New Horizons by Max Roy

  The Nitty Gritty   They say we all die alone, the human fate. I see it differently. The most fortunate will see it differently. When I was a youngster, surveying the world, the place I inhabited, it was like a puzzle I was trying to unravel. Who were these people in the family wherein I had been planted? I had this sense that I had been dropped among them like a Cuckoo’s egg deposited in some random nest to be hatched. I left home for a year when I was eighteen. When I returned, my feeling of isolation was reinforced. How could I relate to these members of my own family who had not shared my growing-up experience? I felt inarticulate, unable to translate what I had become to the people with whom I was closest. Was there any hope for achieving that with strangers? We go forward in life, like the Argonauts of ancient Greece, into the unexplored, the unknown. We gird our loins to confront the dangers we know that life will place before us, as we seek the Golden Fleece. ...

        Life As A Beautiful Story Once upon a time there were humans on a planet called earth. They shared consciousness with only few mammal species that we know of, dolphins are one, as are those creatures in the ape family and related species. Killer whales make the grade. Surprisingly, only the European Magpie is the winner among the flying species, but I wonder about those canny crows? Earth teems with life, but consciousness seems to be a very limited commodity among living things according to those who are knowledgeable about these matters. Consciousness has to do with an awareness of self. So a mouse and a bee are alive but do not seem to know and appreciate that. And the same seems to be true about chickens and cows, and even cats and dogs. Our children recognize their own images before they are two and have an awareness of self by the time they are three. Being conscious means we are aware of ourselves as having a separate life. We can becom...

              What’s Going On? I’ve just had the shock of my life. I’ve just come to realization that I’m not living at the center of the universe in the way I have always conceived it of myself. I am watching television programs like Sunday Morning and Face The Nation. I come across the faces and names of people who have been famous for years and realize I have never known of their existence. How did I miss that? How did I miss knowing them? Where was I all that time- was I marooned on some desert island? How could I not have known what was going on? I have always thought of myself as having my finger on the pulse, aware of the currents in the ocean of world events. Don’t you sometimes think of yourselves that way? I have had an education. I can make myself understood in at least six languages. I have travelled to many countries, seeing a good part of the world. Retired from the workaday world for the last twenty-five year...

                   Jewish Lives Matter There it is, now I’ve said it. I’ve said the thing that many Jews say in their hearts but never say out loud. Naturally, every ethnic group will say the same thing in their hearts. We don’t express these things out loud because it is not polite, and because we do not publicly want to admit that our particular group deserves some priority in the public mind. Of course, the Black Lives mantra is a reaction to the unjustified treatment Blacks have been exposed to historically. But isn’t that true for Jews as well? Don’t we know that Jews are the ones that suffer to the greatest extent from reported incidents of all kinds of attacks? And that’s not counting all the incidents that are not labelled for what they really are. And how many Holocausts have Jews suffered over the centuries of their dispersion? But when was the time that there were public demonstrations with signs p...

        

          The World We Live In Have you given some thought to the world we live in? Our earth is a happy accident, close enough to our sun to give us warmth in the summer, some chills in the winter, but far enough so that we kept our atmosphere and are shielded from toxic rays emitted by that body. Everywhere we have looked in our system we have not found another place where humans are viable. The last paroxysm our planet faced only made our supremacy more possible, more likely. What have we done with our heritage? Many of those who comment on that issue keep giving us a failing mark. I don’t see it that way. What was life like for humans five hundred, one thousand, years ago? The mere fact that we are now eight billion souls today, compared with the past, gives us the evidence that humans are flourishing on this spot in the universe. It may be that we will reach a point that population will stabilize. It is clear that birth rates reach a bala...

    75 th Anniversary of Israel’s Independence                Blood, Tears and Survival The Day that Israel’s independence was declared, May 15,1948…. forces from seven Arab countries entered the country to drive the Jews into the sea! When we examine the present in 2023, appreciating Israel’s prominence now, its contribution in so many fields being out of all proportion to its economic and population size, it is a shock to examine its early beginnings, and its fragility, when it issued its Declaration of Independence. In this year 2023, Israel will mark its 75 th anniversary with its population approaching ten million. In 1948, armies of seven Arab countries invaded to join internal Arab resistance to Israel’s existence. Many countries placed an embargo on the sales of arms to Israel. The war continued for ten months, through three ceasefires called by the UN, as the Arab side saw their hopes for a quick...