Erick’s Blog

I told Agi today that I'd love to get an "eau de baba" -- you can't beat the
infant baby smell (ok with some exceptions).

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing
himself." – Leo Tolstoy

We've watched this past week (and recently re-subscribed to Netflix--we love
those guys):

- Love Story: Excellent. The male lead was especially good and authentic I
thought. My expectations were low for this film (thought it would be
standard chick flick) and the characters developed in a very genuine way.
Agi loved this movie in high school and said she specifically remembers how
the young couple were studying together all entangled on the couch and
thought that's the way to to go.

- Born into Brothels: Very moving real-life portrayal of kids living with
their parents in a brothel in India and a young American woman's efforts to
give them a better life and an education.

- Underground: A Serbian movie some friends from church highly recommended
and one that Agi had seen in college. She said it's like "Pulp Fiction of
Central Europe." It was wild, maniacal, beautifully filmed and left you
with an understanding of the deep tragedy that the Yugoslavian countries
lived through in the 20th century. Others brutally abused them and they
abused themselves up through the 1990s.

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14585545

HE WAS sure that once he started fighting, he was going to die. No point in
being scared about it. Death was death; there was nothing more, nothing
bigger, that could happen to him. At least in this way, taking up arms, he
could die on his own terms rather than theirs. His time, his place. Suicide
would have been another way to do it, but he never considered that. Going to
the gas chamber or the mass grave with quiet, considered dignity, like many
of the residents of the Warsaw ghetto, was another way: far more admirable
and more difficult, he thought, than running through random bullets as he
did. But it was not for him. Only by dying as publicly as possible, loudly
and with his gun blazing, could he let the world know what the Nazis were
doing to the Jews in Poland.

The odds were overwhelming. He was deputy commander of 220 untrained “boys”
with pistols and home-made explosives. Against them were around 2,000 Nazi
soldiers, the pick of the Wehrmacht, with plenty more behind them. The Nazis
had come on the eve of Passover, April 19th 1943, to liquidate the Warsaw
ghetto, from which they had been deporting 6,000 Jews a week to the death
camps. For almost a month Mr Edelman helped keep them at bay, barricaded in
the streets around the brushmakers’ district until the whole place was
burned down round him.

The ghetto had been established in October 1940 to cut off the city’s Jews,
with a high wall and wire, from the general population. Jews were crammed
into its four square kilometres from all over the city, Poland and the
German Reich. By April 1942 half a million people lived there, many on
filthy straw mattresses directly on the ground. Around 1,500 were dying each
week from hunger and disease. In those conditions, Mr Edelman said, the most
important thing was just to be alive: not to be one of the naked corpses
wheeled past on carts, heads bobbing up and down or knocking on the
pavement. A “terrible apathy” took hold, in which people no longer saw or
believed the random horrors round them. He tried to rouse them, first by
staying up night after night to print mimeograph newspapers, and then by
fighting.
Through the sewers

As a messenger at the ghetto hospital, Mr Edelman was one of the few allowed
out. He passed on news of Nazi atrocities to the larger Polish underground,
and gathered up weapons and fighters. Precisely how much help he got is
still disputed. He implied later that gentile Poles both couldn’t do much,
and wouldn’t, to help the Jews they still distrusted, even though they faced
a common enemy. But the beleaguered Jews were disunited too: secular,
socialist, non-Zionist Jews like him, with ardent Zionists and communists,
all bickering over tactics at the edge of the abyss.

He considered himself both a Pole and a Jew, despite his white armband with
its blue star. Warsaw was home to him; his parents had died when he was
young, leaving him to be brought up by staff in the hospital. He spoke
Polish, Yiddish and Russian. His dream was not of some Zionist homeland, but
a socialist Poland in which Jews would have cultural autonomy. He continued
to hope for that all his life.

During the final throes of the ghetto uprising 50,000-60,000 Jews were
deported to the camps. Mr Edelman survived, escaping with a handful of
colleagues along tunnels barely two feet high, slimy water up to his lips,
to safety. Some 16 months later, in August 1944, he took part in the larger
Warsaw uprising, which was crushed after 63 days. It led to the razing of
the city by the Nazis in a last act of revenge.

After the war, Mr Edelman was one of the few Jewish Holocaust survivors who
stayed in Poland. He moved to Lodz, where he graduated in medicine.
Subsequent waves of anti-Semitism did not dislodge him: not even one in 1968
when up to 20,000 Jews left, including his wife and daughter. When he lost
his job, he merely moved to another hospital. Nothing else terrible happened
to him, as he put it. In 1981, having become an activist for the Solidarity
movement, he was briefly interned under martial law. He had known worse.

Mr Edelman could be brusque and difficult with colleagues. But it was his
quiet thoughtfulness that most irritated people. He refused to express open
hatred for the Nazis, and for years would not talk about the ghetto
uprising. As Bronislaw Geremek, another ghetto survivor, said once, he was
“a hero who didn’t like heroism”. Only in old age did he start to speak out,
not least to try to influence the present. In 1999 he publicly supported
NATO strikes in the Balkans, arguing that a policy of pacifist
non-intervention only played into the hands of dictators.

His expertise was in cardiology (uninhibited by his chain-smoking), and the
heart and its emotions seemed to intrigue him more as the years passed. His
last book, published this year, made a point of describing the love affairs
of the Warsaw ghetto: the “marvellous things” that happened, and the
ecstatic moments of happiness, when terrified and lonely people were thrown
together. Man was naturally a beast, but love could overwhelm him, and love
could also be taught. As for his general devotion to medicine, that was
easily explained. Someone who had known so much death, he used to say, bore
all the more responsibility for life.

"A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I
asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were
used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go
because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t
there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new
opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the
new untouchables.

That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those
who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them
work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves
untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to
provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to
combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a
higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more
education — but we need more of them with the right education."

Have seen that there's a "good feeling" you get when you organize things
that is very similar to the "new purchase good feeling." However the
organizing satisfaction is superior because you didn't have to spend any
money obviously. Also, buying new stuff just adds to having more things
around, which makes it tough to have a refreshing minimalist environment.

Interesting thought from an author I just learned about named Stewart Brand:
that because many rich & powerful people around the world live on the
coasts (e.g. hedge fund managers in Manhattan) and they will start using
their money & influence once the water starts to rise. Although.. they may
just decide to move. But still, he has a point.

Saw excellent documentary on "Cheese Nun" last night after very enjoyable
dinner with Becky and Steve M. Documentary made me appreciate that every
properly prepared cheese has a unique flavor and scent. Also learned the
Benedictines strongly valued manual labor. Interesting seeing lots of burly
nuns doing yardwork.
I'm also loving the China travelbook I'm listening to in the gym & I'd like
to see a documentary on China sometime soon.

At the gym yesterday, saw Holyfied give great quote about Tyson on Oprah:
"The early Mike Tyson was fearsome--I realized he could beat me because he
outworked everybody."

Did spiritual reading in morning today on Kuyper and what constitutes good,
true conservatism: adhering to and upholding ancient creeds that are truly
life-giving; the seed of life; not the crust and traditions that form around
the seed.

We walked around the very nice Forest Heights neighborhood today.  We've been very impressed with all the trails there amongst the houses.  We're considering this place as a long-term target neighborhood--moving from our condo in a year or two.  Our Budapest place is for sale and that happening will be key to upgrade to a house here.