A Jew In ’America’ Today Take a deep breath and look around you. How has the world changed so radically while we weren’t looking? Maybe I was asleep at the switch, but things today seem so different from the way I imagined they were, how I assumed they were. I am living in Canada, but I am taking America to mean North America, and looking at the world seen through my ‘American’ eyes. I was born in 1934. I knew a Canada of the Depression. I grew up before there was an Israel, with the growing knowledge of what had befallen our brothers and sisters in Europe. The discrimination we took for granted on our streets, in education, real estate, and with our fist fights in the mud in our streets and in the school yards where we played. This was something we absorbed into our consciousness. It was always there, lurking forever at the back of our minds during our life experiences. It united us into a community where we recognized each other for sharing a common destiny. Now, ninet
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Staying Young for a Lifetime Well, why not? Isn’t that what we all want? We don’t want to just live longer, but to live longer in good health. Right? But how do we do it? Most of us accept the reality that all living things die. We learned that at an early age. It’s bound to scare us so we probably put it out of our minds. But by the time we are in our forties and fifties we remember this and start thinking about it a lot. Maybe it’s because we begin to see that things about our health are no longer what they were when we were younger. That probably has a lot to do with the kind of lifestyle we have been living. That’s a hint that we should have been thinking about this stuff a lot earlier. There’s a great deal of work being done in the research area of aging. There are a few new ideas being floated around. Plenty of them have not been fully proven. Some of them have come out of work on yeasts and mice. But they have reached a state where there are quite a few people, mo
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ENSURING A BETTER SELF Like some of your neighbors, I am quite a few years down the road. I am increasingly being joined by others of my ilk. Statisticians tell us that by 2030, ten years hence, some 21% of Americans will be 65 or older. Things are even worse in Canada, the figure being 23%. By 2060, almost one in four Americans will be of that age or older, and over one-half a million will be aged 100 and older. Wow! Obviously, scientists must be re-directing their efforts to finding those secrets for long-lived healthy living and to finding answers to the scourge of Alzheimer’s and related conditions. Aside from the health implications, a whole range of economic consequences come with having a smaller and smaller share of the population participating productively in the economy. The plunging birth rate in the developed economies that is elevating the percentages quoted above is one of the powerful prompts for an energetic immigration policy. In spite of the increasi
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Seeing With My Own Eyes It was a beautifully sunny today contradicting the promised rain. Then came the rain and then it went. The staunch container ships were arrayed across English Bay here in the city. The water was glassy calm even with a sprightly breeze off the ocean ruffling my hair, currently being worn long and loose. My Bride and I are enjoying the pleasures of this autumn day as we take our medicinal walk along the Sea Wall. I am wearing my straw hat which I have adorned with many feathers and a button preaching love. We hold hands or lock arms depending on the traffic. People smile at us or remark on my hat. We are having a good time living in the moment. We are pushing it in the age dimension. When we married at seventy, we never thought about our age, and now it’s nearly twenty years later. We know people are living longer as advances in medicine and information about desirable lifestyles are having their impact. Yet, we
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The Vanishing Breed This is not a scholarly article with annotations of sources and detailed attributions. Much too bulky! You are getting here a version of history that I have been able to drag out of Google and the Bible to make the points I want to make. It is what it is. My story of populations is a numbers game so we will have a few numbers to talk about. The story goes back to Abraham. Sarah, his wife, was barren, so she brought her handmaiden Hagar to give Abraham children. She bore Ishmael. When God intervened, and Rachel bore Isaac, she persuaded Abraham to turn Hagar and her son out. Ishmael is the supposed progenitor of the Arabs, the other element, with the Jews, of the Semitic race. The story shifts to Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who took his family, numbering some seventy persons, to Egypt, where his son Joseph stood at the right hand of the Pharaoh. We know that things changed after some time, and the rulers, perhaps fearing the power and numbers of these
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Light And Color. Light and color are an important part of the joys we find in life. It is no surprise we don’t have any trouble talking about that. At the same time there is a lot of mystery about those elements in our lives that we don’t think about. Since the dawn of man they have fascinated us. Many humans have found them a source and a basis for worship. Man has studied them since they first began looking up. Over the centuries they have been the subject of human study. These days, our scientists are have offered some ideas they believe in for our consideration. They say light is an expression of energy. That seems obvious. They also think that light takes the form of waves or particles called photons. That may be new to us. They tell us light can be considered to travel in waves. In the world of quantum physics scientists have determined that light can also travel as particles. Indeed, it is claimed that light can be both at the same time. Once we are
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Choosing Your News How the world has changed! We always assumed that the news we might get about world events would be the same wherever we looked to get it. Not anymore! Your news, whether the detail reported, the spin on how it is reported, or whether events are reported at all, really depends on where you look for it. Maybe that was always true and we never realized it. Well, we realize it now. After the October 7 th attack on Israel by Hamas the world’s airways were flooded by reports about Israel’s occupation of that place when Israel had left the territory more than twenty years previously. Few in the media mentioned that. Immediately there was talk of genocide by Israel when it was Hamas that had opened hostilities and placed their civilians in harm’s way as Israel pursued those who had brutally murdered mostly civilians, even burned babies alive in front of their parents before executing them. And as Hamas promised to do it again and again, including