I guess I’ve had a couple trips down memory lane lately. Well, other people’s memory as well as my own.
I saw this iconic picture yesterday hanging on a wall and it started a conversation between me and another lady sitting there. So I looked up the history on it. Far from being faked as has been supposed by some,
On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, 11 ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the project’s near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football; a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all 11 ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling 850 feet above the city’s streets.
For these dudes, eating lunch, having a smoke, reading a paper 850 feet above the ground was not a big deal. Another place, another time. It’s like Sheila, can we take a picture of you feeding your animals? Business as usual.
Then I got a email from a friend of mine with pictures of tinker toys, drive in movies, Dippity Do, Howdy Doody, saddle oxfords, and many more. All things I certainly remember. Another place, another time.
Then I had a conversation with my Mom today, and we talked about the picture in the course of the conversation. How we were as a people then. Tough, strong, brave, and we wanted to make our own way in the world. We wanted our children to have more and better chances than we did. We wanted to leave the world a better place for them. And often that was in the form of hard work, dangerous work, creative work, and sometimes war. Another place, another time.
And now, our children are “children”. In college they seek counseling from the trauma of seeing a name written in chalk. They need “safe spaces” in college, and college communications professors (fired now at University of Missouri at Columbia) trying to shut down, well, communications. They need the segregated “safe spaces” that the civil rights movement fought against a mere 50 years ago. Those struggles forgotten and dishonored. Another place, another time.
Instead of Mr. Smith Goes To Washington we have the dimocratic toddler time as they enjoy their catered in meals, bathroom breaks and publicity photo ops, rather than working to do right until they collapse. They are pitchin’ a hissy fit as they try to take rights, self-defense, endowed by our creator, not them. Another place, another time.
Recently a holocaust survivor publicly confronted former London Mayor Ken Livingstone about several statements, one of which was hitler was a Zionist. He made several other erroneous statements and the radio host corrected him. He knew so much that wasn’t true.
“It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.” ~~Ronald Reagan
But it was the statement of Mala Tribich, survivor of Bergen-Belsen that hit me hard.
“I find them very offensive and hurtful when people belittle the Holocaust. When they use the Holocaust to score a political point,” she said.
“I really can’t see it. They are usually people in high places. I take them as being intelligent and educated. Yet they can stoop so low to use the Holocaust to better their positions. What really bothers me is that they do it whilst there are some survivors still around. What will they do when we’re all gone?”
As anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise world wide, entire political parties are openly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel or both, and it’s accepted or excused. They say things that would have gotten them shunned, kicked out of the political arena or the papers would have been chewing them up with the facts of their lies. Another place, another time.
Our wonderful Nicki and I exchanged some e-mails today talking about Moshe Feiglin, and she nailed it.
I just think it’s a sad state of our world that we actually hold men such as this as heroes. They should be the NORM. They should be the rule, not the exception, ya know?
And they did used to be, in another place, another time.
And so, someday the survivors will be gone, and then what will they (the liberals, the anti-Semites, the anti-Israel people) do? They will be confronted by me. And they will be confronted by Zelman’s Partisans, and they will be confronted by good, strong and brave people everywhere. People that seem to come from another place, another time.
