Politics And Swings
I want to write about politics today, but I don’t know where to begin.
Henry Kissinger is dead. I don’t want to say anything mean about the dead so I won’t. There are some strong opinion pieces out today about him, one by Ben Rhodes whom I respect. I grew up on Kissinger, he was symbolic of what American foreign policy was… and somehow even at a young age, I knew it wasn’t right.
Secretary Blinken is back in Israel. As a cartoonist, I have to admit that I love his name. Silliness aside, I feel that he is the opposite of Kissinger, and I am glad he’s on the case. I envision a new Gaza with leadership that wants Israel to exist and is good for Palestinians. I hope we and others help rebuild what has been destroyed in Gaza. Is this asking too much? I know Blinken is bopping around the Middle East trying to make it work (and plenty of others behind the scenes). Senator Chuck Schumer of New York wrote a strong op-ed about the rise in antisemitism in the US— its horrifying, we need to keep talking about it and try to stop this trend.
Here is a drawing that might make you smile, this was in The New Yorker.
We’re in tough times, so we need the help of those we love to enjoy simple things.
I love the cartoon what an antidote for these complex times.
Will respect your moral objection to speaking ill of the dead. I don’t follow it myself, mostly since I became a mother I wanted no ambiguity cast in their young minds. There are some people who deserve as brutal an assessment of their brutal lives.
When I was young I aspired to BE Henry Kissinger. I went to Harvard for one year, taking a lot of history and government courses. I wanted to end up with the kind of influence Kissinger had, but thought I could use it better that he did. When I dropped out of school it was in part because I knew I could not answer there the most important question I had: What should I do with my life? I focused on that for 4 years, and realized I did not want to be Henry Kissinger, or anyone else in particular, and I adopted a fairly primitive morality: we have evolved as a social species, so we have an ingrained inclination to do well by others -- that seemed like something to build a life around, and a non-Kissingerian foreign policy. Anti-Semitism and all other racial and ethnic "anti's" do not fit this philosophy, and I (gently) oppose them all. Also, tribalism is another ingrained inclination, but it's a dangerous one that often produces violence. The Middle East has always been very tribal, so far as I know, and it has led to disaster after disaster. Kissinger seemed comfortable with that reality, but I'm not. I think all groups of people should be treated as people, and not as fundamentally different from ourselves. This can be hard in practice, but I think it's the only thing that will work (and good news: humanity has made a lot of progress in that direction in recent centuries).