Hi Natalie and Ed,
Here's a little story which has elements of what you were both writing about.
About ten years ago my wife and I were travelling in Turkey and had dinner
at an hotel in Ephesus (the Roman city where St Paul had preached in the
amphitheatre). (It was there that I learned for the first time that all the
white marble buildings there had originally been painted in gaudy colours,
as were all Greek and Roman buildings! An eye-opener for me.) Back to
story: We got chatting to the couple on the next table and then we had
drinks together after the meal. He was Jewish and had retired from being an
Israeli government agricultural advisor to various African countries. She
was German and had been a teenager when WW2 ended. Her family lived in the
American occupied zone of Germany. In order to bring the attention of the
German population to the horrors of the concentration camps and the
extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies and others that had taken place
during the war (most ordinary Germans said that they never knew what was
going on!), the American army took film shows of Belsen and Auschwitz
around to villages, towns and cities all over their zone and, as much as
possible, forced people to look at the film. In the case of her village,
everyone was forced to attend. However, her parents -- as with all other
parents in the village -- told their children to shut their eyes for the
duration of the film. As far as our acquaintance could see, all of the
audience did so -- except herself. She disobeyed. She was horrified by what
she saw in the film but she also knew that she could never tell her parents
that she had disobeyed them or else she'd have been thrashed. So she said
nothing afterwards. She waited for several years until she was 21, and had
obtained qualifications as a secretary. She also told them that she was
ashamed of being a German. She had already bought a ticket to Israel and
left home immediately, becoming a naturalized Israeli soon afterwards. She
became a civilian secretary in the Israeli airforce and was then gradually
promoted until she was a senior lecturer in navigation, and was teaching
all the new fighter pilots in night-time flying. (Her personality had
struck us very forcibly when we met her; she must have terrified the young
pilots!)
We never met again, though we kept in touch for several years. Many years
later, when my choir was singing Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, we
were having difficulty in pronouncing the Hebrew lyrics. I happened to
mention this in a letter to my Israeli friend. She promptly asked her
actress daughter to recite the six psalms slowly and clearly and sent the
tape to us.
There we are then. A curious but interesting story. Events have a way of
living on in all sorts of ways!
Keith
At 09:27 02/01/2011 -0500, you wrote:
Nice thoughts, Natalia, but I'm afraid we are what we are. Could I indeed
share my meditations with beasts like Hitler or Stalin or with all those
butchers who escalated simple ideas into profound human tragedies? I
don't think so. Again, we are what we are.
Having nothing better to do, I watched the Rose Bowl game yesterday. At
one level of interpretation, that of the huge crowd watching from the
stands, it was a demonstration of supreme athletic skill. At another
level, it had to be seen as formalized brutality. Young male hominids
rushing at each other, attempting to crush each other. Or take hockey, in
which fist-fights and injuries are "part of the game". We are what we
are, and there are many people on this earth with whom I would rather not
be connected.
But do have a good year.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: <mailto:[email protected]>D and N
To: <mailto:[email protected]>RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME
DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION
Sent: Saturday, January 01, 2011 11:07 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] FW: Blogpost: Wikileaks, Open Information and
Effective Use: Exploring the Limits of Open Government
Believing we are all connected can be both a matter of faith and a matter
of science. When individuals share such stories, we know we are all part
of one experience. Thank you, Ray.
May we all collectively direct our meditations towards a better nurtured
and educated future world. May we realize that our lack of confidence to
overcome such injustice is but arrogantly imagined--that we, in fact, do
not expect enough of our ability to effect change. With a unified
vision, we can reclaim sanity, restore and eventually leave a world we
proudly leave to our children.
To all, a healthy New Year, replete with the grace and vitality of a
healing world.
Natalia
On 1/1/2011 4:56 PM, Ray Harrell wrote:
This is what it's all about. When I was in college, the ministers in
the Presbyterian churches in Tulsa, Oklahom would preach about how the
news always spoke of American dead and that others were less important
and that this was wrong! In a nation that parades religion around as
a requirement for office, there is bloody little listening to it.
Thank you Natalia for this statement. In 1994 I directed a Gypsy
Carmen that was about the Gypsy Holocaust during WWII [at LaMama theater
here in New York City]. I kept a picture of bodies at the base of a
waterfall in Rwanda in the front of my score, floating like logs, to
remind me that it was and would continue in the fabric of
humanity. Later it would be a child in Iraq during the American
Master's Arts Festival. From Vietnam, and my friend Kim Phuc running
down the road screaming from the Napalm, to the present time when the
agent orange still ravages the newborns of Vietnam we seem stuck in a
pattern of horror unbelieved and unimagined. When America invaded
Iraq, Kim sat in the corner of a Catskill mountain cabin and said "I
can't believe they're doing it again" as she wept bitterly. That was
the last time I saw Kim. Thank you again Mike and Natalia for your truth.
REH
It makes blood boil for anyone who has toiled through the reports of
collateral damage of about 5 million Iraqis, which includes over one
million dead, 1million plus widows, and 4.5 million displaced. No
infrastructure, little food or potable water, and depleted uranium soil
for half a million years to come. The innocents arrested and tortured,
whose numbers so far outweigh the numbers killed on 9/11 by non-Iraqis,
that one has no choice but to conclude the US doesn't give a damn about
collateral damage. Nor do the sick soldiers who execute these
atrocities, nor do any of the Americans who supported this war. No one
is so stupid as to think that the loss was entirely American, and where
there remains such posturing, I'm sure it could be permanently scared
out of them with a little bit of America's own water-boarding
treatments. America and her government had this coming, for the sake of
accountability, just as all other potentially damaging leaks change the
playing field to one of greater need for responsible actions. The
internet is being used responsibly where governments, military and
industry are trying to keep secret their blundering and misguided dealings.
Media, most often controlled, is looking bad and irresponsible too, and
rightly so. Just for Iraq alone they should have lost their jobs. And
still, having today realized how swept up they became in Bush's
bandwagon to wealth, they would never have the nerve to do what Assange
did in any format. If not Assange, then who? Neither government,
military nor Multi-National would ever risk such openness because
integrity is what the wage earners are supposed to possess, not the
world leaders. Certainly not those in media we hope will at least expose
profit in deceit.
Natalia
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2010/12/
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