Kristlenacht

Rebirth of a Realist

Standing in front of the train ticket window, my sea bags on my shoulder and still in uniform with my ribbons for all to see, I was about to buy a ticket home and begin civilian life. A Trainman came by and asked me where I was going. I told him and he waved for me to follow him. I told him I didn’t have a ticket but he put me on the train. Later I had to take a bus from the train station to my home. The driver put his hand over the coin collector and again I rode free.
At home I had my mustering out pay, a ten thousand dollar GI mortgage guarantee, free college tuition with a stipend of $50 a month if I attended and the twenty dollars a week for fifty two weeks to hold me over. I was also assured of health benefits at Veterans hospitals. That was the mid forties. That was my America. Today the Bush administration is cutting the Veterans hospital budgets to the bone and he is making more patients every day.
The treatment of our veterans today is a national disgrace.
The question all aging Americans want answered is how did we let our America get away from us?
We thought our America was really a democracy with a government of by and for the people.
As I write this two candidates for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Connecticut have already spent about ten million each and the campaign still has a few days to run. That is only for the nomination. How much will they spend on the election campaign itself?
Michael Bloomberg spent about $73 million of his own money to win the mayor's seat in New York City. One wonders how much more was contributed. He bought the Mayor’s office.
If you have enough money, say around one hundred million, you can yank a duly elected governor out of office and stick in a muscle-bound two bit actor with absolutely no credentials to govern a large state. Of course the actor had to promise big contributors that the first thing he would do is deregulate the energy industry in California and that is what he did.
They did the same thing with Ronald Reagan who soon became known as the de-regulation President.
As a Realist I can see that this is not only happening in America, but around the world. In Moscow I heard Russians use the old expression of money talks when speaking of politics and the election of the boorish drunk Yeltsin and his successor Putin. American Dollars put them both in Power.
In Tel A Viv I heard the same thing said about the election of Begin, and Sharon. Even when speaking to a Chinese journalist at the Book Expo in New York she told me how upset she was that American dollars are at work in Chinese politics and Chinese media. As I grow older and watch history repeat itself I become very angry.
How did we let this happen? What was it Eugene O’Niel said, There is no tomorrow or today, just yesterday, again and again and now.
On November 10,1939 Nazi storm troopers smashed windows of Jewish storefronts, burned synagogues and created mayhem. A total of 110 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 Jewish businesses were smashed, 26,000 Jews were arrested and physically beaten, and 91 died. Later Goering and his henchmen joked about it and called it Kristallnacht. I remember my mother’s tears.
Last night I had tears of my own as I watched Israeli soldiers (be careful not to call them Jews; my mother would be offended) smashing walls and windows of the homes of terrified Palestinians.
Goering’s excuse was that a 17-year-old boy named Herschel Grynszpan had killed Nazi Third Secretary Ernst Von Rath after the Nazis had destroyed his father’s business. Can any honest person not see a parallel today?
In 1966 I stood in front of Martin Luther King at the base of Enid Dam in Mississippi. An exasperated King looked up at the gun-carrying possemen on top of the dam and then stared at the militants in our group screaming for Black power. King said, "I am not interested in white power, green power or black power. I am only interested in moral power, the most powerful force on earth."
Israel was created on moral power, but as the right wing, blind-faith fanatics gained control the moral power diminished. Now there are anti-Israel demonstrations everywhere. These are not anti-Semites who are demonstrating; many are Jews like me.
The Jewish Federation, who ran ads stating, " we stand with Israel" and those members who belong, must decide if they are standing with the thousands of Jewish anti-war demonstrators in Israel and all over the world who are trying to restore the moral power, or if they are with the Kristallnacht troops who have destroyed it and may therefor destroy the state. Older Jews must also be asking How did we let Israel get away from us.



,.