Israel, Hamas, and the Palestinians.

For context, I was born in 1949, the year after Britain washed its hands of Palestine. I am not Jewish. I am a fourth generation American of Polish extraction with a Roman Catholic upbringing, though I am no longer a religious practitioner of any sort.

Here are the overriding salient points as I see them.

1. The Jews have been reviled for over two millennia, victims of bigotry, prejudice, and persecution, often with state sanction.

2. The Jews of Europe were abandoned by the world in the 1930s and 1940s.  As a result, six million of them—6,000,000 men, women, and children—were slaughtered by the Nazis. Even the United States turned them away from our shores. And the world powers of the era denied them the opportunity to go anywhere else, including Palestine. Their house was on fire and we locked them in.

3. The United Nations created the Jewish-Palestinian problem in 1948. The UN initiated an untenable situation and has been blaming Israel for it ever since. The UN handed the Palestinian Jews the shitty end of the stick and the Jews have been beating the Palestinians with that stick ever since, with the shitty end still in hand.

4. The Israelis have treated the Palestinians like others have treated them, with bigotry, prejudice, and persecution. The nation of Israel has applied an inverse corollary of the Golden Rule. It is not only despicable, it is not sustainable by just or peaceful means. The Hamas attack of October 2023 was only to be expected. Palestinian resistance to Israeli abuses are only to be expected.

5. As a consequence of the October 2023 Hamas terror attack and hostage-taking, Israel's only logical course is to destroy Hamas or, failing that, to create such an object lesson that the Palestinians will not permit the rise of such a terrorist agency again. Moreover, the majority of the Palestinians of Gaza are, at the very least, complicit in allowing Hamas to come to power. And while the Hamas attack may be understandable, given Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, it was purely stupid and self-defeating, except as a strategy to make Israel look bad while defending itself.

6.The Israel-Palestinian situation is a UN-created problem, a world problem. It needs a solution that is going to require more real estate than has been made available by the UN. The world needs to step up and pay for the mistakes it made.

7. The designated religious sites in Jerusalem should be under UN administration, with reasonable and equitable access guaranteed for all.

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Why a College Education should be "free" to students

In a nutshell

A college education has exactly the same purpose as that of the first twelve (or fourteen) years of public education: an educated populace benefits the United States of America.

The whole idea

It seems many citizens think that public education is for the benefit of children. WRONG! Public education is for the benefit of the public—the people of the nation at large—else there is absolutley no reason to pay for it out of tax dollars. And to cite the obvious, the reason public education benefits the nation is because educated citizens make better decisions in elections, get better jobs and pay more taxes, make better officers and enlisted members of the armed services, and contribute more materially, and in a wider variety of functions, to the strength and prosperity of the nation as a whole. With that understanding in mind, an eduction beyond those initial twelve to fourteen years provides significantly more benefit.

Some Disclaimers

1. Public education should be provided by public schools governed by the public. PERIOD. This includes college. Only state or similar publicly-run colleges and universities would be "free" to students. No vouchers, no tax breaks, none of that for non-public schools. If the public won't provide sufficient support for decent public schools, then they get what they pay for, but those public funds that are available should not be spent on private schools —that would be just bass-ackwards.

2. "College" would mean any manner of advanced education beyond the twelfth grade, including technical or trade schools, as long as they are publicly governed. To be more specific, publicly-governed means a generally-elected or government-appointed board of chancellors; it does not mean privately owned or a corporation with publicly-traded stock.

3. I would encourage "free" post-grauate education as well, but only in return for a period of public service, no less than two years, in the armed services, Peace Corps, Conservation Corps, Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, or other government-run, non-sectarian service dedicated to the public good.

In conclusion

Public education is not free. For students, it's a full-time job, paid in educational credits. For the public, it's expensive, at least if it's done right. The education of young people is an investment in our own personal safety and security. America can only be great if its citizens are well educated.

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Critical Racism Theory

Critical Race Theory: well, yeah, but no. Not to say that Ron DeSantis and his ilk are not douchebags of the first order, but I think Mr. DeSantis owes his rabidly anti-CRT position not so much to racism but more to the endemic sociopathy necessary to win votes in our political system. It's not so much that CRT is barking up the wrong tree, it's more that CRT adherents can't see the forest for that tree. And while DeSantis and those like him deliberately prey on people's fears, that is because we humans are so susceptible to being afraid. Fear brought us to the evolutionary stage we occupy today.

The problem with Critical Race Theory, for all its purported truth, is that it likewise engages the fears of many, many white people who are rooted in the systemic racism that grips us all. Please note: I am not saying that CRT is wrong, or bad, or a lie. What I am saying is that, while CRT may be a body of critical knowledge, it is quite obviously not an effective tool for winning the hearts and minds of frightened human beings. Marching under its banner may earn one kudos from the other members of the marching band, but it ain't gonna convince the parade-goers to march along. In fact, waving that flag in people's faces fans the flames that warms the cockles of DeSantis's and Trump's and McConnell's campaign coffers.

Accusing people of racism is not the way to counter or diminish racism. What needs to be confronted, and what I have yet to see addressed, is that all human beings are inherently racist -- and sexist, and ageist, and everything-else-that-is-different-from-me-ist.

Look around: the history of humanity is a tapestry of people identifying with others of their own kind: their own family, their own religiosity, their own gender, their own age, their own ethnicity, their own guild, their own every damn thing. Moreover this is due to an innate survival strategy that has human beings hard-wired by evolution to be fearful of those different from ourselves. Come to that, homogeneity is pretty much the strategy of every species on the planet. Shouting at people that their evolved organic personality structure is wrong or evil will be as effective as shouting at them to change the color of their eyes. It is no one's "fault" that he, or she, or non-binary pronoun of choice is racist. It is what it is. 

That is the challenge we face: overcoming an inherent vice that is still an evolutionary imperative. Until we deal with that, all we are doing is barking up trees.

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'NUFF SAID

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Photo credit: whitehouse.gov (original photo) modified by author.

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