#microblogmonday – Page 3 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Do We Americans Still Have It? Do We Care? #MicroblogMonday

I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:

A bitterly divided country

Racism

Institutional injustice

The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere

The decline of our public schools

Climate change

The rise of fundamentalism

The coarsening of our culture

The cost of a college education

Ebola

ISIS

Hunger

Anti-Vaxx-ers (seriously)

Add your own here____________________

Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values. As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded — whether they would even be willing to try. Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice. I hope so.

Being a Grandmother, a Mother, a Daughter, and Sad

Once a year I pay special honor to my parents. In a service on Yom Kippur called Yizkor, I say a prayer to their memory and pledge to do something to remember them: to donate charity for their sake.

This year, even more than usual, I wept as I prayed, and afterward. I have three grandsons now, one of whom shares my father’s name, and my parents don’t know it. They aren’t here to enjoy these lovely boys, or to help me handle the issues that emerge when one’s children have children.

Our boys and their wives are stunning parents (and wonderful to us) and our grandsons are, of course, perfect; that’s not the issue. It is, rather, that I know now some of what they must have felt and I would be so grateful if I could tell them what I have learned about their own grace as grandparents, and ask them for advice on the moments that grab the heart, or maybe even, as in every family, for a moment, break it.

Justice on Television: Way Before Good Wives and Even West Wings!

Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.

My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:

The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
A tragic battle over the insanity defense in a death penalty case: a two-episode story on The Defenders* (1961-65) , starring Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch.

There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.

* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”

When the Children Become the Parents: After You…

Two new grandsons have joined our first (born almost three years ago); one is 6 days old, the other just over two weeks. They are beautiful and delicious; watching our sons with them is breathtaking.

With the birth of that first little boy, we became grandparents; he brought us a new identity. Just after the birth of the second of the three, though, the rabbi took us beyond that. With the birth of their children, our children have become ancestors, taking their places, as we had done, in the thousands of years of Jewish history.

I’ve written before about the special meaning of our “Biblical” lineage , especially since we can’t trace our personal ones very far back, but I’m saying something else here: look forward as well as back. There’s something compelling about the concept of one’s children becoming ancestors – something wonderful and profound.