REMEMBER WHEN?

Hi Bob,

Haven't spoken in a long time. Hope you are well.

I read your description of life as it was for us as kids in The Bronx and remembered when I was ten. A thought passed through my head as I read of our past life. How fortunate we were to be born and brought up in America. Though most kids wherever they are born and go through childhood and remember their childhoods with delight, we were particularly blessed. We had clean water to drink and bathe in. We had warm beds on winter nights. We had parents who read to us and books to read for ourselves. We did not have to wait for our hunter or fishermen fathers to return with enough food to feed us - or with no luck on the hunt - to our ensuing hunger. We had doctors and dentists, teachers, and cops, we had candy stores and delis, we had clothing and shoes. And no matter how much money our parents earned or had, we thought we were rich, or at least we never thought we were poor.

But my thoughts turned to today and now. How many kids in how many countries live in fear, hunger, uncertainty, illness, thirst, cold? How many kids know to use a rifle rather than a pencil? How many smiling dressed up children wearing explosive belts pose in front of powerful smiling adults? How many kids learn to hate rather than to love?

So it's not only the modernization of the life in these passing years that I see; it's the degradation of the quality of life and the demeaning of the value of human life itself. It’s the world-wide spread of the disease of hatred and of "education" to destroy the "other." It's the spread of powerful weapons into the hands of children and childish powerful politicians and powerful ideologues and religious zealots, all intent on using those weapons to kill human beings to increase their power.

And for me, even more frightening, is that our country, the United States of America is among the nations LEADING THE WAY to hatred and intolerance. Our country is the major supplier of weapons to the world and is reinforcing the immorality of "Might makes Right." We have become the major bully of the world with our enormous wealth and power. The outcome has been in recent years and will continue to be the increasing death-rate of our kids. They will go from playing stickball in the streets of New York to dodging bullets in the streets of Baghdad. And they will be sent there and to other lands by men who benefit from the increase in the flow oil by the increase in the flow of blood under the pretense of spreading democracy.

So that's what your "Remember when?" did for me. It brought me full circle from now to then to now. Thanks a lot.

Nach