True enough Miriam. It does seem that we are driven by a frantic,
ever more chaotic System. But lots of that is due to aging. When I
was working for the Department as an assistant director, the work load
could always be counted upon to increase. And with each new
assignment, Shirley, my boss, would smile and say, "I know this is
going to consume all of your time, but when we wrap it up we'll have
time to relax." It never happened. Shirley was a workaholic. I
remember that it was five years after I'd retired, that I went into
the Agency Building for a Rehab Council meeting, and realized that for
the first time my stomach did not clutch. Five years for me to get
past that frantic feeling of not enough time and too much to do.
Earlier in my life, as a sweat hog in the drapery factory, I would
come home after a hard day's labor and realize that I was shoveling my
dinner into my mouth as if I were eating on a time clock. I actually
had to force myself to take a bite, lean back and chew it thoroughly.
The same was true when I was active in the NFB, and working full time
at the Department. This push to do everything was a big part of my
second marriage failing.
With the grim news coming at me from all sides, I receive many emails
demanding that I do this or that, or sign this or that. I have come
to a place where I delete all but a few. I don't send many
organizations money, and I don't volunteer to door bell or telephone
for one cause or another.
We've been spending more time listening to talking books in the
evenings, and I'm playing more of my CD's, and listening to standup
comics on YouTube.
When Cathy and I began contracting to provide services to older blind
and low vision people, I would schedule two appointments before lunch
and two in the afternoon, five days a week. Twenty folks spread
across five very large counties. After dinner we would do our running
record for the day, schedule new clients and order the aids and
equipment for folks. Today I have no idea how we did it. I do
remember Cathy pulling off the highway in the evening, coming back
from Neah Bay or Aberdeen, so she could grab half an hour nap in order
to make it home. Today we hold Monday as our office day. We see an
average of two clients a day, never more than four days a week, and
usually three days in the field. We do a large amount of work over
the phone that we used to do face to face, but we still speak with
groups of folks in the various retirement and assisted living
facilities.
And even funnier is the fact that when keeping the fast pace schedule,
on weekends we grabbed the tools and cut brush, split fire wood,
tended to the horses, and made time for family gatherings. Age. Age
is the real factor. Not blindness, at least not for those of us
who've been blind or legally blind for many years. Energy and stamina
and youth made the world look different.
Sure, it doesn't look good out there, but it's really no different
than it has ever been. We came to these shores and butchered the
folks who lived here, then we mocked many of those folks who came to
these shores after us...Irish, Italians, Polish, etc. And if their
color was not the same, or their religion didn't please us, we beat up
on them and forced them to live in shacks and do our dirty work. We
did free our slaves, rather by accident, and we've been trying ever
since to keep the yoke upon them. We shoved some of our good American
citizens into internment camps, which was our civilized name for
Prisons or Holding Pens, for Japanese Americans. And, maybe worst of
all, we refused shelter to Jews who fled Germany's terrors. But here
we are, wanting to send home people we had allowed into this Land of
Opportunity, because we don't like their color or their religion.
So the only thing that makes it seem so much worse, and so much more
crazy, is that we are getting old. Worn out! We have forgotten, or
never learned how to age gracefully, how to kick back and take it
easy. We've confused effectiveness with busyness. We feel that we
must be letting down when we fail to keep up the pace. While I do
know a few people over 80 who are still on the go full time, they are
rare exceptions. A friend of mine, whom I'd believed to be a man of
steel, finally admitted to me that he always made time in the mid
morning and in the late afternoon for an hour nap. But folks who
didn't know this believed that he was Grandpa Superman!
Maybe there is an entire new profession for Adjustment to Aging.
Topics like: How to get less out of life and enjoy it more. Or, How
to look intelligent while trying to remember who you're talking to.
Or, The Art of staying calm when folks are talking down to you.
Finally, Learning to behave like the children your children believe
they are now parenting.
I had a longer list, but I forgot where I put it.
So my unofficial advice as a volunteer Adjustment to Aging Counselor,
is to begin finding stuff that makes you laugh--look for ways of
helping folks help you--and don't worry if you drool when you laugh or
chew.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/4/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The news is incredibly discouraging. And as I experience the world away from
the comfortable isolated nest in which I lived, more or less protected from
most day to day human contact, aside from what I read and heard on the
internet, I could hide from the disintegrating quality of most human
interactions. I won't go into details in this email on list, but the fact is
that almost all human interaction these days is monetized in one way or
another. People are part of your life if they benefit financially in one way
or another. Personal caring has a price. Everyone is pressured for time. Few
people use time away from work, when such time exists, for relaxation. There
are errands to do. There's household maintenance. There are work related
social activities that are mandatory. Communications are by texts on smart
phones or emails, seldom phone conversations. All problems are considered
solveable by technology. If one doesn't conform, fit in, for whatever
reason, one is marginalized. So everyone works hard to fit in, to accept the
system. It is this culture which now rules our society, that is most likely
to prevent the change we'd like to see in the world.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2018 10:30 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Is this justice?
There are days when I read such horrors as this account, that I feel a
hopeless empty aching in the pit of my stomach. There is so much violence,
mindless hatred, and fear in the world, that I sometimes feel as though I'm
clawing my way up an avalanche. I know that we Humans are capable of so
much more, love, peace, caring for less fortunate, kindness, sharing,...I
know such words and feelings still exist, but the overload of bad news is
pushing us closer and closer toward the edge of the cliff overlooking Hell.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/4/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Emmett Till Effect in Israel
African migrants protest outside of Israel's parliament in Jerusalem
in 2014. (Ariel Schalit / AP)
Is this justice?
Last Thursday, two Israelis were convicted of brutally beating an
African refugee to death, but were spared long prison sentences when
the judge agreed to reduce the charges against them from murder to
manslaughter and grievous bodily harm, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz
reported.
In November 2016, 20-year-old Dennis Barshivatz and a 17-year-old who
cannot be named under Israeli law beat Babikir Ali Adham-Abdo, a
40-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker, for an hour and a half in front of
the city hall of Petach Tikva, a Tel Aviv suburb that is a sister city
of Chicago, Ill.
Barshivatz will serve a maximum of 10 years in jail and will be
eligible for release much earlier. The court has yet to determine
sentencing for his teenage accomplice.
The killing of Adham-Abdo has evoked comparisons to the Mississippi
murder and mutilation of the Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1955.
Just as American racists attempted to excuse Till's murder by
posthumously accusing the black teen of having flirted with a white
woman whose path he had crossed, some Israelis allege that Adham-Abdo
had brought on the lethal beating he received when he supposedly
sexually harassed a group of Israeli teenage girls at the scene.
In the case of Till, the woman he was accused of flirting with
admitted over half a century later that she had fabricated the entire
claim, and that Till had never made any advances toward her. The
allegations against Adham-Abdo were also revealed to be baseless when
CCTV footage of the incident was released. The city hall security
camera video clearly showed that Adham-Abdo approached the table where
the three teens were sitting, spoke to the group for less than 10
seconds, then turned and walked away. Moments later, his assailants
set upon him and began to brutally beat him.
Another parallel between the Adham-Abdo and Emmett Till incidents lay
in the grievous injuries wrought to their faces. In both cases, their
faces were pummeled so badly that they were unrecognizable.
Adham-Abdo's brother was only able to claim the body for burial once
he had identified it based on its missing fingers, which had been
severed during murderous clashes in Darfur, from which Adham-Abdo had
originally fled to Israel to escape.
"We don't agree to the penalties," Adham-Abdo's cousin Moussa told
Haaretz.
"We thought there was justice in the Israeli courts, we thought Israel
was a state of justice. If the victim had been an Israeli, the outcome
would have been different. There's racism here."
Sadly, Adham-Abdo was not the first African refugee to be beaten to
death by a group of Israelis in a public place in recent years. In
October 2015, during a shooting attack at the central bus station in
the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, a security guard shot
29-year-old Ertirean refugee Haftom Zarhum under the premise that he
was assumed to be one of the terrorists.
The bus station's security footage revealed that Zarhum was clearly
unarmed and crawling on the ground like other innocent bystanders,
trying to avoid the bullets of the terrorist attackers.
As Zarhum bled out on the ground, Israelis took turns kicking him in
the face and slamming chairs and benches down on him, while other
bystanders actively prevented medics from reaching him to treat his
wounds. In June 2016, a judge ruled that one of the Israelis who
slammed a bench down on Zarhum's head would not be charged. Charges
are pending against four other Israelis who participated in the lynching.
The vicious violence against non-Jewish African refugees in Israel
follows years in which Israeli political leaders and religious
officials regularly whipped up racist sentiments against them,
accusing them of bringing to Israel deadly diseases, violent crimes
and anti-state terrorism. Official Israeli government statistics have
proven all these smears to be baseless.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's primary justification for
expelling the refugees cannot be so easily dismissed: They should not
be able to live in Israel, he claims, because they are not Jews.
That the refugees are not Jews is true. Of those who are religious,
about half are Christian, and about half are Muslim. The belief that
non-Jews have no right to live in the Holy Land has always had some
currency among Israeli Jews, but it has become increasingly popular in
recent years, with the country's current chief rabbi now openly
preaching that genocidal doctrine.
In 2013, Netanyahu completed the construction of a high-tech fence on
Israel's border with the African continent, in order to end the influx
of asylum seekers. In the five years that followed, Israeli
authorities cajoled over a third of the community, more than 20,000
refugees, to agree to self-deport, by withholding their refugee rights
and promising instead that these will be granted to them in an unnamed
African country. Now Netanyahu has warned that any African refugees
who don't agree to self-deport by April
1 will be jailed indefinitely until they do so. The first group to
face this choice will be single African men who aren't yet fathers.
Human rights activists, journalists and liberal lawmakers who have
followed up with refugees already forced out of Israel have learned
that the government never fulfilled its promises to them, and that
they were quickly made stateless once more. Without state protection,
the vast majority of these refugees then fled for the European Union,
hoping to find asylum there. Many then endured horrific tortures at
the hands of Libyan slave traders, or drowned in the Mediterranean in
failed attempts to reach Fortress Europe.
Anticipating Netanyahu's April 1 deadline to self-deport, progressive
Israelis have begun to publicly oppose the impending expulsion. In
recent weeks, groups of doctors and artists, pilots and teachers have
taken out advertisements in Israeli newspapers, articulating their
objections to the plan. Liberal rabbis have invoked the memory of
iconic Holocaust victim Anne Frank in announcing that they plan to
resist by hiding African refugees in their own homes, and some
Holocaust survivors have also agreed to take them in.
But despite these expressions of solidarity, Netanyahu has vowed to
carry out the expulsion as planned, reaping popular support for the
plan that he sowed with years of racist incitement. A poll last month
found that two-thirds of Israeli citizens support the government's
plan to round up and deport all the remaining African asylum seekers,
who now number only about 36,000, less than 0.5 percent of the
population.
On Saturday, 20,000 Israelis and Africans marched in the streets of
Tel Aviv, calling on the government to allow the refugees to work
legally, and to invest in the neighborhoods they live in, so that
their presence is not perceived as a burden to long-time residents. It
was a brief reminder that the left still exists, even after a decade
of rule by what may have been the most racist governments in Israel's
history.
But it was also an indication of the vigilante violence that could be
let loose against African refugees if Israeli racists feel that the
government plan to expel them all is in danger of being annulled.
According to Israeli news site i24, police detained two Israeli men
and seized a gun from one of them after they publicly plotted over
Facebook to attend a pro-refugee demonstration and attack the Africans
with weapons.
David Sheen
David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker born and raised
in Canada, now reporting from the ground in Israel*Palestine. His
written and video work focuses primarily on the country's racial and.
David Sheen