I'll Be With You Shortly

In the meantime . . .

Photo by Jess Loiterton on Pexels

I’ve been away for a few weeks. A trip to Florida – so welcome – left me with Covid – so unwelcome. Paxlovid is swiftly  returning me to health, and my appreciation for medical science deepens.

Although I try to post bi-weekly, I have to be flexible. Because of Florida and Covid, my next substantive post is still more than a week in the future. In the meantime, some wandering thoughts, prompted by recent events, global and personal, which relate to some earlier posts.

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Age Is More Than a Number 

Each stage in life has its own rewards, its own hardships, its own truths. For the old, one of those truths is the inevitability of death. Sometimes we deal with that wryly. Philip Roth once said that he belonged to a Funeral of the Month club. Grace, of the sitcom Grace and Frankie, called her landline the “death announcement” line. 

Ordinarily each death is a loss, and we grieve. The hardest to accept are those of people younger than we are. I learned last fall that a colleague -- I’d lost touch with him -- had died in his early 70s. Another, I learned soon after, had died in her 60s. As jolting as those were, the deepest grief was watching the painful last years of a close friend. She died this month at the age of 60.

The Panic over Biden’s Age

I still think Biden’s age is one, but only one, factor that matters. I’m still impatient with what I take to be an overemphasis on it. But several news reports got me thinking.

One was the report on Biden’s handling of classified documents. The Special Counsel declined to prosecute, writing that Biden presents “as an elderly man with a poor memory,” and no jury would convict him.

Whether he should have included that comment is up for debate. Later I read some of the interview’s transcript.  Biden’s forgetting how and where he misplaced documents seemed to me pretty ordinary. Anyone who has mislaid anything would answer similarly; not remembering when you last saw something is almost a definition of the problem.

But then Jon Stewart took up the problem. He showed clips of the President in which Biden came across as frail, even as doddering. Stewart is the best kind of comedian, a truth-teller who skewers everyone, including his own people. A court jester, if you will. I became worried.

I remembered what I had recognized recently (from an early season of the Netflix series “The Crown”). Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Second World War was powered by his eloquence, which remains moving to this day. Leaders have to inspire followers. As John Boehner puts it, a leader without followers is just a man taking a walk. I worried further about Biden

And then. In his State of the Union address, Biden spoke with vigor and wit, responding swiftly to audience dissenters, bargaining with them on the spot. This is not a man walking alone. Jon Stewart, truth-teller, mocked himself for his earlier doubts.

Gaza

The horror continues.

Israeli girls, singing, blocked trucks bringing food and water to Gaza.  

Gazans began to speak out against Hamas: for gambling with Palestinian lives, for losing, for hiding in their tunnels while civilians died en masse.

Israel blocked trucks carrying aid because they contained birthing kits, which include tiny scalpels for cutting umbilical cords.

American drops food aid into the Strip as Israel drops American bombs.

The past is prologue.

My book group has been reading Isaac Babel’s short stories. One, semi-autobiographical, describes a ten year old boy surviving a pogrom, one of a wave in pre-revolutionary Russia. Antisemitic violence presaging the Holocaust.

But the past also reminds us that a better world is possible. 

A British historian recently traced an astrolabe to its 11^th century origins in Andalusian Spain. At that time, under Moorish rule, Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived together in relative harmony. Science and culture blossomed. Astrolabes (devices for charting the sun, moon, and stars) were used by Muslims to find the times for prayer, and for other purposes by Jews and Christians.

Babies

In most of the developed world birth rates are steadily falling. Our own is well below replacement rate. Africa, still a continent of the young, is the exception, but one that is likely to change as modernity takes hold. In the short run, the low birth rates are good. The planet needs fewer people. In the long run, a steady decline is ruinous. (Consider Japan today.)

Part of the solution for the U.S. is increased immigration, through a much-enlarged legal system. The mess at the border needs to be cleaned up, and for a while there was hope it would be. A carefully worked out, imperfect, but promising bipartisan bill was rejected by the Republicans who had supported it, once Donald Trump trashed it.

Another approach would be to make life easier for families with children. Other countries whose birth rates have been low for longer are experimenting with how to support parents. We can learn from what they’ve tried. However much we disagree about “family values,” we can agree to value families. Culturally and economically right now, we don’t. 

Next

I’ve just read that California wants to make its people happier. I’ve been wondering about whether the American pursuit of happiness makes sense; in a week or two, I’ll share some thoughts about that.