Making Jokes While Packing Medical Supplies for Ukraine

 

Four days last week, I was working in a warehouse in New Jersey, part of a team of #RazomforUkraine volunteers assembling Individual First Aid Kits (IFAKs). In total we packed more than 8,000 IFAKs last week for shipment to Ukraine during the week. We work hard filling the small packs with medical supplies, but we also have fun while we work.

On Wednesday last week, I was refilling boxes with a dozen different kinds of medical supplies while ten people assembled IFAKs.  A new volunteer noticed me grabbing boxes of supplies from different places and said, "Do you have x-ray vision or something?  How do you know what is in all these boxes?"  

I laughed and said I was there enough to know where everything is.  Which led to a the question, "What superpower would you want?  Pick one."

We then got into a discussion of the social downside of having super powers: other people get envious; you lose friends; your family starts to wonder why you are so special....

On Friday at the end of the day we were setting up three lines for assembling IFAKs.  As we lined up the supplies and boxes on the pallets, we started talking about the lines competing about who is fastest.  I was telling one of the guys that if this were the Army, the lines would definitely compete with each other and start insulting each other--saying their line was the best.  We started making up things the lines would say to each other.

On Saturday, one of the volunteers who I have worked with for weeks saw me opening boxes of cloth tape and asked if I was qualified for that job.  I told him that in the 1970s when the Army first got Photocopiers, I had to attend a three-hour class to be a qualified photocopier operator.  Once I had done that, I was definitely qualified to open rolls of tape.

Each day I volunteer, I leave the warehouse tired and happy to be part of doing to help Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invaders.  And most days, I am smiling about how much fun it is to be part of a team with a mission doing good.

Victory Day, May 9, Is Also the Day I Broke 13 of 40 Bones

May 9 is the date Russia and several former Soviet countries celebrate victory over the Nazis.  Nazi Germany unconditionally surrendered very late on May 8 which was May 9 in Moscow, which is why the rest of the Allied nations celebrate VE Day (Victory in Europe) on May 8.  

Which meant May 9 was both very good--defeated Nazis are the best Nazis--and also very bad, because May 9 is the date of my two worst bicycle accidents.  

On May 9, 2007, I broke ten bones in a 50mph crash and flown to the hospital by MEDEVAC. The story is here. On May 9, 2020, I splintered my left elbow in a low-speed crash. The surgeon had to break my lower arm to fix my upper arm.  So a third of the forty bones I have broken, I broke on May 9 on a bicycle.  

I broke four other bones in four other bicycle crashes for a total of 17.  Cars, motorcycles, football, fights and missile explosions add up 23 for a total 40 broken bones in 69 years--fewer than one per year.

Before publishing this post, I had to listen to the news from Ukraine today.  I was worried I would hear about Russia marking the anniversary with some new atrocity.  Russian President Vladimir Putin made a speech saying the war he started against Ukraine is to defend Russia.  

The Russians staged the annual parade in Moscow to showoff their military prowess. The big display always had a hollow ring, but this year with the string of defeats Ukraine inflicted on the Russian army, this year's parade sound like a defeated boxer saying "He didn't knock me out."

If I were a superstitious guy, I would stay home and watch movies today. But I will ride with my friends. There are only 365 days in a year, and more than 25,000 days in a life as long as mine. Dates are going to repeat.  

 

First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas Ricks Book 15 of 2022

 The very long title and subtitle of this book comprise a good summary of its content from beginning to end.  The founders of America were deeply influenced by the Greece and Rome, by the examples of their leaders, by their culture and by their writings.  

Thomas Ricks shows how the classical world shaped the lives and leadership of the first four American Presidents.  Each of these Presidents:  George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took very different lessons from the classical world, but that influence was evident throughout their lives and especially in their Presidencies.  

For George Washington, the only one of the first four Presidents who did not attend college, the classic world, especially the Roman Republic, was his example for how to live. He carried himself with dignity in every situation and rarely showed emotion. Only a few times during the Revolutionary War did he allow himself a public display of anger. Even fewer during his Presidency. Although he did not study the classics, the classical world was in him from his teens to the end of his life.  Even his final great act of leaving the Presidency amid a clamor for him to run again was guided by the example of Cincinnatus returning to his plow.

John Adams was vain and contrary and acerbic with little of the quiet dignity that guided Washington, but the Roman Republic guided his thinking and actions. He read and re-read Cicero and thought his times the most well-document period of ancient history:   

The period in the history of the world the best understood is that of Rome from the time of Marius to the death of Cicero, and this distinction is entirely owing to Cicero’s letters and orations. There we see the true character of the times and the passions of all the actors on the stage . . . Cicero had the most capacity and the most constant as well as the wisest and most persevering attachment to the republic. Almost fifty years ago I read Middleton’s Life of this man . . . Change the names and every anecdote will be applicable to us (the Founders). 

Thomas Jefferson, the third President, was more influenced by Ancient Greek history and culture.  For him, Athenian democracy provided the guide to all of his leadership from the writing of the Declaration of Independence to his two terms as President.  The Declaration of Independence would be an amazing document in any era or any place, but as a statement of a fledgling nation rebelling against the greatest military power of their time and saying all men have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--that was amazing.  (The end of slavery was in Jefferson's first draft, taken out by the Continental Congress.)

Throughout Washington's Presidency and into Adam's term, Jefferson fought against those within the government who wanted America to be a monarchy. Hamilton was first among those who wanted America closer to England and led by a hereditary monarch. 

Compared with the iron will of Washington and the combative Adams, Jefferson was a more affable. He was a lover of parties, at home in France, and enjoyed life. 

James Madison, the fourth President, was by far the most bookish and studious of the first four Presidents.  The Declaration of Independence was a singular act of rhetorical genius from Jefferson, whom John F. Kennedy thought the most brilliant of the Founders. The Constitution grew out of a year in which Madison studied everything he could find from the ancient world and contemporary sources. He wrote a document that became the beginning of the Constitution, was instrumental in the work of creating the final document, and then he wrote of the one-third of the essays  that explained and defended the Constitution. The 85 essays that he, Hamilton and John Jay wrote became the Federalist Papers.   

While the book focuses primarily on the first four Presidents, other founders come in and out of the story.  Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Ben Franklin are important to the story Ricks is telling.  

Seeing how America began and how the first Presidents saw the world helped me to better understand where we are now.  On one hand, reading this book shows the almost infinite distance in character from dignity of Washington, the firm resolve of Adams, the brilliance of Jefferson, and the reasoned determination of Madison to malignant stupidity of the 45th President.  If is almost impossible to believe a list with those four and Abraham Lincoln and both Roosevelts and Harry Truman could also contain Trump.  I have trouble believing they are of the same species.

Read the book and enjoy where we came from. It gave me a glimmer of hope for where we could be going. 

First fourteen books of 2022:

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua (The Tiger Mom) Book 14 of 2022

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations 

Yale Law Professor Amy Chua set off a firestorm in the world of parenting with her 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  She said the book was a self-mocking memoir of how she strove to be a traditional strict Chinese mother to her 21st Century American daughters.  

I did not read the book at the time, though I recognized a fellow traveler, a strict parent in this century is more counter-cultural than a hippie in Oklahoma in 1965.  I did not think about the book again until February of this year, when I heard Chua interviewed by Bari Weiss on the Honestly podcast. The episode is here.

As I listened to the interview, I became very interested in her latest book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations published in 2018.   

Amy Chua

Right from the Introduction, Chua made a strong case for the effect of tribal divisions within America, and how neglect and dismissal of tribal divisions led to disaster after disaster in America's wars and other foreign policy in the past half century. She also introduces the "tribe" that brought Trump to power:  the peculiar American heresy known as the "Health and Wealth Gospel." She talks about one of her students who saw his family sucked into the strange Pentacostal Christianity that worships wealth and is devoted to Donald Trump.

Chua shows that when a small minority controls the majority of the wealth in a culture, the rest of the culture will turn against that minority, sometimes violently.  In Vietnam during the time of the war, a Chinese minority of just one percent of the population controlled more than half of the wealth of the country.  People of North and South Viet Nam were united in their hatred or the Chinese merchants. When America talked about making Viet Nam a capitalist nation, the majority heard America was backing the Chinese.

The Baathist minority under Saddam Hussein in Iraq was a minority with power that was hated by the entire nation. Iraq dissolved into a predictable civil war of Sunni against Shia after the American invasion, with the Kurds defending their territory in the north. But all factions agreed that they were going to get rid of the Baathist minority that controlled the wealth and the government under Saddam.

The book gave me a sad and useful perspective on the tribal forces behind America's military defeats over the past century. Chua also showed the tribal nature of Trump's path to power.  Maybe because the book was written in 2018, the ending is more hopeful than her evidence warrants.  Trumpism is quite alive and the Republican party is a cult. It's great they are out of power, but for how long?

First thirteen books of 2022:

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Jews by Choice: Those who choose to be part of a long-persecuted faith/community

 

This week Jews around the world mark the Holocaust Remembrance Day. For me, this day is a swirl of sadness and disbelief that such an atrocity could ever occur.

There are roughly 20 million Jews in the world, about one in 3,500 of the people living today. And that relatively small number of Jews is radically divided into groups from Ultra Orthodox to atheists and a thousand variations in between.

One group that stands out for me among all of them, especially this week, is Jews by Choice: the people who decide to become Jews, to become part of a community that is, has been, and will be hated, despised and slandered everywhere.

As I write this Jews are fleeing Ukraine knowing how Russia has dealt with Jews for the past millennia. The Jewish homeland of Israel is getting hit by rockets by terrorists. The past five years has seen more violence against Jews in America than at any time in our nation's history. The treasonous cult of Qanon is digging up the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes of the past centuries and dreaming up news ones: Jewish Space Lasers start California wild fires!

Jews by Choice join a community that will always be the target of hate. They join willingly knowing the dangers: the Rabbi who leads them into their new faith commitment makes clear what they will face.

And they become Jews anyway.

On this very sad week, I salute the courage and love of everyone who became a Jew by Choice.

Back to LeMans: another look at a the greatest endurance race course

Part of my visit to France in February was a long walk around the race course at Circuit de Sarthe where the 24-hour race at LeMans is held.  I took more pictures in the museum.  

I first visited in November 2019. I had planned to walk the course, but there was a 24-hour race in its final hours when I arrived in the afternoon, so I watched the race. This time I walked along that paths near the course and looked at the track from different vantage points. 

Some day I would like to see the race at night--headlights blazing in the dark at more than 200 mph on the longest stretch of the Mulsanne.  Here is the post on that visit.

I was in Paris in November 2019 during the premiere of the movie "LeMans 66" which was called "Ford vs. Ferrari" in American.

Below are more pictures from Museum of the 24 Hours of LeMans.

Other posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen: Book 13 of 2022

 

There are many Leonard Cohens. All of them occupied the same body born September 21, 1934, in Quebec, Canada, that passed away on November 7, 2016, at the age of 82 in Los Angeles.  He first aspired to be a novelist in his 20s; became a rock star in 1967 at age 33; gave up his career as a rock musician and went to Greece in 1973; went to Israel in October 1973 at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War and spent the next two months in a jeep entertaining troops near the front lines of that very bloody war.

Cohen is a Jew. Like many Jews he has a sometimes tense relationship with his Jewishness. And those struggles pervade Book of Mercy, a little book of contemporary psalms: praise, anguish, pleading and anger poured on the altar of the Temple that is Leonard Cohen's heart.  

Over the past few months, I read a psalm or two then put the book down, the way I read King David's psalms. For me, reading more than two at a time erases the mysteries I should be open to. 

Here is a man arguing with God and all who are of his faith and land:

Israel, and you who call yourself Israel, the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation - none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you at war with Mercy.--27

In another he is a worshipper, a son of the Most High:

My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terrors for one who remembers the name.--31

And this:

Like an unborn infant swimming to be born, like a woman counting breath in the spasms of labor, I yearn for you. Like a fish pulled to the minnow, the angler to the point of line and water, I am fixed in a strict demand, O king of absolute unity.--29

In 1984, the same year this book was published, the year Cohen turned forty, he recorded his most famous song for the first time "Hallelujah." 

Twenty years later, Cohen, like Job of the Bible, would find all of his wealth gone. (Cohen's fortune was stolen by his long-time manager; Job's fortune, family and everything was taken by Satan with divine Okay.)  He went on tour in his early 70s finding devoted fans and great success all over the world and, like Job, had what was lost restored. 

In addition the tours and new songs, Cohen wrote poetry in his later years published shortly after his death.  That book "The Flame" will be my next volume of Cohen's poetry. In a couple of years I hope to re-read the Book of Mercy. 

First twelve books of 2022:

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen