable cost – in blood, money, and international reputation – of keeping this tiny, poor, and densely populated province of maintaining the security of a few thousand Jewish settlers who lived lavishly in twenty-two settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians.

To be sure, Sharon had no intention of giving up “Judea and Samaria.”  In fact, the so-called Disengagement from the Gaza Strip was designed to freeze the political process, thereby preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state and maintaining the geopolitical status quo in the West Bank.  Yet an increasing number of the more realistic Israelis have recognized that the conflict with the Palestinians  cannot be resolved unless Israel accepts what the whole world has been saying from day one of the occupation: Israel must return to the pre-Six Day War lines with minor and reciprocal modifications.     In 2002 the Arabs offered what Israel had called for from its foundation in 1948: an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, recognition of Israel, peace agreements, and normal relations – in exchange for withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967, a just solution to the refugee problem in accordance with UN Resolution 194, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with Arab Jerusalem as its capital.  This far-reaching peace initiative was crafted by Saudi Arabia, adopted by the twenty-two member Arab League at its summit in Beirut in March 2002, and reaffirmed at the Riyadh Summit of the Arab heads of state in March 2007.  In Israel none  of the governments (p.284) since 2002 – Sharon’s, Olmert’s, or Netanyahu’s – has ever discussed the Arab peace offer.

Despite high-sounding proclamations about the desire to make peace with the Arabs, whenever a prospect of reconciliation was on the table, Israel has been immobilized by fear of what it would entail.  ‘Aziz Shehadeh, who led the Palestinian entity movement, wrote in 1969: “Immediately after June 1967 a golden opportunity was offered to the Israel Government to achieve a peaceful settlement…. The Israeli  leaders wavered and did not grasp the importance of this offer.”  Shehadeh concluded: “The seed of peace that was planted immediately after the Six Day War has thus been trampled upon by forces both within and without the country.”  But Israeli leaders kept maintaining that no Arabs were willing to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Israel.   As late as 1975 Yisrael Galili, who served in the cabinet from 1963, went so far as to claim that “there was not a single occasion when the government of Israel refused to respond to an Arab initiative.”  However, a number of prominent contemporary officials and observers – including a cabinet minister and an army general – argued retrospectively that in the aftermath of the 1967 War, Israel missed an opportunity for a settlement with both Jordan and the Palestinians, particularly the latter.

Indeed, it was not the Arabs who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity – as Eban’s often cited quip suggests – but the Israelis, who persistently and deliberately squandered every opportunity for a settlement.    They changed tack only when doing so was inescapable.    King Hussein’s pithy  summary was that “Israel can have either peace or territory, but not both.”  Abba Eban, who quotes this observation in his 1993 memoirs, goes on to say that it was “not far from being a universal international consensus.”  But it was Eban who  quarter of a century before had carried out Israel’s foreign policy of takhsisanut, or deception, designed to serve as a political cover-up for the effort to gain time while staying put in the occupied lands and creating a fait accompli.

This study has focused on Israel’s policy and practice in the aftermath of the June 1967 War, and some readers might feel that its conclusions, which are especially critical of Israel, are not even-handed.  But it should be borne in mind that the parties to the conflict were unequal.  There were the victorious occupiers on the one hand and the vanquished and the occupied on the other, and the former held all (p.285) the cards.   They were aware of international resentment but did not care.  A popular song which came out in 1969 appropriately captured the Israeli collective spirit:

The whole world is against us

Never mind, we’ll overcome

. . . . . . . .

And everybody who’s against us

Let him go to hell

One of the Most Incredible Books I've Ever Read

Paul Tough concluded his brilliant book: How Children Succeed talking about the importance of helping the 10% of American children whose household income (for a family of four) is below $11,000/year.  He noted how these children often have multiple problems in school related to various traumas they experience in their lives.

p.193 – “No one has round a reliable way to help deeply disadvantaged children, in fact.  Instead, what we have created is a disjointed, ad hoc system of governmental agencies and programs which follow them haphazardly through their childhood and adolescence.” …..  

“But we could design an entirely different system for children who are dealing with deep and pervasive adversity at home.  It might start at a comprehensive childhood wellness center, like the one that Nadine Burke Harris is working to construct in Bayview-Hunters Point, with trauma focused care and social-service support woven into every medical visit.  It might continue with parenting interventions that increase the chance of secure attachment, like Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up, or ABC, the program developed at the (p.194) University of Delaware.  In prekindergarten, it might involve a program like Tools of the Mind that promotes executive-function skills and self-regulation in young children.  We’d want to make sure the students were in good schools, of course, not ones that track them into remedial classes but ones that challenge them to do high-level work.  And whatever academic help they were getting in the classroom would need to be supplemented by social and psychological and character-building interventions outside the classroom, like the ones Elizabeth Dozier has brought to Fenger or the ones that a group called Turnaround for Children provides in several low-income schools in New York City and Washington, D.C.  In high school, these students would benefit from some combination of what both One-Goal and KIPP Through College provide – a program that directs them toward higher education and tries to prepare them for college not only academically but also emotionally and psychologically.

A coordinated system like that, targeted at the 10 to 15 percent students at the highest risk of failure, would be expensive, there’s no doubt.  But it would almost certainly be cheaper than the ad hoc system we have in place now.  It would save not only lives but money, and not just in the long run, but right away.”

(Note: the individuals and programs noted above were all explained in detail earlier in the book.)

Tough talks about the critical importance of children bonding with at least one parent by age three.   He believes that measures of aptitude such as IQ testing fail to address the highly important issues of children learning to deal with failures in life, build curiosity, have “grit” and what he labels “character” so that they will believe in themselves and strive to learn and grow.  He talks of the importance of character skills such as self-control, optimism, perseverance and conscientiousness. While he focuses upon the needs for helping children throughout their upbringing, he also talks of successful efforts that can help some teenagers turn important parts of their lives around, despite earlier major life difficulties.

This book cites numerous research studies in various areas particularly focusing upon neuroscience.    

The Difference Between Motivation and Volition

From: "How Children Succeed" - by Paul Tough - an Incredible Book!

(reference is to a chess player seeking to improve his chess ranking)  p.130 - "Rowson's comments seemed to speak to Prilleltensky's plight - and they also echoed Angela Duckworth's' theory on the crucial difference between motivation and volition.  'When it comes to ambition,' Rowson wrote, 'it is crucial to distinguish between '''wanting''' something and '''choosing''' it.'  Decide that you want to become world champion, (p.131) Rowson explained, and you will inevitably fail to put in the necessary hard work.   You will not only not become world champion but also have the unpleasant experience of falling short of a desired goal, with all the attendant disappointment and regret.  If, however, you choose to become world champion (as Kasparov did at a young age), then you will 'reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination.  Every action says, '''this is who I am. ''' "

Journey of an Israeli in Palestine

(p.121) "We were at a dialogue at Majeed's house.  Majeed was explaining a point when he said, "The Palestinians had barely 10,000 fighters, but the Haganah and the other Jewish militias combined were triple that number if not more.  So when the Jews attacked, the Palestinians never had a chance."  That was the most outrageous version of history I had ever heard: that the fighting forces of the Jewish militias in1948 were superior to the Arabs' and that the Jews attacked.

My father and all of his friends had fought in that war.  I'd heard first-hand stories about the sieges, the fierce attacks, and the touch-and-go battles where our forces were outnumbered and won only because they had the wits and the moral high ground.....

I was fully convinced that with my background I knew more than anyone else about this aspect of the conflict and that what Majeed was saying made no sense.  In a way it dishonored the story of the creation of the Jewish state, a story in which the few defeating the many is a crucial element.  If what he said was true, then it de-glorified much of the story.

That could easily have been my breaking point.  I could not explain why Majeed would be perpetuating this insane notion that Israel was not a "David" defending itself against the Arab "Goliath," but I wasn't ready to dismiss him as a liar.

I could not dismiss him because by now trust had been built between us.  This trust allowed me to let go of the safe comfort of "knowing"  so that I could explore the unknown territory of the "other".  This was very difficult, but I felt that even if what he said was not the truth that I knew, I would have to explore it.

I didn't say anything right away because I didn't want to start arguing.  Instead, when I got home that night, I called my brother Yoav, who taught political science at Tel Aviv University.

"Yes, what your friend said has merit.  If you want to know more, read a few books by Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Avi Shlaim."  These three "New Israeli (p.122) Historians" had all recently rewritten the history of the establishment of Israel.  I did exactly as Yoav advised.  Over the following weeks and months I read all the books by these authors.  And the more I read, the more I wanted to know.  They had corroborated what Palestinians had been saying for decades.  In fact, the corroborated what most of the world had known for years: that Israel was created after Jewish militias destroyed Palestine and forcibly exiled its people.  This was a rude awakening for me."

From: "The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine" by Miko Peled, Just World Books, 2012

p.102 - "Then, in the fall of 1997, an unthinkable disaster befell our family.  Two young Palestinians blew themselves up on Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem and killed my niece."

p.31 - "As an adult, my father made his mark on Israeli history.  First as a young officer, who distinguished himself in battle as a fearless, committed, and levelheaded leader of men during Israel's War of Independence.  Then as a career officer who dedicated himself to building a well-organized fighting force for the young state of Israel.  But probably most notably as one of the generals of the Six Day War of 1967, when the Israeli army captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula."