Carl,
I beg to differ. There was a time when people worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. They
were not on call to respond to questions and issues at the end of the workday.
Their bosses and coworkers were not sending them text messages and emails about
emergent problems. There was a time when people did favors for each other, even
businesses did favors without charge for their regular customers. Now, there is
a fee for everything. The fees are high. The prices are high. People have
accepted the impersonality involved in the day to day relations they have with
businesses and service providers. Incompetence is rampant and expected. People
mistrust each other. They cling to the people they trust, but everyone else is
suspect.
Everyone pays bills on line. Money transfers are very interesting. My Visa card
is paid automatically and the total is supposed to be withdrawn automatically
on the 19th of each month. But that's not what my checking account says, nor
does the bank's computer voice, if I call. On the 20th, the money still appears
to be in my account. If I talk to a real person at the bank, he or she assures
me that the money has been withdrawn, bu the bank's computer doesn't tell me
that. On the 21st of the month, the money has gone from my checking account and
the computer at the bank that has my checking account, tells me that my bill is
paid. If you track the online payment of all your bills, you'll discover
similar strangeness.
Yes, aging is significant. If you a solitary person, and if you have several
disabilities in addition to blindness, you are marginalized. That does not
happen if you are socially and vocationally connected to the world of the blind
and it is less likely to happen if you're outgoing so I'm sure you're not
experiencing it. Additionally, if you conform to what the world demands of you
and to not question the systems that regulate the world in which you live, you
won't get into difficulty. But if you tend to rebel against systems, you run
into difficulty.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2018 3:24 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Is this justice?
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