Hell yeah, I want a COVID passport! But, like everything right now, many people’s brains have been switched off and they’re doing most of their deep thinking with their other end.

The Kentucky Libertarians say COVID passports are exactly like the yellow Stars of David that Jews had to wear during the Holocaust.

In Britain, after recklessly avoiding social distancing and masks in order to obtain herd immunity — and in the process ending up with one of the worst COVID mortality rates in the world — many Britons are now opposed to COVID passports as “divisive” or at odds with “British instinct.”

Obviously not the survival instinct. But mainly it’s sour grapes. if they don’t want a vaccination then you can’t have one.

Next in the parade of fools is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society,” DeSantis said.

Who ever said Florida had a normal society? Too bad DeSantis doesn’t feel the same way about formerly incarcerated people having to show proof they’ve paid off court debts in order to vote.

QAnon and Stop the Steal have also jumped on COVID passports as a World Health Organization (WHO) globalist plot. Representative Without Committees Marjorie Taylor Green says a COVID passport should be called “Biden’s Mark of the Beast” and she has promised not to comply.

One Forbes magazine writer fears that COVID passports will lead to global inequality if worker mobility is restricted. Apparently nobody told him that there are already blanket restrictions on who can travel between countries.

A COVID passport simply shows that you’ve had your shots and that you pose a low risk to others. This is why the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is creating a COVID passport for air travel. It’s really about this simple: if you haven’t had a shot I don’t want to sit next to you on a long flight right now.

Sure, COVID has turned the world upside down. But let’s not imagine that proof of vaccination represents creeping authoritarianism in some new dystopia. We’ve had vaccination passports for years. You can’t get into India without a full set of vaccinations. And speaking of India — in 1958, after spending several years there as a child, the US wouldn’t let me return without proof I’d had a Smallpox vaccination. You can see my “Smallpox passport” in the image below.

All politics is personal. It’s impossible to look away from the mirror of history you’ve been part of. And it’s impossible not to have emotions about places that have been significant parts of your life. Our complicated feelings for the United States go without saying. For migrants and visitors to other lands, the same is true. They become part of us.

I sometimes start to say that I “grew up in” — but correct myself because I came into sentience in India in the 1950’s, a boy only a couple of years younger than India itself. My sister and I began our formal education at the Beldhi Church School in Jamshedpur, in the state of Jharkhand (Bihar when we lived there). Every day we’d pass through school gates, past the poor and the sick, to a little sandstone building where we received instruction from Indian Baptist nuns. Today the sandstone building is still there — it’s an administration building — but the school is now a secondary school with an impressive campus.

Our family was in India for several years because my father, an engineer, had been conscripted into an army of international contractors to build, at the time, the largest steel mill in Asia for Tisco, the steel division of the Tata family. The company’s (and town’s) founder, Jamsetji Tata, had taken to heart Thomas Carlyle’s quip that “the nation which gains control of iron soon acquires the control of gold.” Besides learning English and maths, we practiced writing our Sanskrit letters on lined paper. My classmates were all Americans, Brits, Germans, Russians, Icelanders, and Anglo-Indians. I grew up — rather, came into sentience — reading the wonderful Times of India comics section and devouring British children’s books left over from the last days of colonial rule.

My parents were in their late twenties and early thirties — both from small-town America that even today cares very little about the rest of the world. The one thing this mismatched couple had in common was the love they both had for India. We often drove into the countryside where my father’s Leica and my mother’s Roloflex recorded thousands of scenes of a country coming into its own after centuries of colonialism. We paid tolls to cross one-laned roads blocked by elephants. We sat on our roof and watched Divali lights twinkling below stars arrayed differently from those in the northern hemisphere.

My father’s hobby, if you can call it that, was to impersonate a Western journalist and crash Indian Congress Party events. In this way he met Jawaharlal Nehru, “covered” a reception for the Panchen Lama, and had a drink with Marshal Tito. My mother, enamored with India’s diversity, visited temples of every sort — Hindu, Buddhist, Jain — and snapped photos of Ashura parades. After requiring major surgery and a long convalescence, she bicycled from Shimla back to Jamshedpur on her own, recording people all along the route. When my son made a trip of his own to India a few years ago, we calculated that my mother’s trip had been just short of a thousand miles.

These are all recollections from a child’s charmed memories of a lost world — or, more likely, a world that never really existed, a white boy’s simplistic view of a complicated country where class, caste, and colonialism played out just as they have here in the United States. And yet, for all the gauze and distortion of these memories, my connection to India includes the beginnings of an understanding of a larger world beyond my own. My continuing love for India is enmeshed in all this, and that affection is as real as the country’s complicated history.

Scarcely a generation had passed since Jawaharlal Nehru served as the country’s first Prime Minister when the same sort of religious nationalism that killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 led to India’s war with Pakistan in 1971. In 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter) declared a two-year state of emergency which jailed political opponents, censored the press, and shut down opposition groups (future Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote a book about it). It surprised no one when Gandhi was assassinated by her own bodyguard in 1984 after conducting a raid on the [Sikh] Golden Temple in Amritsar in the Punjab.

In 1998 India became a nuclear power. The Tatas, the Parsi family that brought our family to India, continued to amass vast wealth and political power, spinning off ventures in Information Technology, automobiles, chemicals, beverages, ceramics, fashion, pharmaceuticals, energy, and investment. At some point after 2000, Bengaluru overtook Silicon Valley as the world’s leading Information Technology hub. But the caste system, poverty, xenophobia, violence against women, illiteracy, and lack of sanitation still exist alongside India’s new malls, gated industrial parks, and dot-com millionaires. Income inequality has thrived in India’s neoliberal “democracy.”

And neoliberalism breeds autocrats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi came of age politically in the Seventies during Indira Gandhi’s “emergencies.” Modi got his political start in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), originally an anti-colonial group predating India’s founding but now a right-wing nationalist paramilitary organization. It was a former member of the RSS who killed Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi in 1948 and it was RSS members who destroyed the 16th Century Babri Masjid in 1992.

Like Sinn Fein’s relationship to the IRA, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the political wing of a nationalist movement that includes a paramilitary wing, the RSS. As Prime Minister, Modi has filled many government posts with RSS members and has set about implementing RSS’s racist and nationalist prescriptions.

As a freshly-appointed Chief Minister of the state of Gujurat, Modi encouraged anti-Muslim riots in 2002 and promoted unvarnished Hindu nationalism — Hindutva. In 2014, when the BJP took control of India’s “lower” house, the Lok Sabha, for the first time, Modi became Prime Minister and he firmly entrenched Hindutva in his party’s policies.

On May 23rd, 2019, running even more overtly as a nationalist, using his old Twitter handle Chowkidar — watchman — Modi was re-elected for another five-year term amid widespread voter disenfranchisement of Muslim and Dalit (Untouchable) voters. Still, India has 900 million eligible voters and 67% turned out to give Modi 543 seats in the Lok Sabha (Congress), where only 272 seats are necessary for a majority.

During the last election BJP president Amit Shah promised to rid the country of “infiltrators” — meaning Muslims by specifically exempting every other group from this threat. Like the American Republican Party, the BJP has become safe haven for violent extremism. One BJP candidate, Pragya Thakur, stands accused of planning the bombing of a mosque in 2008.

In 2017, after Rahul Gandhi filed his candidacy papers for the 2019 elections, Modi took a swipe at Gandhi’s “anointment” by dubbing him “Aurangzeb Raj,” a Mughal king appointed by his father. Like Donald Trump’s digs at Hillary Clinton’s virtual coronation, there was a certain truth to the jibe.

Rahul Gandhi, who is also the current head of the Indian National Congress, is the son of Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; grandson of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; great-grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister; and great-great grandson of Motilal Nehru, the founder of the Indian National Congress. Mirroring Trump’s “birther” tactics, The BJP circulated the rumor that Rahul Gandhi was actually an Italian citizen. But there is no question that, throughout India’s entire history, the Congress Party has been the family business (or visa versa).

India is sometimes described as the “largest democracy in the world.” Yet Congress Party hegemony and corruption, and now the country’s extreme turn to the right, blatant Islamophobia, and violence against non-Hindu minorities all raise the question of what sort of democracy India really is. Accompanying Modi’s far-right turn is the move to turn India into an Orwellian surveillance state. Each of India’s billion citizens is now required to participate in a system that allows the government to track them by National ID.

I still remember India eight years after its Independence. Of course, those memories are colored by nostalgia and the ignorance of the child who preserved them. But what many Indians remember of that brief moment in history was an optimistic nation trying to turn centuries of colonialism into a democracy for all of its many people.

But those days are long gone. It’s Modi’s India now.

In some not-so-distant dystopia Americans will educate their children like Elon Musk, abandoning the language arts to make more time for robotic flamethrowers. Or they will live in a state like West Virginia, where the Department of Education was just abolished. It’s safe to say that most Americans will spend more time checking their messages than reading poetry — especially the old classics.

One of my favorite bloggers — himself an old classic — is the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff. Besides his many political and philosophical writings, Wolff knows and loves poetry. He recently quoted Dylan Thomas to echo his thoughts about our receding democracy. I confess I hadn’t read “Do not go gentle into that good night” for more than thirty years, but it echoed my own feelings as well. The poem expresses the sadness that most of us “of an age” will fail to achieve what we so dearly hoped for in our youth.

For me, Thomas’ poem both forgives and curses the wise men who couldn’t figure life out, the good men who didn’t do enough good in it, the wild men who tried vainly to hang on its fleeting joys, and the serious men blind to its realities. Thomas asks his dying father, who has come to a point where he can survey the landscape of his own life, to “curse, bless” him with his fierce tears as he passes into “that good night.”

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Despite the compassionate end of an old man’s unrealized dreams and days, there is no other way to live than by refusing to abandon his dreams. Although we are now witnessing the dimming of our own democratic ideals, what choice do we have but to rage and fight?

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas (1952)

Years ago I was leaving the supermarket with my daughter, then in kindergarten. I breezed past someone asking for money for a dog rescue — and she looked up at me, shocked and incensed: “Daddy, you’re mean!”

It really made me think. In short order I also stopped worrying about all the ways a panhandler could misuse the money I gave him. I stopped offering to buy him lunch when what he really wanted from me was cash. I had a pretty good idea where the money was going. But patronizing charity never seemed like a completely human gesture. Finally I took a page from the Talmud: when someone asks you for money, reach into your pocket and don’t even ask.

Of course, this makes you a compassionate chump. But it’s pretty liberating to give out of habit and not have to run through all the permutations like a tightly-wound investor. The reason for this, as I learned, is to avoid having your heart grow hard — to not permit yourself to become cruel.

And isn’t this what a human society and its justice system should be founded on? Compassion that errs on the side of — yes — even foolishness? We congratulate ourselves on our high standards for prosecution — beyond the shadow of a doubt. Our Constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishments, even for savage crimes. And once upon a time generosity and benefit of the doubt were even intended to be part of the justice system. But compassion has long dried up as we become increasingly the severe, judgmental Puritans who founded this country.

Justice tempered with compassion was also a feature of ancient Jewish halakha. A violent crime had to have two witnesses who saw it committed with their own eyes. Even when there was absolutely no doubt of guilt, if all twenty-three judges of the sanhedrin voted to convict the accused it was assumed that something had gone terribly wrong with the ruling — that some measure of compassion had been overlooked — and the man was acquitted.

But truth be told, we angry citizens are little more today than a mob hiding behind the respectable but vengeful face of the courts. We as individuals easily pronounce harsh online sentences on each other after taking only a moment to read a post. Lumped together as a jury, we vote to convict after obscenely short deliberations. The judges we appoint follow minimum sentencing guidelines to explicitly eliminate human compassion. For all our moral posturing, the mechanized justice we dispense is no wiser or kinder than a Taliban stoning or a Puritan witch burning. We have, in fact, perfected cruelty by putting it on an assembly line.

Ninety-five percent of violent crimes are never heard in court because most defendants in America today are pressured into plea deals by terrifying, inflated charges and poverty that eliminates any chance of an adequate defense. Prosecutors will convict on the basis of faulty evidence or bias, or community anger, or suppressed exculpatory evidence. In prison inmates can spend years behind bars for nonviolent crimes, or serve sentences largely in solitary. Our prison system is the largest in the world and it has become just another piece of a corrosive and exploitative capitalist economy.

Once a prisoner completes his sentence, society marks him with a scarlet “F” for felon and he becomes unemployable, disenfranchised, and a pariah for life. He is turned out onto the street with little more than cab fare, years of probation ahead, and few skills to feed himself or his family — once back in the world of upright, moral, angry men.

And when a death is involved the angry men demand blood that can only be appeased by the state’s own murder of the guilty. It sounds almost like the sick satanic ritual it is: the condemned is injected with concoctions of poisonous drugs, whose provenance and composition are kept secret, while onlookers peer through curtains as the man gasps and chokes and suffers on a gurney overseen by a physician who has renounced his promise to, first, do no harm.

Without reforms long recognized but never implemented because they might make us all compassionate chumps, the judicial system continues to tilt toward injustice, the twisted, and the cruel. The very notion of mercy has been completely excised from the courts. Rehabilitation may have once been a fleeting ideal, but it can no longer be found in prisons operated increasingly by get-tough political grandstanders.

All that remains of the justice system today is the angry, vengeful state doing the work of its angry, vengeful citizens, demanding blood and usually getting it.

American history is not simply the tales of presidents, generals and explorers — or of the many wars to which the U.S. has sent its children. History is not some abstract account of other people. Our own families and communities have created traces that demand to be viewed in the mirror of history. American history, then — our history — is both a personal story and a personal reckoning.

Almost twenty years ago I became interested in genealogy. My mother’s ancestors lived in the United States long before it became a republic. They can be traced back five or six centuries to little Welsh and English villages, and somebody somewhere has a book with all the dry details of begats, property transfers, and manumissions of slaves. Slave ownership among white families, even by Northerners, is a dirty little secret some would rather forget.

In among all the yellowing photo albums is a picture of my mother as a two month old, cradled in the arms of an old black woman. Below the photo, in my mother’s scrawl: Louisa was born a slave.

Of course, this was 1930, it was the South, and much has changed since then.

But, as Charlottesville reminded us not that long ago, a lot has not changed. Slavery may be gone, but it ended recently enough that we still find reminders in our family albums. For Louisa, the Jim Crow South kept her living in poverty, taking care of someone else’s children, her sons farming for someone else, and it placed incalculable obstacles before her grandchildren. For all the recent talk of flags and monuments and legacy, it is not so much Confederate (or Union) symbols but racist institutions that represent our true heritage. And like our family albums, these institutions persist to this day.

Many view white supremacy as dead and cold as Confederate statues. Yet the white supremacy on which slavery was based is hot and pulsing, alive and malign. White supremacy is such a major part of the national DNA that it has shaped our justice and economic systems, healthcare, immigration, foreign policy, policing, the prison system — every aspect of American life, North and South. It is the source of America’s great wealth, our expeditionary militarism, and a daily contributor to income inequality. White supremacy lies behind the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism. White supremacy has justified most of our wars of choice, not just the Civil War. And just like actual DNA, white supremacy seems to be transmitted across generations like a deadly gene.

My mother once told me an unflattering story about her own mother. It was 1940 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president for eight years. Like Obama, Roosevelt was despised throughout the South and was accused of being a race traitor and a Communist. For all the epithets hurled at FDR by my grandmother and those like her, the New Deal had improved the lives of poor people of every race and America was changing — and for the better. On one particular day in April that year, a black census lady came to my grandmother’s front door. My grandmother told her crisply to go to the back. The census worker replied, “I can do it here, or not at all.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but my grandmother’s world had already changed — into something she would never accept. A genteel Sunday school teacher with Southern breeding, my grandmother would have despised today’s racists as so much “white trash” for mixing Southern “heritage” with the Nazism America was then fighting. But on matters of race my grandmother held exactly the same views as today’s white supremacists.

Tea Party Republicans now own the party and the presidency — and they warn us the gloves are off and the bare knuckles out. But so too are the white satin sheets and coarse brown shirts out of the closet. We now know exactly what these men and women are — and we shouldn’t hesitate to use the proper terms: fascists and white supremacists. A frighteningly large segment of white America no longer feels any shame about public expressions of their hate. Racism without consequence has become re-enshrined in law and Jim Crow is making a comeback. Worse, “mere” racism seems to be making the transition to fascism.

Adolf Hitler may never have been a member of the Confederacy but today’s white supremacists just as easily sieg Heil to a Nazi Hakenkreuz as they salute a Confederate flag or monument. Today it’s almost impossible to distinguish racism from fascism because, in the end, what’s the difference when dehumanization, deportation, ethnic cleansing and murder are shared objectives?

But the silver lining — if there is one — is that Charlottesville released a flood of essays, meditations and documentaries on our Original Sin, on the magnitude of our problem with white supremacy — and I must agree with Jamelle Bouie and others who identify it as a white problem.

Among the best pieces I read immediately after Charlottesville, in no particular order:

• When Heritage Equals Hate: ACLU on Confederate monuments
• Stone Mountain: the disgrace that hate built
• Where are all the monuments to Black lynching? Bill Moyers
• America was never White
• When Nazis filled Madison Square Garden
• Hate Rising: Jorge Ramos
• CNN Interview with Jared Taylor
• Charlottesville – Race and Terror: VICE News
• White Americans have to make a Choice: Jamelle Bouie

If all this is overwhelming and heartbreaking, it should be. We should be overwhelmed with shame and remorse and anger. We should be crying and we should be screaming. We can never fix what’s wrong with this country without acknowledging the deepest foundational injustice that almost every other injustice is based on.

And we can never change society without changing ourselves. It is not enough for Liberals to champion civil rights at home and deny them to others abroad. It is not enough for Liberals to ask for a minimum wage and family leave domestically, while ensuring that workers overseas work in horrific sweat shops to build iPhones and sew designer jeans. Besides white supremacy, liberal white America must firmly reject colonialism and militarism. Justice must be universal, equality must know no borders. No deity confers special blessings on the United States. We are simply one nation among two hundred and some others.

The baby in the picture was born into a narrow, racist world. Things she’d say would provoke tears and winces. Until the day she died it was obvious where she had grown up, and in what kind of world. But like all of us my mother was a work in progress and she ended up a kinder and more compassionate person than the generations that preceded her.

I must believe we all are works in progress — and so is the country each of us loves and hates with alternating passion and despondency. But if we really mean to repair it in earnest — it means not fearing to look squarely into that mirror of history.

Today’s remarks from Iowa’s unrepentant White Supremacist, Rep. Steve King, just underscores the difference between the GOP’s new proto-fascist vision for America – and the one engraved on the Statue of Liberty that celebrates a nation of immigrants.

American history is not just the stories of heroes, sinners, and survivors – or tales of presidents, generals and inventors. It is a record of the struggles of immigrants for a place at the American table. It’s also a personal story.

Almost twenty years ago I became fascinated by genealogy. My mother’s family lived in the United States long before it became a nation. They can be traced back five or six centuries to little Welsh and English villages, and somebody somewhere has a book with all the dry details of begats and property transfers, including the manumission of slaves.

My father’s family had no such privileged roots and were double – maybe even triple – immigrants. My father used to say that his g-g-g-g-grandfather was born on the sea. And, after ordering Canadian archival records, it turned out he was right. Johannes Mooß was born “auf dem Meer” (on the sea) in 1828, enroute from some German-speaking village to Nova Scotia:

I say “German-speaking” because it wasn’t until after the Napoleonic Wars that the Holy Roman Empire was finally dissolved. And it wasn’t until 1815 that the German Confederation, mainly a trade and tax agreement, united German-speaking states. And it wasn’t until 1866 when a Northern German Confederation, and then Otto von Bismarck, founded something akin to the modern state of Germany. But when Margarete Mooß arrived in Nova Scotia, the Europe she knew resembled this:

The land my ancestors arrived in was hardly modern Canada. The French had ceded territory to the English under the Treaty of Utrecht a century before, but “New France” maintained control in Upper Canada. It had been only 70 years since Le Grand Dérangement, or the Arcadian genocide – the forcible expulsion of 14,000 Arcadians from what is now Canada’s Maritime provinces, which killed 9,000 of them. Many people in New England and Louisiana know this history well because they are descendants of Acadian refugees.

Likewise, the United States of 1828 was hardly recognizable as the nation it is today. Michigan, in which my grandfather, father, and I were born, was not yet a state. Mexico owned all of California, Texas, Arizona, and the Southwest. Years later, when the United States grabbed this territory from Mexico, Mexicans suddenly became “Americans.”

We haven’t always had $40 billion walls separating us from other nations. On both my father’s father’s side and his mother’s side there are multiple connections to Canada. The borders between both nations were once as porous as sand – still are – and some of my Quebecois ancestors – the unwanted refuse of Alsace and Normandy – even made a brief appearance in Attleboro, Massachusetts before ending up in Northern Michigan.

Sometime in the mid-1800’s my father’s family migrated to Upper Canada (now Ontario). And sometime during the beginning of the 20th Century my father’s people emigrated once again – or maybe they simply sneaked across the non-existent border – and by pure luck all of us since then have been American citizens.

Fully bitten by the genealogy bug I made phone calls, sent out emails, and scoured genealogy boards. I gathered family trees from Midwestern German and French cousins, Francophone ancestors, people I’m related to in Maryland, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Ontario and British Columbia. Through marriage on my father’s side it turns out I have Chinese and Indian cousins – “India” Indian and Native American. My sister’s daughters share her background and also that of their Puerto Rican father. Several of my cousins are part Polish. A young cousin married into a Mexican-American family. My own children share all the ancestry I’ve described, plus the Lithuanian and Ukrainian heritage of my wife.

Despite all the ugliness happening right now, our histories and families are literally fusing. This is the reality of America, and its beauty.

As I’ve worked on the family trees, I’ve unearthed Ellis Island records from my wife’s grandfather and his brothers:

I found the stedtl in Lithuania the brothers came from, and a marker that identifies where all those who remained in that village, including a sister Perla, were slaughtered by Einsatzgruppen and xenophobic neighbors on September 11, 1941:

At the time the United States had immigration quotas for Jews, even though everyone knew what was happening in Europe. Today the lesson of protecting vulnerable people is one we have failed to learn.

I’ve never been able to determine where in Germany my father’s people came from, and I’ve followed many false leads. Some of them have been fascinating. Who knew that Germans were invited to live in Bessarabia (Russia) by a czarina in the early 19th century? Or that a century later they were disinvited by another czar and instantly became refugees – some fleeing to North Dakota. Who knew that other German refugees were brought to Nova Scotia to offset Catholic population?

As I’ve researched names on census rolls, cemetery lists, and ship manifests, I’ve discovered a lot about the fragile lives of immigrants of every era. Certainly some come for economic reasons. But unless you are hungry or have been made a refugee, who would choose to leave everything behind, pack a few belongings into a suitcase, and start all over again with almost nothing?

The ancestor born on the sea arrived in steerage and became an indentured servant as a boy. Pitted against citizens already established, and pitted against each other, immigrants work without savings, language, security, the support of nearby family – or much of anything – until they either become part of the fabric of a new nation. Or have to start all over again.

My own family story is nothing special. We all have a story like this. What is both amazing and shocking is that the nation’s xenophobes and racists have as little notion of who they are as of American history.

* * *

Modern day stories of today’s immigrants are no different. Like refugees from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and elsewhere, many have escaped death squads and military juntas:

* * *

Immigrants today are just as likely to be fleeing drug cartels and pan-national gangs as those arriving a century ago were fleeing from cossacks or the Czar. Or, like the Acadians, today’s refugees may be escaping genocide:

Whatever you choose to call them – immigrants, refugees, seekers, dreamers, illegals – they’re not here to take American jobs. They’re here to survive.

* * *

For Trump and his collection of racists and xenophobes, Syrian refugees are not victims – or people or families – but simply a danger to be contained. The most ludicrous aspect of Trump’s dehumanizing Muslim Ban is that it is Europe – not the United States – that has taken responsibility for the human tragedy that perpetual American Wars of Choice have caused.

Building a massive, shameful, wasteful wall and doubling or trebling the number of ICE agents may not be equivalent to another Kristallnacht, but from Trump and Bannon we hear strong echoes of the same fascist rhetoric.

Last October I traveled to Berlin to find out how Germans were dealing with the huge number of refugees literally washing up on European shores, and I worked with a refugee aid group. For a month I handed out shoes, clothing, and supplies to people from all over the Middle East. Many were from Aleppo, a city racked by a civil war the United States has played a major role in. Many were from Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries the U.S. has been waging wars against for two decades.

This is what the cowardly 45th President of the United States is afraid of – people fleeing war zones with their children:

In Germany there is opposition to the large number of people transiting through the country, to be sure. But many Germans have been welcoming. As the sign below says: “we are all foreigners.”

And if more Americans dug into their own family trees and stories, they would recognize just how much we have in common with those we should be welcoming.

It is one of life’s great joys to have adult children I can argue with. Smart people with the right and the obligation to keep the old man honest. The other night I was having a phone conversation with my son, who expressed his annoyance with not only right-wing flacks but with flaming liberals.

And I was included on his list.

I argued that we can’t reach agreement with the Far Right because (1) they are highly averse to facts; and that (2) most of our disagreements can’t be settled with a New England stone wall (you live your life, I’ll live mine on my side of the wall) – when the Far Right’s idea of freedom really means the right to take civil rights away from a multicultural majority. And (3) – I questioned whether, at the end of the day, any amount of polite chitchat would ever really change their commitment to taking my rights away.

My son disagreed and said – well, you have to start somewhere. You will reach some of them. And anyway – what’s the alternative, dad?

This, of course, was the grown-up way of looking at the problem. And maybe my grown up son is right. Maybe we just start where luck and serendipity take us.

* * *

Another of life’s great joys is to have second chances to spend time with your grown children. We are in South Carolina for a few weeks avoiding the New England winter, and our daughter flew down to run in a race and to visit with friends.

Yesterday we were all sunning ourselves in Waterfront Park in Charleston when a man with an NRA cap and a “Lifetime NRA member” T-shirt stopped in front of our bench and asked, “Where y’all from?” Massachusetts, we answered. “Where ’bouts in Massachusetts?” he pressed us. I replied by asking if he knew where New Bedford is. “Hell, I was BORN in New Bedford. 115 Pleasant Street. But I haven’t been back in 40 years.”

We talked about the area. He remembered random local geography and history, including Joshua Slocum, and he couldn’t remember the name of “that Portuguese sausage,” Linguica, I said. “Linguica,” he repeated with a happy grin. “Yeah, that’s really good.”

My new NRA friend stood in the sun a moment remembering New England, while I sat under one of South Carolina’s famous palmetto trees enjoying the winter warmth. Then he stepped forward and offered his hand and gave me his name, and I did the same. And we shook hands like we meant it.

I have my doubts, but my son is probably right. We have to start somewhere. And maybe the only things we will ever have in common with those of wildly different political views are things like food and warmth.

But maybe a shared appreciation for what we all bring to each other is enough to make that start.

About my Berlin Trip

September 3, 2016

Dear friends and family,

In October I will be in Berlin to see how a nation of 80 million can absorb a million refugees. By contrast, the US, a nation of 330 million, only last week reluctantly (and with much fear and whining) took its 10,000th. I will be volunteering with a German welcome organization and talking to refugees, journalists, political and social service organizations.

If you’re interested in following my trip, you can subscribe to an email distribution list here:

http://tinyletter.com/precaf

This is an opt-in list. You’re on it only if you want to be.

Warm regards,
David

The World Refugee Crisis

September 6, 2016

Dear friends and family,

Thanks for subscribing. I leave on October 1st and will start sending you my impressions and my own photos. But if you don’t follow international news, a few facts on the world refugee crisis:

For many years the count of refugees and displaced persons numbered in the tens or twenties of millions. Not pretty numbers, but nothing like last year’s shocking 65.3 million.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/unhcrsharedmedia/2016/2016-06-20-global-trends/2016-06-14-Global-Trends-2015.pdf

Of this number, a third (21.3 million) are refugees, almost two-thirds (4.8 million) are internally displaced people (meaning they have had to flee war zones or destroyed homes within their own countries), and 3.2 million have sought asylum.

The countries with the most refugees are Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, CAR, Myanmar, Eritrea, and Colombia.

As a consequence of its darker history, Germany has a generous refugee policy. It’s not necessarily generosity of spirit, however: it’s the law. Article 16a of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) gives asylum to those who are persecuted or in danger, and they may not be put back in danger (contrast this with the United States practice of sending Mexican, Honduran and Guatemalan refugees back to gangs and death squads). The EU’s Dublin Accords also specify rights for asylum seekers, but some countries (notoriously Hungary) abuse the agreement to shunt refugees to other EU nations. Germany and Serbia now receive 75% of all Syrians fleeing Assad, ISIS, and Russian and American bombing.

Last year the uncensored images of the body of 3 year-old Aylan Kurdi appeared in the press. Aylan drowned when his family undertook a sea escape from Syria. Soon there followed images of a Hungarian camerawoman kicking a group of Syrians fleeing across a field, amid reports that not every EU nation was doing its part to provide humane care of refugees. Indiana governor (now GOP VP candidate) Mike Pence declared his state off-limits to Syrians, who he described as ISIS militants in disguise. But the United States has only taken 10,000 Syrian refugees, while Germany has been taking that number every day. There are now a million refugees living in Germany.

The world’s reaction has either been one of generosity or of callousness. Lebanon, for example, hosts the largest number of refugees per capita than any other nation on earth. The United States is at the other end of the spectrum – all the more notable because it bears a lot of responsibilty for this human misery.

So how much generosity of spirit – how much responsibility – should we Americans be showing? Will we step up to the plate and pay for what we broke? This is, after all, the “Pottery Barn rule” that Colin Powell reminded us of when we launched the war in Iraq:

“You broke it, you bought it.”

Unfortunately Americans are often predisposed to let the other guy pay for it. And the other guy in this case is Germany. But suddenly the German welcome is wearing out.

This week there was an election in a neglected region of Germany called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (MV), a state with just over a million people – Angela Merkel’s home state. In many ways the area resembles the region in Massachusetts where I live – or it could just as easily be anywhere in the US where industry has picked up and moved away. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has plenty of natural beauty but no industry. It’s only 80 miles from Berlin, but it might as well be on the moon. Although there have been a few attempts to bring jobs to the region (a DVD plant, for example), other states generally win out when it comes to development. MV has an inferiority complex. Educational levels are low, and voters are angry. Yesterday’s state primary elections shocked everyone when a three year-old political party, Alternatives for Germany (AFD), beat Angela Merkel’s CSU in her home state. Even Americans were paying attention:

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-09-07/the-rise-of-populism-and-anti-immigrant-sentiment-in-europe

AFD waged its campaign largely on the basis of refugees – although Mecklenburg-Vorpommern actually has very few of them. And the AFD is only one of several right-wing tendencies in German politics.

This is going to be an interesting visit.

Warm regards,
David

First Day

October 3, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

I arrived in Berlin late yesterday afternoon and am writing this from my Airbnb room, which is very nice. Because of a Berlin housing ordinance VRBO home and apartment rentals shorter than two months long are forbidden. With home-sharing schemes like Airbnb people renting rooms are usually reluctant to rent for more than a week. I’m caught right in the middle. On the plus side, I’ll get to see more of Berlin than if I stayed in just one place.

Today is both the Day of German Unity, a national holiday, and the first day of Rosh Hashana. Everything is closed. Tomorrow I visit a refugee assistance organization called Moabit Hilft (Moabit Helps) and the day after that I am having dinner with a member of the Masorti congregation in Orangienburg with whom I will also be volunteering on the 9th to help Syrian refugees.

This visit is a chance to see how one country is struggling with a terrible humanitarian crisis. Germany now has over a million refugees) and is struggling with its post-war identity. The history of this country is well-known, and for a long time it was a liberal democracy. But a dark new chapter is emerging — as it is all over Europe and our own country. Right-wing parties and movements like the NPD, PEGIDA, and AFD are gaining influence here, and in Angela Merkel’s home state the AFD actually won regional elections recently. All this could turn out to be either the same type of phenomenon as the Tea Party’s takeover of the Republican Party — or it may herald something much worse.

This trip is also personal for me. For those of us who have lived all over, each place and each language becomes a little part of who we are. When I was 19 I had been working a dead-end job in Philadelphia after running out of money for college, so I went to Germany on a lark. There I found a job in a furniture store and later I worked in a bank. I have returned to Germany a few times since then, but I’ve always wanted to spend more than a couple of weeks in this city where history, politics and culture converge.

I will try to write every few days. But let me hear from you as well.

Warm regards,
David

First day at work

October 4, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today was my first day “on the job” at Moabit Hilft. The German is starting to come back and there was plenty to do. Moabit Hilft has two locations – a “store” on Turmstraße right next to the LaGeSo (Governmental Social Services) processing center, and a small office on Lehrter Straße where they help people use computers. I got a quick hello from the director, Christiane Beckmann, who is a force of nature when it comes to her advocacy work, and after visiting the computer training office I returned to the “store.”

Working the store is not exactly like retail. No money ever changes hands, there is no haggling, no one asks if you have a shirt in taupe. Everyone just gets whatever fits them and thanks you in the only words of German most of them know. A volunteer’s job is basically just keeping shelves and baskets from descending into chaos as a never-ending stream of people paw over the clothes, shoes, toys, and personal necessities available.

I can’t list every country our “customers” came from today, but a few who identified themselves were from Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Moldavia, and the Kurdish regions of both Iraq and Syria. One young man I spent the afternoon with had left Iraq after ISIS slaughtered thousands of his neighbors. Another with both excellent English and German had come only a year before from Damascus and was already helping out as a translator.

And so many children. My young colleague taught me to pay attention to how children were dressed and to recommend clothing now that winter is on the way. One girl came in with only pajama bottoms, another three year-old wore only rubber sandals. Several boys had no jackets, not even warm sweatshirts. We didn’t let them leave until we had found something warmer than what they came in with.

It is so sobering to see people who present themselves as they arrived in Germany – in the only clothes they own, and with basically no supplies. And these are the lucky ones – people who sold everything they had to come to a country that would offer them asylum.

At the end of the day we were out of almost everything. We picked up the empty boxes outside which had previously contained toothpaste, shampoo, and sanitary napkins. After that I was glad to be able to knock off a bit early. It was a rare slow day, so I was told.

Tomorrow these amazing people will do it all over again.

Warm regards,
David

Settling in

October 5, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today was another day of tending the store. It was less exhausting than yesterday, but it does take the starch out of you, at least us old guys. I really admire everyone who does this year-in, year-out. Today I had more good political conversations with colleagues and some great moments with the customers. It is starting to get cold and the change in seasons is on the mind of everyone that comes in. Today a man in his 80’s came in wearing rubber sandals and it took a while to find him a pair of shoes that would fit. Then another man without shoes, and then another. We were working non-stop until 2:30 when lunch was ready.

Before I continue, I would like to personally send a message to every Republican who thinks that helping out traumatized refugees poses a threat to our national security – come here and work for a day if you can stand some fact-based research. These are just people trying to survive, not terrorists. The volunteer staff here is mostly comprised of Kurds, Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians. It is quite a sight to find all these folks pulling together to help the other guy – literally the other guy. An Iranian helping a Iraqi. A Syrian helping a Kurd. A Kurdish Christian helping a Syrian Muslim. And, while the effort is not going as well as it could, Germans are more than doing their share by the West, helping refugees. Why aren’t Americans helping?

But as I was saying – the pay here stinks and I’m sure they’re not giving us the number of coffee breaks German law requires. But they do feed us well. This was lunch today (dessert not pictured):

Evening.

When it is crisp and sunny Berlin is beautiful. When it is cold and wet and grey the city – actually, any city – is cold and feels unmerciful. I was on my way to meet with Gerhard Baader, a senior member of the Masorti (Jewish) congregation in Berlin. From his emails I thought I’d be meeting a young man about forty who had his hands in various projects. I was right about everything but his age. The Jewish High Holidays will end in about a week, and there was a police presence in front of the synagogue on Orangienburg. Next door to the synagogue was a stylish restaurant, the Cafe Orange, where I met Gerhard, a man of 87 who met me in jacket and tie and left in windbreaker with his backpack to jump on a train. More on this later.

I am hoping I can get back to the synagogue next week when they do their work with refugees, and maybe I’ll throw some lint from my pocket on Yom Kippur. After I’ve done a bit more homework and put all the pieces together I will try to give you a fuller picture of this very interesting congregation and the Berlin Jewish community in general.

And then I still have to find an Iraqi bakery. But that’s a different story.

Warm regards,
David

Downtime

October 6, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

My lodging in Moabit was available only a week, so today I went apartment-shopping and finally found a room in an area called Wedding. It took the better part of the morning and a bit of the afternoon, and I found myself with a little downtime at about 2:00 pm.

My friend Jim had emailed me with a suggestion to visit a gallery in Charlottenburg where two SouthCoast Massachusetts and Rhode Island artists (who are now in New York) have an exhibition, so this sounded like the right way to finish the day. My Berlin mass-transit skills have improved and I am now less likely to go the wrong way on bus and subway lines. I got to the Galerie Friedmann-Hahn in less than 30 minutes. Thanks, Google.

There I found the exhibit of paintings by Anne Leone and Daniel Ludwig which Jim had told me about, and I talked a while with Maxi and Alex and an artist friend. They made me feel very welcome despite the absence of my checkbook or any sophisticated art knowledge. It was just one of those odd connections that makes the world interesting.

Dartmouth, Massachusetts is roughly 41 degrees North, while Berlin is 52 degrees North. So dark comes pretty early here after Summer has passed. By the time I got home it was already dark. I went out a little later to one of the Turkish fast-food joints that line Perlebergerstraße and had a Dürüm Döner – basically, a Turkish burrito. Only a healthy one because it’s a wrap filled with chicken, lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, garlic paste, onions and peppers.

And then I walked home.

Warm regards,
David

Desperate men, heartless men, and Ampelmännchen

October 7, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

For those joining the story, I’ve been working in the “store” that Moabit Hilft runs in Moabit (in Berlin) for refugees. People have arrived from the Middle East and Central Asia with almost nothing, and desperation can make people frantic. Just a few people grabbing everything can quickly deplenish a rack of clothes. There are two ad hoc signs in the children’s section that are meant to spell out some basic rules of who can take, and how much they can take:

I had an interesting conversation with an Iraqi man today. He was a mechanical engineer from Kirkuk who had fled ISIS with his family. Their transit passes were all stamped with “Germany” as their entry point into Europe from Turkey, and the plan had been to join the rest of the wife’s family in Finland. But after eight months in barracks and gymnasia in Finland they were “deported” back to Germany, where the whole process will begin again.

In Greece approximately 20,000 refugees have been stuck on the island of Lesbos for months, their lives in a similar holding pattern. In order to transit through Europe, the refugees have to pass through the Balkans, but Macedonia and Serbia have closed their borders, and the EU and Turkey are still bickering over a deal to distribute asylum seekers.

The basic strategy is to shuffle them around until someone else takes them

A little context.

In Syria alone, a nation [once] of 22 million people, half the population has been displaced by war. Half of that half, 5.5 million, have left Syria according to UNHRC, the UN agency for refugees. Talking to a Syrian man this evening, he thought the UN’s number was conservative — that half the country was no longer there. Some refugees have fled Syria on foot — taking astounding routes. Of the 5.5 million who have fled, 2.2 million are in Turkey, many in Lebanon and Jordan, 800,000 in Germany, 30,000 in Canada, and 10,000 in the United States — the country with the most resources and the least interest in helping.

Last week, for example, the “Christian” governor of Texas turned his back on refugees by dropping out of the Federal Refugee Settlement program. There is a line from the aptly-named chapter of the Bible (Exodus) in which Jews are reminded to take care of the stranger “for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Governor Abbott, who is known for winning a suit to display the Ten Commandments at the Texas State Capitol and is theoretically familiar with the Old Testament, seems to want to pick and choose which biblical precepts he follows. The Republican Vice Presidential candidate, Mike Pence, just tried this stunt in Indiana — turning his back on human suffering.

But I would ask the Republicans — if individuals and religious organizations are willing to step up to human and ethical responsibilities, why shouldn’t government just get out of the way? Isn’t that the usual line from this party? For Democrats the $64,000 question is — will the next president create more refugees, or will she lead the US to do its share to take care of the ones we’ve already created?

* * *

I’ll leave you with a picture of Ampelmännchen — little traffic guy. I think he is a Berlin thing — and, like the much-reviled Trabant vehicle, he comes from former East Germany, where the street lights looked like this. Ampelmännchen was so beloved that they kept the little dude around — I’d like to think it was to say “welcome back” to the East Germans who rejoined the West.

Warm regards,
David

Moving Day, Meetup

October 8, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Saturday was moving day — from my Airbnb in Moabit to a new one in Wedding, a busy commercial district. After getting set up, I took a walk and went to a Meetup group for B1-C1 German for foreigners (the class sign below says “stay calm and learn German”).

The teacher was a young woman from Humboldt University who is about to become a licensed teacher, and who does all the classroom things one is supposed to do with language students. My classmates were a young and interesting group of students and professionals from all over — Sicily, Ireland, Ukraine, South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Morocco, the UK and the US. As always, I represented the over-40 crowd. 50. 60….

Berlin is poised to become an even more young and cosmopolitan city because of the Brexit. With London out of the picture as Europe’s financial capital, I expect this role will quickly go to Berlin.

After class, I walked down to the corner and I saw this — the DDR’s own Trabant — a car known for its lack of power, its stinking lawnmower engine — but a cutie nonetheless. Juxtaposed with a Coca Cola sign and used as a prop for a restaurant, this says it all about Berlin’s quite literal fusion of East and West Germany. Appropriately, the Trabant sits in front of the Ost-West Cafe on Bernauer Street.

Bernauer Street was the street on which the Berlin Wall was built and which is known for several killings of people trying to escape from East Germany. Here is what it once looked like:

And here is what the same location looks like today after the Wall was torn down:

But there are many more walls to be torn down in this world. And certainly no more should ever be built.

Warm regards,
David

Sonntag

October 9, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Sunday is a sleepy day in Berlin, especially now that it’s the rainy season. Nothing besides cafes and the big megaplex movie theater on the corner are open on Sonntag. Church bells ring for sometimes fifteen minutes without stopping — such as the Evangelische (Lutheran) Kapernaum-Kirche immediately across the street from me:

Berliners, who normally rush around at high-speed, have no option but to slow down, meet friends, and even sleep in a bit. It truly is a day of rest.

And so I relaxed, did some laundry, read about Donald Trump’s latest hijinks, and consulted the fivethirtyeight.com poll rollup to reassure myself the nation would still be there when I got back.

And then I went out to meet and thank the journalist who put me in touch with the organization I am now volunteering with. We talked for an hour and a half about refugees, politics, German society – and sonstiges – and then she had to go pick up her daughter, and I took the U-Bahn back home.

I know Deborah won’t believe this — and that probably goes for others of you who know how I pronounce the word “nature” — but I have been walking a lot around the various neighborhoods and on my way to and from subway lines, trolley lines, schnellbahn lines, and buses. Possibly even liking it.

Berlin is densely-populated, but there is green everywhere, and only now are the leaves beginning to drop:

I keep being impressed by all the different ethnicities and languages. For the second time in some days, I ran into people speaking Spanish on the subway. And for the second time it turned out they were from Colombia. But you regularly hear German, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Russian, More than a hundred languages in all are spoken by people here:

I won’t be up at 3AM to watch the debates, but I hope this one finally sinks Trump. And I hope you hardy Democrats will all write the winner to tell her you don’t want any more wars of choice in the Middle East.

Warm regards,
David

How do you say frustration in German?

October 10, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Last week Moabit Hilft let me change my schedule to spend some time in their main office on Lehrter Strasse. Among other things, this office provides help with job and housing searches and runs German classes every evening. Where the “store” provides the basic necessities of things like toothpaste and sweaters for new arrivals, the office helps people further down the integration pipeline.

Refugees get a stipend to help with housing, but they must compete with college students and an increasingly global workforce in Berlin’s ever-shrinking housing market. Finding accommodation is not easy, even with a computer. Moabit Hilft’s clients usually come in accompanied by a translator, and they are limited by family size and subsidies to certain types of housing.

There is something called WBS (Wohnberechtigungsschein), which roughly translated means “housing voucher” for public housing. WBS housing is basically like Section 8 Housing — a certain percentage of it has to be built when complexes are developed. On the wall are some guidelines on how to calculate expenses (below). The organization that publishes this is not the German federal government, but the Lutheran Youth and Welfare Agency (more on them another day). But much of the help being given to refugees is private and not funded by taxes.

From early afternoon until about 6:30 there is a stream of people coming for help with their housing searches:

One of the wrinkles is that refugees must be counseled to avoid areas where there are significant numbers of neo-Nazis. These areas strongly correlate to precincts where the AfD (Alternatives for Deutschland Party) won the biggest numbers of votes (blue sections of the map, former East Berlin):

At 5:00pm the German classes begin. Language classes in Europe all use the Common European Framework for Reference for Languages. The one I sat in on was A1.1 — beginner’s beginner’s German.

The teacher started the class at 5:00 and – as drop-in language classes everywhere – only two students showed up on time. Twenty minutes later, four or five other students arrived and it caused some disruption. One of the early-arriving students was annoyed, and his anger only grew as the class went on. At about 15 minutes from the end of the class one of the late-arriving students interrupted the young man’s companion, and the young man began screaming and charged the late arrival. I tried to restrain him but my chair and I both ended up on the floor. Luckily, two other students successfully restrained him before he harmed the latecomer.

But it was a good example of how much frustration is building up in ad hoc housing with hardly any privacy, as these folks are stamped, fingerprinted, placed in hour-long lines, and often handled like cattle.

Warm regards,
David

Mostly pictures

October 11, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today was a morning for bookstore browsing and then an afternoon in the office. I also scoped out my third neighborhood for the last ten days of my stay in Berlin. Compared with yesterday, today was pretty sedate except for losing my credit card. And so I will entertain you with some pictures I snapped – although you will probably be disappointed at the quality compared to those from the real photographer in the family.

I’m always amused by the little things, either just slightly different or totally the same as at home. I’ll leave it to you to guess which.

A prison in a residential neighborhood:

An advertising sign that let you recharge your phone:

A tattoo parlor with dubious claims:

An open house in a school for students who want to go back to college:

A Lutheran refuge for the homeless:

Yuppification of a poor and working class neighborhood…

… all for micro-apartment for young professionals. The sign says roughly: “I’m not commuting – I’ll be living in the thick of it.”

A gay refugee organization – who knew? – but then – of course!

And today’s 5:00pm German class, who are already learning the pain of nouns with three genders and declinations of them into four cases. Which immediately reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “I’d rather decline a drink than a German noun.” Er hatte recht.

And that’s it for today. Tomorrow I should have an interesting interview.

Warm regards,
David

Moabit in the morning

October 12, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today I had an interesting interview, which I’ll summarize in a second post today (if time permits). But I was out taking photos in the morning on my stroll around Moabit, a city that reminds me somewhat of Oakland in its rough charm. For German readers, none of this will be very special, but for Americans the pictures may provoke a smile.

A miniature rental car (I didn’t see the driver getting out):

An Afro-German center:

The German version of a dollar store:

When you gotta go, you gotta go:

Notice anything? Let me rephrase that: notice anything missing? Hint: power lines:

A center to promote family values – with an unwelcome ad out front:

This is the only correct way to serve hot chocolate on a cold rainy day:

The morning headline: a small fire in the EuropaCenter had some Berliners thinking of something much more serious. But it was 10/11 and not 9/11:

Missionaries camped outside a refugee center, hoping to snatch some souls. You can see the refugee tents in the background, left:

And finally, the man who made my lunch today (yeah, I really like those Döners):

Inside the restaurant a black man was bussing tables and being as helpful as he could. The hint, I think, was that he was working for a tip. When I asked him where he was from, he told me: Mozambique. We chatted in Spanish with a sprinkle of Portuguese for a while, and then I took the hint.

It’s now been 40+ degrees outside for several days, and rainy, and it’s going to be a long winter for men like this.

Warm regards,
David

Small world, small goof, small delay

October 13, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

I had a post for you tonight, but I need to rewrite it for reasons tomorrow’s post will explain.

We have run out of memory to install in the donated laptops I was working on, so I have returned to the “store” to hand out clothes. This weekend I will look around for a few more sticks of memory so I can finish the project if it’s not too expensive.

My morning began with a cup of strong Arabic coffee some Syrian volunteers had made (4 giant thermoses of it), tidying up the children’s section of the store, then wandering around to talk to people. There is a room in which every sort of personal care product is handed out, including sanitary napkins. I noticed that this was the menstrual product stocked almost exclusively, and one of the women volunteers explained to me that this was done because 1) it’s safer for people who don’t know how to use tampons, and 2) most of the refugees don’t.

The volunteer had an unmistakable accent, and I asked her where she was from — Israel, she said. There are about 70,000 Israelis who have left the country and are now living in Berlin, she told me. Germany has a “Law of Return” of its own which grants citizenship to the grandchildren of expelled Jews. So for many young Israelis, a European passport, job opportunities, and religious freedom — or perhaps better expressed as freedom from coercive religion — make Berlin an appealing destination. A representative of the Jewish community in Berlin told me last week that 10,000 Israelis had come last month alone.

My young colleague told me she had met Jewish refugees at Moabit Hilft from Macedonia and war zones in mainly Kurdish territory. And I have been meeting Palestinians whose families, after expulsion from Israel in 1948 and later, had fled to Syria. As an ironic side-story, Jews and Palestinians are both getting it in this Syrian war.

The volunteer told me it was her obligation as a Jew to help refugees, that her grandparents had had to flee themselves. I mentioned the line — “for we were strangers in Egypt” — and she said, “Exactly.”

As we chatted, I found out she belonged to Jüdische Stimme — the German sister organization of Jewish Voice for Peace. I had been wondering if I’d run into any other lefty Jews in Germany. And then she put me in touch with another one.

Later in the morning, a Dutch film crew came in and I discovered one of the filmmakers was from Guatemala. He and I were chatting about the “Mayans” in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when the mother of a volunteer jumped into our Spanish conversation. It turned out she was visiting her daughter from Queretaro, Mexico, where Deborah and I have been a few times.

The world is getting smaller all the time.

Later I tweaked the translation of a PowerPoint presentation, and then returned to my post. I enjoy talking to the children who come in. I have found that most of them speak German and can be Dolmetschers for their parents — so I ask them their age, compliment them on their German, ask them where they are from, how long they’ve been here, how they’re doing in school. They all ask for toys, and we really have only stuffed bears and sad little plastic things to give them. I may be hitting you all up for some donations. Actually, you can count on it.

After work, I was supposed to go visit the Berlin Quakers, who also do refugee work — almost. My meeting is actually next Thursday night, and I had misread my calendar. But I made it to Friedrichstraße and got a pure tourist shot of the Spree river:

This part of Berlin is rolling in dough, luxury hotels, and shi-shi restaurants. Still, in the most wealthy country in Europe there is poverty and homelessness, alcoholism and neglect a block away:

Next week I will return to my friends, the Friends:

Until tomorrow,

Warm regards,
David

Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD)

October 14, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Two of the reasons that brought me to Germany were refugees and the return of the German Far Right. Both issues are focused on Muslims yet Muslims themselves are often not asked for their views in the mainstream media. I’ve had a number of one-on-one conversations with refugees but I thought I’d go talk to a group that advocates for Muslims in broader German society — one that might help me understand the bigger picture.

So I made an appointment with the Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland e.V. (Central Muslim Council in Germany) and — given that Muslims have huge targets on their back — I was quite surprised to be welcomed to their offices in such a friendly fashion. But the representative I spoke to asked me to not disclose their address, publish his picture, or use any names — so for the purposes of this letter, I’m just going to call him “Bob.”

The Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD) advocates for Muslims in German society. Its main office is in Köln but the press office is in Berlin. The ZMD was established in 1994 and represents 300 mosques and their local communities, and 35 associations with over 100.000 members.

Many of the Muslim communities in Germany are distinguished by national and linguistic differences, and there are many Vereine (associations) throughout. Most large urban areas like Berlin, Hamburg, and Bonn have their own community organizations. Turks, Albanians, and other ethnicities have their own associations as well.

Germany, a country with a population a quarter of the size of the United States, has 4.6 million Muslims and there are also now 600,000 Muslim refugees — about 1.9 million more Muslims than in the US. Something like 5% of all Germans are Muslim, a demographic change that began during Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (the economic miracle) of the 60’s, when millions of Turks came to Germany to work.

Although entire Anatolian villages were emptied to provide cheap labor for Germany in the Sixties, many Germans were disappointed when they didn’t all automatically rush back to Turkey. A poll by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation found 40% of Germans no longer want Muslims in the country. A Friedrich Ebert Foundation poll revealed that 56% of Germans are hostile to Islam. In Germany today there are clothing bans for Muslim women in most German states, and the community call to prayer is outlawed. And these are the legal forms of discrimination against Muslims in a country with a tax that goes to your choice of church.

Bob told me there have been over 50 attacks on mosques recently, including a bomb attack last week, 1,000 attacks on individuals (mainly women), and that Germany has an estimated 70,000 right-wing extremists who regularly target “foreigners.” Existing laws criminalizing hate crimes against Jews do not yet apply to Muslims, but Bob told me that by next year this loophole should be fixed.

ZMD is involved in outreach programs intended to both help the Muslim community and allay fears by non-Muslims. “Wir sind Paten” (with the implication of “We’ll be there for you”) is a program in different cities throughout Germany which provides volunteers to stand by refugees and Muslim newcomers — to show them the ropes and to help navigate the confusing structures of a new society. “Wir sind Paten” also creates a network of helpers who share information about cities, training, language, laws, and navigating red tape. The volunteers support not only the newcomers, but each other.

Another ZMD program is called “Safer Spaces.” This is designed to help communities spot troubled young men and intervene before they go off the rails. The vast majority of cases of radicalization have been social misfits, people who have been damaged by trauma — Einzelfälle (individual cases), Bob told me. When I mentioned the American term “lone wolf,” Bob nodded in agreement — yes, that described the Einzelfälle pretty well.

ZMD also collaborates with the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK), an organization which shares many of the same goals with the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the US. Bob stressed that the ZMD’s core mission is pretty straightforward — to improve the lives of Muslims in Germany and to promote integration into German society.

75% of all German Muslims are Sunni, and the remainder are Alevis, Twelver Shi’a, Alawites, and Ahmadiyya, while Sufis, Ismailis, Zaydis, and Ibadis each are less than 1%. 63% of Germany’s Muslims are from Turkey and most German Muslims live in Berlin, but there are significant numbers in Saxony and other states. Berlin is interestingly also the site of Germany’s first Muslim cemetery, established in 1798. Muslims have been in Germany a long time, and they’re here to stay.

Are the various communities islands unto themselves? I wondered. Bob said, no, there was actually a lot of unity among Muslims in Germany. He said it was not uncommon for Shia and Sunni to worship together, and that being a minority (together) in Germany might even make this more likely than in the old country. After all, now everyone’s in the same boat.

Just as American Jews are largely Democrats, German Muslims are probably most at home in the SPD and the Green Party, and to a lesser extent the CDU — Angela Merkel’s party — which has now changed its slogan to “we want to know who’s entering the country.”

When I mentioned Merkel’s original phrase regarding handling refugees — wir schaffen das (we’ll manage it), Bob grinned and said, “Yeah, like Yes we can.”

To some extent, the handing of refugees has been a logistical disaster — for reasons I will explore in a later email — so implying the Chancellor’s words are mere sloganeering is rather harsh, even by Bob’s own admission. But he gave the Chancellor praise for making a moral issue a national challenge, even if her own party is not solidly behind her.

Tell me about the Far Right, I asked. The NPD and PEGIDA are basically unrepentant Neo-Nazis, he said. Bob also repeated some of the NPD’s slogans — Goodbye Ali! — Don’t touch me! — Eva and Maria instead of Shariah! Bob recalled an incident on German Unity Day in Dresden in which the ZMD’s leadership was threatened by twenty PEGIDA members, including PEGIDA’s national leader Lutz Bachmann. A neo-Nazi contingent showed up at a “unity tent” comprised of Germany’s main religions. “We had to call the police.”

In some ways, Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) is even worse, Bob said, because the party is slick, uses telegenic speakers, and couches its xenophobia and Islamophobia in dry, economic jargon. And this is what I’ve been hearing for the last twelve days I’ve been here, from just about every person I’ve talked to.

The rise of the Far Right in Germany is a result of Germany taking its eye off the ball, my host told me. “In the old days the police would intervene immediately — with even the slightest hint of neo-Nazism. But now both politicians and police give them too much leeway. Worse, the police have been infiltrated by the Far Right.” He mentioned a case in Dresden involving a police chief. And Bob worries that the Far Right has also found its way into federal security agencies. An underground National-Socialist organization (NSU) was uncovered in 2011 — 13 years late, and the case also featured murders of witnesses and shredded evidence.

Germans once used to refer to Nächstenliebe — to love your brother as yourself. This principle is what once differentiated the German CDU — the Christian Democratic Party — from their economic policy brethren, American Republicans. But while the economics may be similar, for American Republicans Nächstenliebe is a bunch of lefty hooey.

Unfortunately this now seems to be what’s happening in Germany as well. “The lack of empathy is a real problem,” Bob told me. Discrimination is quite common against Muslims, in all same the ways it is with Blacks in America. A woman with a non-German name will be told, “This job is not right for you.” The same often applies to those with Slavic names “but they can more easily change or alter their names.” Although the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) prohibits this type of discrimination, it has to be constantly monitored and reported. “You have to fight for the rights you already have,” Bob stressed.

The future isn’t totally gloomy, though. Bob told me that the village of Hainichen, in Saxony, is only 9,000 people but has opened its doors and its hearts to refugees. “It’s a hero village,” he smiled. But like everything in Germany, there’s a bit more to the story. More than a few of Hainichen’s residents remember — Hainichen was one of the Third Reich’s earliest concentration camps.

History can be learned and changed. Or it will be repeated.

Warm regards,
David

Formulas make bad movies in any language

October 14, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Tonight I had a notion to watch a good movie at the neighborhood theater. But the Dartmouth AMC theater at home doesn’t usually show my sort of thing, and neither did the Alhambra Cineplex in Wedding:

Here’s what was playing tonight. Sad to say, but movie formulas make bad movies in any language. But it was interesting that the intended audience for many films was not assumed to all be native German speakers:

Warm regards,
David

Die Liberale Synagoge

October 15, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

This morning I went to shul. Jewish readers will know at once that this means synagogue, but German readers may wonder at the similarity to the word Schule (school). In Jewish life at one time they were one in the same. As soon as I had written and expressed a desire to visit, I was invited to attend by no less than four people. There is a constant police presence at the synagogue, so I had a little trouble getting in until I showed one of the officers an email from someone he knew. Once in the building, I went through an airport-style security screening.

The foundation stone for die Liberale Synagoge was laid in 1859 after it was designed by Karl Heinrich Knoblauch. After Knoblauch became sick, construction continued under the supervision of Friedrich August Stüler. When Stüler was unable to continue, the work resumed under Knoblauch’s son, Heinrich Gustav. A slew of engineers and specialists finally completed the work on November 6, 1866, and there was a face-lift in 1901. But in 1938 die Liberale Synagoge was torched by the Nazis and subsequently bombed in 1943 by the Allies. Yet somehow it was meant to survive. Renovation began in 1988 and in 1991 the work was complete.

The plaque on the building (in the first picture) reads:

This synagogue is 100 years old and was set on fire on the 9th of November 1938 ON KRISTALLNACHT by the Nazis. During the Second World War 1939-1945 it was destroyed by bombing in 1943. The face of this House of God should remain a site of warning and memory for all time. NEVER FORGET IT. The Board of the Jewish Congregation of Greater Berlin. September 1956.

The congregation I was visiting is the Masorti Jewish congregation on Orangienburger Straße near Tucholkystraße. Both the rabbi, Gesa Ederberg, and the hazzan (cantor), Avitall Gerstetter, are women, and both received training in the United States. The congregation is egalitarian and very welcoming. The hazzan explained to me that the return of Masorti Judaism in Germany owes a lot to their American Jewish cousins. For non-Jewish readers, Masorti Judaism preserves a lot of tradition but is not Orthodox.

My instructions were to go up the elevator and hang a left, so I followed some people who were doing just that. I introduced myself as a visitor to a couple of people, one of whom turned out to be the cantor. I was greeted by a friendly young man who offered me a Chumash (bible) in either German or English, and a Siddur (prayer book) in either language as well. The Chumash was Etz Hayim with its familiar deep red cover.

I got a little confused whenever the rabbi shot out page numbers almost simultaneously in German and English. Peeking over people’s shoulders didn’t help much either because everyone was in the zone, doing their own thing, on their own page. But they all were singing the same words, and beautifully too. I can’t recall a moment in the service where anyone merely read Hebrew. It was always sung, and by more than a few skilled singers who added harmony. The cantor also had a lovely voice. Even in the prayers that followed lunch, everything was sung — at length. It was incredibly musical, and very moving.

And although I’m not wired for prayer myself, I know that everyone in that room was doing all they could to please God.

As everywhere today, the Torah portion this morning was Ha’azinu: Deuteronomy 32:1-52. Somewhere in the middle of the portion, God seems to rather harshly command Moses to go die on the mountain he is climbing. He tells Moses he will only be able to see from afar where his efforts will eventually lead. In the rabbi’s D’var Torah (words) after the parsha (part of the reading), which she gave in German, she observed that many of us never get to see the fruition of our work — and she gave some contemporary political examples — but that we still keep at it. It’s what we do. Idealism or faith — whatever you choose to call it — can be a pretty good thing.

And then I thought of all the people who had worked at keeping this very building alive for 150 years, and all those who had kept trying to re-establish a Jewish community in Germany.

At lunch I found a table with a father who had brought his three year-old to shul. He was from Hungary, his wife from Russia. We talked for quite a while, then I said I really should go thank the rabbi for the invitation. But before he let me go he invited me to Shabbat dinner next week.

Like my lunch companion, the congregation is young, and it numbers about 200, though today the number was between 40 and 50. “Post Yom Kippur fatigue,” someone joked. An overwhelming majority are English-speaking, from the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. But I also talked to people from France and Hungary, and I assume many more European states are represented. Germany’s “Right of Return” law for Jews has brought back the grandchildren of Holocaust victims. I asked a young ex-New Yorker who was doing a master’s degree here how she liked Berlin. “I love it, but I know it’s not like the rest of Germany.” She told me her father respected her decision to come to Berlin but he had only visited her once because Germany brings up such strong feelings for him.

And then I thought of that parsha again.

Warm regards,
David

IKEA

October 16, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today I had arranged to have lunch with a man about my age from Syria and he asked me to meet him at IKEA. Who knew IKEA had a cafeteria with really inexpensive food? Getting out to Pankow took a while, undoubtedly longer than an experienced Berliner would have required. The part of Pankow I visited reminded me of Canton (MA), Warwick (RI), or King of Prussia (PA). My lunch buddy was not the only one who thought of this:

We talked for about five hours over too many coffees, than it got late and I went my way as he queued up to pay for his kitchen gear. Getting back to the Schnellbahn took me through more industrial park, a long walk over a freeway, and then finally to the station. I was getting lost and a bit desperate when a couple who turned out to be Iranian and Palestinian took mercy on the clearly lost foreigner and walked me right to my platform.

The Iranian lady and I chatted about her sister studying in Boston, her own studies in Heidelberg, and how Heidelberg had really changed.

A lot has changed in this country of 80 million.

Warm regards,
David

Alternative für Deutschland – no interviews

October 17, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

One of my goals when coming to Germany was to see where the Far Right was headed. I was advised by a number of people to avoid the NPD and PEGIDA, both of which use violence. I heeded their advice. However, I really wanted to meet with Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD. It’s a new party that popped up rather recently, in 2013, and has gotten about 12% of the vote in Berlin. Politically, it has an ultraconservative economic program, but culturally it appeals to the same neo-Nazis who fill the NPD (which is declining in political influence) and PEGIDA.

The AfD is on its way to becoming what the Republican party has already transformed into.

While the left and center parties in Germany are pretty bunt — brightly colored (i.e., multicultural), the AfD is as lily white (and old) as the Republican Party. Here, for example, is the party leadership in Berlin:

In the United States, most of the “Tea Parties” that eventually took control of the Republican Party are xenophobic and racist organizations. The NAACP did a study in 2010 which showed that six out of seven were brimming with neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. But Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks Tea Party appealed to voters more on economic terms, although Mexicans and “Welfare Queens” were soon identified as the root cause of all our economic woes.

I thought of this when I contacted the AfD. Do they deserve the benefit of the doubt if, really, they are all just free market fundamentalists like Dick Armey? Hmmm. But I also wanted to find out how their platform applied to immigrants, refugees, and Germany’s own poor — all of whom receive benefits under the Harz IV program. I wanted to know about their foreign policy (they hate the EU but love NATO). How do they really feel about multiculturalism? (One party leader said it belongs on a manure pile).

So for the last two weeks I have contacted the AfD four times for interviews — or even just a chat — anything. Recently I received an email from the Berlin office telling me they wanted me to submit questions in writing, which I then did:

From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de&gt; date: 10/10/2016 9:17 AM Subject: RE: Request for an interview

Dear Mr. Ehrens,

thanks for your request for an interview with Mrs. von Storch and your interest in the AfD policy in Berlin.

Unfortunately it is very hard to make an appointment with Mrs. Storch in the next few weeks, so I suggest we prepare the appointment by clarifying some details.

1. For which magazine or newspaper do you work?
2. Which policy field are you interested in?
3. What will be the questions, Mrs. von Storch will have to answer.

For more information and to answer your questions, please contact me by email.

Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. press officer to Beatrix von Storch, MEP Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40

Accordingly, I jumped through Frau Axtmann’s hoops and put a number questions to Frau von Storch, which were all based on the party’s platform:

http://afd.berlin/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/AfD_Leitlinien_2015_DE.pdf

But I guess they didn’t like my questions All I got was a wish for a fun time in Old Germany:

From: Lydia Axtmann <…@beatrixvonstorch.de&gt; date: 10/17/2016 11:17 AM Subject: Re: Request for an interview

Dear Mr. Ehrens,

thanks for your e-mail. Unfortunately it is not possible to meet Mrs. Storch because of other appointments she has to meet. Maybe it is possible to meet her when you are in Germany next time. We are very sorry for giving you a negative answer.

Nevertheless we hope you will enjoy your stay in Berlin.

Kind regards Lydia Axtmann

Lydia Axtmann, Ass. iur. Presse & Kommunikation Abgeordnetenbüro Beatrix von Storch Zionskirchstraße 3 10119 Berlin Tel: +49 30 24 33 97 40 Mobil: +49 170 3 55 25 67

What’s clear to me is that the AfD is good at curating its image, avoiding being seen as the same overt racists and violent thugs the other far-right groups unapologetically represent.

No, what the AfD says is that it simply has an economic platform, and if it happens to offend people — like the lazy parasites that get help from the state, or the shiftless foreigners who come here to suck jobs away from real Germans — well, screw Political Correctness! We’re just telling it like it really is.

Sound familiar?

Warm regards,
David

Sounds

October 18, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Nothing new in the store. Just a steady flow of customers from morning to mid-afternoon. I thought you might like to “hear” what I hear every day – the whirr of people speaking in a dozen different languages, and the sounds of little children making the sounds that little children make everywhere…

Warm regards,
David

Turmstraße

October 19, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

The LaGeSo (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales – Department of Health and Human Services) and Moabit Hilft, where I am volunteering, both have an address on Turmstraße (tower street). The street — so says a sign as you exit the subway — is so named because you can see church towers (and also a court’s tower) all up and down the street.

Within the same complex there are a number of private organizations, and throughout Berlin there are hundreds, many of them run by either the Lutheran church which is stronger in Northern Germany, or to a lesser extent by the Catholic church. There is more than a little irony in the fact that, despite widespread xenophobia, so many Christians have stepped up to help people who are predominantly Muslims.

Several people told me of a Christian concept called Nächstenliebe — loving your neighbor as yourself. It sounded like something New Testament-y until I looked up the line in which the German word appears — only to discover it’s actually from the Torah:

You shall neither take revenge from nor bear a grudge against the members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 18:19).

And when the Torah says “I am the Lord,” it’s not just a suggestion — it’s the law.

I keep hearing about the EJF, the Evangelisches Jugend- und Fürsorgewerk (Lutheran Youth and Welfare) — and this being Northern Germany, I wanted to find out what they were up to with refugees. I wrote them several emails which were never answered, but then discovered the reason: they had moved their offices. So I tracked down and stopped by the new office one morning to see whom I might run into. A security guard told me to come back on Wednesday morning at 8:00 am and maybe someone could help. It sounded rather unlikely — but why not?

So this morning, at 8:00 am in a cold rain, I stepped into the vestibule of the EJF offices with a group of soggy refugees who were all there for social service counseling. I explained (to a different guard this time) that I was hoping to ask an administrator a few questions and — amazingly — he said, “follow me.” After about twenty minutes of being shuffled around by various staff, a young woman came out into the hall. I apologized for ambushing them and said I knew they were probably quite busy. “Yes, actually this is a really bad time,” she said like a true Berliner, “but why don’t you send me your questions and I will give them to my colleague.” So that I did, and I hope to have the responses for you soon.

The EJF was busy taking care of people who needed their time a lot more than I did.

While even fiscally-conservative Germans are doing something for refugees, our American Republicans are running away from basic human responsibility. Loving your neighbor may be the gold standard in whatever religion most of them profess, but the GOP can’t even manage the low bar when they demonize Muslims:

You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow, but you shall not bear a sin on his account. (Leviticus 18:18).

Warm regards,
David

Die Quäker

October 20, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Tonight I visited the Quaker Meeting in Berlin. It was even the correct night (see my post from October 13).

To get there from Wedding, you take the U6 subway and walk a bit. Easy peasey. I’m beginning to feel like I almost live here, but Saturday I have to move again — so this will mean learning another subway line.

At 6:30 pm the city is still crowded, and the subway reminds me not so much of a rat race as a stockyard:

After coming up from the Friedrichstraße subway I arrived at the Meeting, not far from the train station and not far from the Spree River, in a lovely courtyard. I rang the bell and the door was opened by Gisela Faust, who at 91 is old enough to remember the Nazi era, and young enough to keep up with the young Friends who participate in a bi-weekly Gesprächskreis (conversation circle).

Gisela told me that there are about 250 Quakers in all of Germany, and about 20 in Berlin. The Berlin Meeting follows devotional practices like those I have visited in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. It is distnguished by Stille Andacht (silent worship). There is a Yearly Meeting for all of Germany, a German-language Quaker magazine, and book distribution. The Meeting also hosts a wartime research archive, paid for with support from American Quakers, which helps pay the rent.

Because the Berlin Meeting welcomes visitors, I assumed tonight’s conversation would be a social or some broad ethical topic. Not quite. It actually turned out to be a Quaker study circle. After more than a year, the seven participants had made a considerable dent in a book called Quäker Glaube und Wirken (Quaker Belief and Practice) and were now at chapter 20.72 — a paragraph on conflict resolution.

Quakers in Germany have a long history and a short history. The long history dates back to the 17th Century, before many emigrated to North America. The short history goes back to World War I, when the Society of Friends, as they are formally known, were just about the only religious organization to help Germans, who like everyone else were traumatized by the war. Even a decade after the war German children were still starving, so the Quakers set up stations that fed almost a million children. From this act of kindness Quakerism again took root in Germany.

In 1938 the very same Meeting where we were sipping tea, which is only two blocks from the Friedrichstraße train station, handled last-minute emigration requests for 10,000 Jewish children to be sent to England on what were called Kindertransporte. Later, when there was not much that could be done to help Jews, Quakers hid them and some Quakers paid the ultimate price for this “crime.”

We sat around the kitchen table drinking our tea, slowly going through each paragraph. Rather than dwelling on the nature of conflict, many of the discussions were about recognizing the truth in what someone says, working to see the world through their eyes, or the impossibility of this always happening. One woman related her experience in the criminal justice system, a man discussed how difficult it was for his father to be known as the “impartial” one, one woman talked about how difficult it was to tell a suicidal co-worker that there was hope without minimizing the difficulties of recovery. Another talked about a complex child custody case, another the challenges of marriage.

Words were parsed, personal experiences shared, but then we got to a quote with a cryptic sentence: “Unless you speak the truth there will never be love.” Hmm. Maybe those Quakers knew what that meant. Things were just starting to get interesting — the quote at least demanded some attention — but, no, it was precisely 8:00 pm in Germany, and suddenly books were closed, coats pulled on, scarves wrapped around necks — and before I knew it two of my photographic subjects had escaped into the cool city night. But I did manage to get a picture of Gisela with three of the kitchen table circle before she locked up for the night (note the jackets; they too were plotting their escapes).

Out on the street one of the young women in the group said that she had been to a Quaker meeting in Ohio. From this I gathered she had decided to be a Quaker herself, so I asked her what drew her to it.

“Oh, no. I grew up in this Meeting,” she said. “My whole family is Quaker.”

Warm regards,
David

Spandau

October 21, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

On my visit to the Orangienburg synagogue I was invited to spend Friday night (erev shabbat) in Spandau with a Hungarian-Russian couple, their three year old son, a bubbe (grandmother), and an aunt. There was a lot of singing of Yiddish songs before the meal and (as had been the case in synagogue) virtually every Shabbat prayer was sung. The dinner conversation centered around the right turn of European and American politics. I had a lovely evening.

To get to Spandau my fastest option was by train:

Who doesn’t love trains?

Compared with the center of Berlin, Spandau has a relaxed, old-timey feeling:

There is a lot of open space:

And a canal runs through the old part of town:

The streets are picturesque in the same cobblestoned way that downtown New Bedford (MA) is:

A quarter of Spandau is from somewhere else. Spandau is equally Slavic and Middle Eastern, many Russians live in the borough, the neighborhood Catholic church has services in Polish, and Turks have long been fixtures of the community — and now the refugees are coming. I snapped this picture of a group of young Arab men on a street corner — maybe you can make out the name…

Warm regards,
David

Moving Day (#3)

October 22, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Today I bid a fond farewell to Wedding and the U6 subway line, which has served me well in getting around the city. Sometime in the next few hours I will (hopefully) hear from my next AirBnb host and will be off — back — to Moabit. Communication is not my new host’s strong suit, so my day is kind of a mess.

I had hoped to move into my new digs and then scoot off to a conference organized by Junge Islam Konferenz. Among other things, the morning session promised a Muslim feminist, an imam who organized an LGBTQ mosque, and a Far Right blogger with a Youtube following — all the panelists discussing the integration of Muslims into German society and the EU. It would have been really interesting:

But while all this is going on I’ll be waiting for the call that will get me into my next apartment.

Next week is my last week in Berlin. As things draw to a close I will be working a bit on a writing project, then will be traveling to Dettelbach in Franconia to visit the family of our former exchange student. Then home.

The German Book Prize was announced a few days ago, and many of the titles looked interesting, but I have probably already exceeded the weight allowance for my return flight. Since I couldn’t meet with the AfD, I settled for a book by Hajo (Hans Joachim) Funke, an expert on the extreme Right. I had actually been in contact with Lamya Kaddor and had hoped to meet her, but I’m settling for her very engaging book on German Islamophobia. A couple of plays, a book to help me remember my German grammar, and a book on Germany’s “forgotten generation” — all this should hold me for a while.

Someday I hope to return to the excitement and the linguistic smorgasbord of Berlin — but as of this minute I’m really looking forward to returning to my quiet little house on the Massachusetts coast and my wonderful family and friends.

And voting.

Warm regards,
David

East and West, and Sunshine

October 23, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Yesterday was a day of moving from one AirBnb to another. I checked into my new place, which is on the sixth floor of an apartment building. Looking out my window I could see people making dinner, working at their computers, having animated conversations, all of us wrapped in the anonymity of night.

I’m not a morning person — what with all that light and the cruel early hour — and when I woke up, the magic was gone. The blinking red lights from the night before were simply part of a construction crane. And it was another Sunday in Berlin — pretty much everything closed — and one either reads the paper, has friends over, goes out to eat, or goes to a museum. I chose the latter.

When I was in Berlin in 2014 the Stasi Museum was closed. But I decided to go there this morning. For people who don’t know what the Stasi is — it was the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst — those nice people who looked out for East Germans’ safety and well-being. Looking out for the lives of others was what they did. Similar organizations exist in every country — the NSA, FBI, GCHQ, even Germany’s present-day BND. Homeland Security.

East Berlin isn’t “East Berlin” anymore, but there is something spare and just a little bleaker than the rest of the city.

The east half bears the fingerprints of both Communism and advanced Capitalism:

The Stasi museum is quite easy to get to from the subway:

And I imagine it’s never looked so good:

Outside there is a display with the chronology of the rise and fall of the East German state in picture form. I snapped those. I also took photos inside the museum itself. Of those photos.

As I entered the museum, I joked with the man at the counter — Die Gedanken sind frei, aber der Eintritt nicht — thoughts are free, but not entry to the museum. He joked back — only good people with good thoughts could enter; everyone else was in deep shit.

Which was pretty much the story of East Germany.

After the war, an altruistic Soviet Union was supposed to guide East Germans in creating a worker’s paradise:

Only it didn’t quite work out that way. No surprise: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a dictatorship. People were miserable. The tattoo on the man’s back, for example, reads — Only when I’m dreaming am I free.

Within short order, East Germany became a police state. As you tour the Stasi offices, you’re shocked by how bland, bureaucratic, systematized, automated, and widespread the surveillance was. This wasn’t a spy museum with secret codes, disappearing ink, and agents in trench coats. This was the nerve center of something that put half the country under observation. For their own good.

I met a group of students from Yorkshire, England, who had come with their teachers for an enrichment program. They were shaking their heads in disbelief. I asked one of their teachers if they were equally shocked at the GCHQ and Britain’s ubiquitous CCTV cameras. He winced and said, “yeah…”

It didn’t take long for East Germany fall to pieces. In the United States we like to believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due to Ronald Reagan’s persistent anti-Soviet efforts — or our good old-fashioned American out-spending the Evil Empire until it went bankrupt.

But the truth is — from the very beginning East Germans wanted their freedom and organized relentlessly for it. Rallies, manifestos, citizen groups, covert groups, demonstrations, petitions, candle-light vigils — all the peaceful means at citizens’ disposal, and occasionally not-so-peaceful means. But the same thing was happening in other Soviet satellite nations, too.

Finally the wall came down.

A huge number of East Germans flooded into West Germany — and they were housed and fed…

And Germans welcomed them… just as they have (sometimes begrudgingly) welcomed today’s refugees.

On my way home, I looked on my Google Maps and noticed that my apartment — at the bottom of Moabit, a block from the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station — is also within walking distance of the heart of the German government.

After an 8-minute walk I got a photo of Angela Merkel’s offices:

This is the parliament building, three minutes from the Chancellor’s offices:

And this is a huge government annex right next to the parliament:

As I walked up to the Reichstag, the parliament, there was music and someone was speaking. They had erected a huge display arguing that Germany doesn’t exist — it’s still in the hands of a shadowy group. Perhaps the Illuminati?

I walked toward the annex building and ran into two women about my age who were warming themselves in the first sunshine anyone has seen around here for — well, since I got here. One of them told me that anyone could exercise their Constitutional rights on the green — even the crazies. We chatted about Trump and Hillary — and she seemed worried that the American election was going to be so close, so I showed her the current polling. We talked about Angela Merkel and sunshine woman said she thought Merkel was a decent Christian and hoped Merkel would have a third term.

“Merkel and Clinton — how about that,” I said. She straightened right up: “It’s time for the women.”

As I got ready to walk back “home” behind me I noticed a token police presence at the edge of the Reichstag.

A state governs by consent of the governed. But sometimes it does without consent. And, then again, it also protects us from the crazies.

Democracy.

Warm regards,
David

Goodbye for now

October 24, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

There are still about ten days before I return home, but my letters will be ending tonight for a couple of reasons.

One is that I am now in a routine of going to my volunteer job every day — catching the #123 bus and stopping at my favorite Turkish breakfast joint before arriving at the center. Nothing so interesting about that. Another is that I am donating my laptop this Wednesday, so writing long text won’t be so easy. I’ve never made the easy transition to mobile devices. Yeah, I know. That makes me old. Nolo contendere.

Besides my personal reasons for coming here, Germany is in many ways a mirror of our own nation. It has been fascinating trying to understand where things stand here in terms of politics and culture — as much as anyone, especially a foreigner, can ever hope to in a few short weeks. But all the same issues are surfacing both here and in the US, and for many of the same reasons. It has been a privilege to have had some great conversations with people who love to discuss politics as much as I do.

The Stasi Museum I visited yesterday had a rack of handouts, human rights brochures, interesting tidbits about the DDR (East Germany), and a newsletter called Der Stacheldraht (The Barbed Wire). It’s aptly named — in many ways it’s barbed and bitter, as victims of the Stasi probably have every right to be.

The brochure on life in the DDR had this tidbit:

To excape this all-pervasive political and social control, many East Germans withdrew into their private lives — so far as this was possible and tolerated… The dacha and the Trabi with a roof tent are examples in the exhibition of this withdrawal.

What was the Trabi roof tent? Someone figured out a way to stick a tent on the top of one of the ridiculously underpowered, stinking little bathtubs. Perhaps it was the East German version of Wal*Mart, NASCAR, Facebook, or Reality TV.

We all have our ways of withdrawing from the world.

I never heard back from the AfD — but in the Stacheldraht newsletter I picked up, I found this:

We once heard from statesmen like De Gaulle, Adenauer, Brandt, and Kohl, to name a few, who used to described the European Union as a union of homelands, all peacefully united in their own democratic traditions. But today this sounds a whole lot different. Now we’re headed, without anyone clearly saying it, toward a European State. Those who feel things have gone too far — those who want to preserve their own national sovereignty, who want to remain Germans, Frenchmen, Danes, Italians, Greeks, etc. — are called reactionary nationalists or relics. And if they point toward the centuries-old Christian tradition to which their country belongs, or dare to call it “the dominant culture,” there’s not much more to say than that they’ve joined the ranks of cultural arsonists.

Here is a glimpse (whether we agree with it or not) of why some former citizens of East Germany (and maybe some of our own emigres) might see the EU as just another Soviet Union. Besides the loss of their German nationality within a Soviet system, the USSR/DDR also denigrated the culture and religion that many valued — including Merkel, also an East German, whose father was a minister. So in many ways the sudden and inexplicable alliance between some former Communists and the Far Right is maybe not so inexplicable after all.

Warm regards,
David

Reichsburger

October 25, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

I’m sorry to annoy anyone by “un-quitting” sending you letters, but this is a correction. And maybe not auf Wiedersehen, either, because I’m doing this on an iPad.

The other day I posted a picture of a conspiracy theorist at the Reichstag (never a good combination) without realizing who and what he really was. As I was reading the newspaper today, it described a new phenomenon in Germany called the “Reichburger” — a “Citizen of the Reich” or what in the USA is called a “Sovereign citizen.” That’s what this is:

One of these Citizens of the Reich shot a policeman in Franconia last week, and in Bavaria two policemen were fired for being involved with these groups. In Sachsen-Anhalt three policemen were also recently canned. The Berlin Police Department has circulated documents internally meant to help officers recognize other officers who many be involved.

The Berliner Zeitung says that an estimated 100 Citizens of the Reich are active in Berlin. Some are anti-Semitic. Others hold fantastic conspiracy theories, “such as, that Adolf Hitler took off with a contingent of aircraft at the end of the Second World War, heading to the Arctic, where they built the nation of ‘New Schwabenland.'”

Laughable were it not for their weapons and their hate.

Another American import to Germany is the KKK, which first appeared in the 1920’s — before Hitler took power. There are now four separate Klans here. Since 2001 they have been involved in 68 hate crimes. At least one police officer in Baden-Wuerttemberg is known to have been involved with the Klan.

The “Right Turn” in Europe and America gets more interesting by the minute.

Warm regards,
David

Prison

October 29, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

I was out for a walk last night and ran into my friendly neighborhood prison. In the US, our prisons are usually way the hell out of town, where no upstanding citizens have to think about crime — and they are also difficult institutions for the families of prisoners to visit.

This one, on Alt-Moabit Strasse, is right across the street from a daycare.

That got me wondering about prisons in Germany, about the number of people incarcerated, but particularly the percentage of citizens sitting in jail. I easily found this document (in English) on the Berlin Prisons website, which describes how treatment programs are developed for inmates.

Berlin Prison Document (English)

When an inmate leaves prison in Germany, they have a support system to reintegrate into society, not just $100 and a bus ticket to nowhere.

In contrast, the United States incarcerates almost 9 times more people per 100,000 than Germany, and recidivism is much higher because we never treat the causes of criminal behavior, and we actually make it more difficult for him to function in the world to which he returns:

Can a nation like ours, with so many people behind bars, truly be called a democracy?

Warm regards,
David

Trains to Death, or Trains to Life

October 31, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

Throughout Germany there are Stolpersteine — literally, stumble-stones. They are usually memorials to people who were hauled off to concentration camps or who died at the hands of the Nazis. One reads: “Here lived Ida Arensberg. née Benjamin – 1870 – deported 1942. Murdered in Theresienstadt on 18.9.1942.”

History is hard not to notice here.

This morning I went down to Friedrichstraße because I have worn out my shoes, and there is a Clark’s, a Timberland, a Shoe City, and a bunch of other retail shoe stores. I was not really thinking about the time change — even after specifically talking to Deborah about it the night before — but I had forgotten to change the time on my watch. For younger readers, the watch was an error-prone personal analog device that people in the 20th century once used to tell time.

So there I was, wandering around a half hour before any of the shoe stores actually opened. I ducked back into the train station to get a coffee, and there on the outside of the building I noticed a couple of historical plaques.

The very same train station — now with both a McDonald’s and a Burger King — had once been used to transport Jews to their deaths:

And, as I mentioned in the letter about the Quakers, the Friedrichstraße station was also used to save the lives of about 10,000 children by sending them on Kindertransporte to England:

The Germans, for all their dark history, at least look it in the eye everyday.

I wonder when the day will come that Americans will have our own Stolpersteine to acknowledge slavery, lynchings, shootings, prisons, torture, genocide, and all the wars of choice — our own dark legacy.

Warm regards,
David

So it begins

November 13, 2016

Dear Friends and Family,

So it begins.

Today President-elect Trump announced that he was going to follow through on his campaign pledge to round up millions of people he claims are “criminals” and deport them. We haven’t seen mass-deportations like this since the Thirties. And it wasn’t just Nazi Germany where this occurred.

The measure of any society is not how much power one group can wield against others. Only a compassionate society that cares for and respects its own citizens — and the rights of those who come to it for help — is worthy of our respect.

And when a government turns its back on the helpless, becoming a force of injustice, it is our responsibility to step forward and do what we can as individuals.

I am very grateful to Moabit Hilft in Berlin for the month I spent there meeting refugees and the people who care about them. Please consider making a contribution:

Donate to Moabit Hilft

Closer to home, the New Bedford Immigrant’s Assistance Center is going to need our help from this moment forward. Those in our community who have become our friends and people we care about — they desperately need our help right now:

Donate to Immigrants Assistance Center

It’s time to get off our asses and do something about this mess. This certainly isn’t the nation I want to live in.

Warm regards,
David

Dear Friends and Family,

I dropped out of Facebook a couple of years ago and do miss keeping up with people. But I’m not sure either Mr. Zuckerberg or the NSA have my best interests in mind, so I prefer to go low-tech or retro. No, I’m not talking about hand-written letters. Just ole-fashioned email.

For the last few years we have spent our winters in warm places like Mexico and New Mexico. This year we decided to stay close to home and see if global warming might work in our favor. So far, so good, but we’ll know around February just how good an idea it really was. But winter here is beautiful…

One thing about sticking around for the winter is that it provides continuity and opportunities to commit to things year-round. Since leaving the computer world, I’ve gotten rid of almost all my computer books (anybody want the rest?) and have been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to write. Letters to the editor flow easily from responses to the daily insanity all around us. Plays and fiction, however, are much more difficult.

Telling stories people want to watch, or read, requires a lot of skill, patience, practice, and observation of humans as they go about their business. Needless to say, a career in computers did not completely prepare me for this. Still, I do have things to say and – as a Boston writer who began in his seventies told me recently – after you retire there’s really only one deadline.

Besides writing, I have been volunteering. Last year I took a training class to learn how to teach English as a Second Language and I’m now putting it to good use at New Bedford’s Adult Learning Center – part of the city schools for adults returning to earn high school equivalency degrees and for immigrants to learn English. I really like it a lot. It has all the perks of teaching – watching people light up when they finally understand something – and none of the downside – classroom management or detailed lesson planning.

On Mondays I work with two separate groups of 4-6 students on some aspect of high school equivalency – English or Math, generally. I work from existing lesson plans and just add my 2c worth. Tuesdays and Wednesdays I work with students whose native languages are Vietnamese, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Portuguese and Spanish. I get a kick out of speaking Spanish (mine isn’t too awful), Portuguese (which is pretty atrocious), and resurrecting my French.

In addition to all the other things she does, Deborah continues to do great photography. You can see what she’s up to at http://debehrens.com/. Since she does not share my tin-foil hat, semi-Luddite sentiments, she is on Facebook and I presume everyone is already up-to-date on what she had for breakfast this morning.

Amelia just graduated from Bentley University with an MBA and a master’s in marketing analytics and starts a new job in September after doing some travel and improving her Spanish. The plan is to move to Philadelphia and commute to work in Wilmington, Delaware. She and Deborah had a chance to travel to Iceland together last Fall and we have some great pictures of the both of them looking like serious outdoorswomen with their ice picks, standing on glaciers that will not be around in 50 years. You can download a PDF version of the book that Deborah did after the trip.

Ben graduated with a degree in economics from the University of Puget Sound and worked for a couple of tech companies in Utah before concluding that office life is not for him. He did some traveling and thinking about the future over the summer – to India and then Portugal, where I met him after he had been there for six weeks. He’s currently looking for work that doesn’t involve life in a cubicle.

Ben and I traveled for two weeks through Portugal and Spain together. How many dads get to do this with their grown sons? Portugal was beautiful and the people were really nice, but I can’t speak Portuguese very well. It was obvious I was a tourist and I didn’t really get a sense of confidence back until we had arrived in Spain, where I can handle the language. I had forgotten to get an international driver’s license, so Ben did all the driving for a week – which was just as well because the rotaries in Spain are even more terrifying than the ones in Boston.

We used AirBnb instead of hotels, which turned out to be really great and inexpensive. The people we met were really nice, and we ended up staying in Cartagena with a couple who owned a gallery in town. I would go back to Cartagena in a heartbeat, and I really liked Valencia too, although it is a very busy city. But at 2:00pm it’s as if the lights have gone out. Boom! Siesta. Things don’t resume until 4:45. In a cascade of clock time, dinner is then later and people then stay up till the wee hours, even taking their kids to toddler-friendly bars (if you can imagine such a thing). Barcelona was interesting, busy, and filled with things to see and do too, but it seemed to be more weary and sad than Valencia.

We got to the Barcelona airport early one morning and both departed within 15 minutes of each other. Ben went back to the States via Stockholm, and I went on to Berlin – a city that’s been on my “bucket list” for some time. I don’t have much talent for videos, epublications, or photos, but I managed to put together a slide show with some highlights of my trip.

Going on to Germany by myself was a good thing. I had lived and worked in Germany in the 1970s and, though I keep up somewhat by reading, I have had very few opportunites to speak the language. I wanted to see some plays auf Deutsch and I did. One, Tape, was merely OK, even though the actress, Nina Hoss, was famous even outside Germany. But the other play, Verrücktes Blut, was outstanding. In it, a group of immigrant high-schoolers practically terrorizes their sweet little German teacher. A gun falls from someone’s backpack, the teacher grabs it and holds the students hostage, and they are forced to act out Schiller’s Die Räuber as both teacher and students learn something about multiculturalism. The play was stunning, excellent, and the acting was as well. The cast came out for maybe 10 curtain calls.

You can’t go anywhere in Berlin without running into history – whether it’s Prussian, Nazi, East German, artistic, literary, scientific or Jewish. The Jewish museum is built at odd angles and the whole effect is disorienting. There is one exhibit in which you trudge through a roomful of metal disks making a terrific clanging, hammering sound. If you look down you notice each disk was cut by torch into the face of a person. As you look out before you, there is a veritable sea of humanity being walked upon. Most of the exhibits, though, inform younger Germans how the Holocaust happened and remind them of the huge loss of a part of their society.

I had many great conversations with my AirBnb host who gave me a tour of Kreuzberg (sort of the Berkeley or Cambridge of Berlin). And as you walk around the city, you hear every language spoken. It is an incredibly cosmopolitan city, and Berliners are proud that it is – once again. As always, people are people. I was in a rush to catch a bus to an Eastern district where an old Soviet park had been built. I arrived at the bus stop where the driver was having a smoke. I asked him if this was where one catches the so-and-so bus. Was? Kein Guten Tag? What? No Howdy Do? he asked. Having appropriately busted my chops, I apologized for my brusqueness and then – I was 20 minutes early – we had a long conversation about life in East Germany, where he had lived before the wall came down. When it was time to get going he told me to sit behind him and he’d tell me exactly where to get out of the bus to find the Soviet memorial. Otherwise you’ll miss it. You can’t go anywhere in Berlin without running into history.

And so I’m here for the winter, I think of it as being in experimental mode. But I’m surrounded by family and friends, and have interesting and meaningful things to do. That’s almost the definition of blessed.

I hope 2015 brings you the same blessings, health and Peace and Goodwill – though experience says hoping for these last two is a bit unreasonable.

Well, the hell with it. Here’s to a Happy and Healthy 2015 – and unreasonable expectations!

With warm regards,

David

I have only walked out of one play in my entire life.

“House,” by Daniel McIvor, would have been the second — if I had been able to extricate myself, unnoticed, from the tiny theater. For 85 minutes I winced at the dated, misogynist, and gratuitously oddball humor of the playwright, delivered by an otherwise capable actor.

It was painful and it was embarrassing.

One of the great things about San Miguel de Allende is the number of Canadians who, at times, seem to outnumber their American Gringo compañeros. Because of this, we sheltered estadounidenses are exposed to playwrights like Norm Foster, for example, who otherwise go unnoticed in the US. Daniel McIvor is another.

Yet on this particular night, while the largely Canadian audience was roaring with laughter, I found the play so totally devoid of humor and pathos that I wondered if there just might be a distinctly Canadian sense of humor I couldn’t grasp.

The experience did have a silver lining, however. When I get home, these tickets are going up on my bulletin board to remind me that there really are plays much worse than my own first steps in this craft.

Jerry L. Kastenbaum
Coatesville, PA

Dear Jerry,

As we get older we look back on the sometimes strange paths our lives have taken, the odd choices we have made, fortuitous and tragic events that have shaped it, and the many people we have encountered on the way who – sometimes without knowing it themselves – said something or did something that took us down a different road.

I am retired now and volunteer as a tutor at an urban school, and I was thinking about this, mainly in the context of the 5^th graders I work with, and the group of volunteers who come twice a week, sometimes just to give the kids some attention. But then, of course, I realized how fortunate I myself have been to encounter the kindness of others.

Your father, Bernie, was one of the people who, probably without knowing it, changed my life. In the late Sixties I was a kid from a troubled family. Fortunately for me, at the end of the trolley tracks in Media, your father had opened a used bookstore. For me it was more than just an escape into reading. Every time I visited his store, your father would say this or that about a book, suggest something, or sell me a bundle of books he liked. And we would talk a bit. I still have many of the books: Toynbee, Malinowski, Malamud, literature, anthropology, history, politics, sociology, religion. He even sold me a Koran under protest once, describing it in somewhat unflattering terms. Without knowing it, your father opened up a world of ideas to me – ideas that were not even necessarily familiar to him – just by chatting with me, feeding and respecting the mind of some teenager he barely knew.

Our public and private sides are often different. I don’t know what kind of man he was to family and friends. Part of me hopes he was just as I imagined him: the quiet, humorous, cultured, self-deprecating pipe-smoker I encountered each time. He never seemed to have any customers, and he would joke that the store only existed because his wife needed him to get out of the house and do something. Your father’s Jewishness and the way he spoke of things may well have influenced me too. Coming from a family without religion, I became a Jew thirty-some years ago and, while not very observant, Jewish ethics express my values best and reflect what I have tried to pass on to my children.

The kindnesses of strangers – the seemingly insignificant, half-forgotten things we do for others – they are greatly underrated. They can literally change lives. You dad’s kindness changed mine. I’m so sorry I never got to tell him this personally.

Sincerely,

David Ehrens

As I get older I find myself more in touch with emotions. How did they sneak up on me with such stealth? There’s the unavoidable outrage at a nation that has lost any morality it ever had in turning its back on the poor and minorities; anger at wars, xenophobia, and the loss of human and civil rights. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of any news program to get me all worked up. I don’t think I can change. I don’t even think I want to change. But the tears are always there too. Sometimes it’s because of unexpected kindnesses or the rediscovery that humanity still insists on expressing its humanness. A young, healthy kid hauls off and gives a kidney to a perfect stranger. An anonymous person pays the rent for a family facing homelessness. Or my daughter organizes her friends to walk to raise money for breast cancer research. Even little kindnesses wash over me and I am filled with gratitude and a sense of relief that there’s still hope for us.

But always present is despair over the kind of world we are leaving behind. Look around and note the contempt with which most people hold their neighbor. We all, even the poor, may have cable television and smart cell phones, but we are all disposable – in the way that feudal serfs, child laborers in turn-of-the-century textile factories, or present-day coal miners are. The young especially are disposable, both on proliferating battlefields and on our streets.

The other day I received an email from the school where I teach one afternoon each week. It said that the older brother of one of my students had died and there would be grief counseling. This is a school where the volunteers and community feel enormous pride in, and a connection to, both the students and their families. Although I did not know my student’s brother, attending his funeral service as a sign of respect just seemed like the right thing to do for a family that is trying so hard to make a better world for each one of their children.

As I put on my “funeral” jacket, a piece of paper fell from the pocket. It was a handout from the service of a friend’s father, a man in his eighties who had lived a full and happy life surrounded by children and grandchildren and friends who cared about him. His final trip to the cemetery, the prayers said for him, the elderly veterans who presented his wife with a flag – all these elements were common to each man of his generation as he left the world on the same well-traveled path.

The funeral service for this young man was no different. The number of people in the evangelical church was astounding: his family, friends, neighbors, people from the wider community, various religious organizations, community organizers working against youth violence, even some gang members. There were Old and New Testament readings, music, benedictions, poetry, a eulogy, and one heartfelt appeal to end a cycle of violence between, literally, family members. “We’re all family here. We all have the same names.” On one side of the memorial handout was the song “Amazing Grace.” Like my friend’s elderly father, this young man also walked a well-traveled path, more tragic and much shorter.

As I paid my respects to his family and considered his senseless death, it was impossible not to be deeply moved by both the best and worst of what humans do to each other.

After the service I hugged a couple of students who were there for their classmate. As I walked over to them, my first impulse was to offer comfort, but of course things always work out to be not quite what you expect. My students knew their world better than anyone. They were the ones comforting me.

We’re at war with everyone. We spy on our own citizens. Our infrastructure is crumbling but nobody wants to pay for the upkeep. We seem headed for a police state or a prison state when we could be educating, healing, and building something together. Civil discourse is no longer civil.

Becoming a more diverse country has people worried. Nativism and Islamophobia are now the “new antisemitism.” A Presidential candidate runs openly on a platform of hate. We keep poking our noses in every country of the Middle East. We live in fear. We hate our neighbors. We’ve lost sight of what the purpose of a society is. It’s every man for himself, and the economic system isn’t working for 99% of the country.

There’s a lot to say about all this and other topics. These essays are collected from Letters to the Editor and other pieces I’ve written.