Liz Cheney announced she is supporting Kamala Harris for president today and shared the news with the line “the truth you can’t hide from.
I followed up my making my Instagram profile public again because I am playing around with pushing my thoughts and ideas about multiple things in multiple places.
My profile had been public for quite some time but I got tired of some of the crap that was being sent to me and the influx of bots that followed me.
We’ll see if I get irritated again and turn it off or leave it on, hard to say, it is a game time decision
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Got my beard trimmed today and my barber told me I should be grateful because I went from a having some small patches of gray to almost none.
I laughed and said he was right, “I look a bit younger” and asked if he had any other secrets to share with me.
Made me wonder when I’ll go completely gray and if one day it will turn white. I am not anxious for either to happen but not afraid of it either.
I’ll have earned it, but there is no need to rush.
What You Believe & What You Know
When I was much younger and would go with my father and grandfather to the shvitz I would sit and listen to the old men talk.
I got an education in many things probably long before I needed to know about them but I didn’t always understand what they were talking about. Nor did I always pay attention as some of it wasn’t that interesting to me.
Nor did I realize that may father was a kid to some of these guys too. He was 25 years older than me so If I was 10 he was only 35.
It wasn’t uncommon for the guys to talk about what they had done in the war and whether it had been in Europe or the Pacific, though I think there might have been some conversations about Korea too.
One time on the ride home I asked Dad and grandpa why that guy talked about banging nurses in England and France.
They both laughed and I said I didn’t think it was funny because if I hit one of my sisters I would catch hell. I remember my grandfather saying “Orrie, it sounds like this is for you or something like that.”
It stuck out because I always noticed when grandpa called Dad by his first name and how my father would respond.
Among other memories that jump out at me were the guys arguing about who the best athletes were and how some would tell the guys who were around my father’s age they hadn’t seen particular people and didn’t understand.
Older Yankee fans were prone to say that about Joe Dimaggio when they compared him to Mickey Mantle. As I got older I heard variations of that argument about multiple players in various sports.
Lots of “you never saw Bill Russell or Wilt in their prime so you don’t really know.”
It strikes me now because I am old enough to sometimes do that myself. When people say Kareem, Magic, Bird and or Jordan are overrated I can almost always guarantee they are young.
I don’t always interject, but every now and then I will and remind people it is different when you have lived through moments and aren’t just relying upon the internet.
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It happens in multiple areas and I cant say I am totally immune to it either. I probably was in my late twenties or so before I really accepted the Bee Gees were more than the Saturday Night Fever disco soundtrack.
They have a few songs that preceded that album that are often in my rotation.
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The situation in Israel jumps out at me too. The college students that are protesting now aren’t old enough to remember Israel as an underdog or the peace process of the nineties,
It is part of why some of them are so easily manipulated, but there is a difference between what you believe and what you know.
The guy above wouldn’t believe some of the things that have happened or how he/I/we have reacted. He would have been dumbfounded about some of it and enraged about others.
He would have berated me for not handling some of it differently. There is a part of me that wants to say he would be wrong on all counts because I am so much older and wiser now.
I am not convinced that is entirely true though it absolutely is in some areas. But even though I often say I know things there are areas where I could easily be wrong but I am much better about accepting that now than I was then.
Ideally I really am a kinder, gentler and more compassionate man. I wasn’t bad then but I try hard now to extend that further and to make more efforts to make it known.
More kindness never hurts.
“The college students that are protesting now aren’t old enough to remember Israel as an underdog or the peace process of the nineties”…
The 90’s? When I was in college in the 70’s, it was a major topic between the Jewish and students who had connections to the Arabian middle east. Because we were in northern New York, there weren’t any protests until I left college, but it was a big deal when Reagan took office and the hostages were released because they were scared of Reagan… of all things! Of course, there was the killing of Israeli athletes in Berlin during the ’72 Olympics that was horrific… enough of that from me.
I think life was just as complex in the 70’s as it is now but we didn’t have 1 minute TikTok videos and Instagram memes trying to distill everything down to bite size pieces.
That hasn’t helped with understanding or education on some pretty complex topics.
And yeah, these kids today know nothing of Munich, hijackings and more.
Hell, I have had conversations with a bunch who think 9/11 was overblown.
Which makes me really angry; yesterday was a hard day to get through… and on top of it I had my eyes dilated twice, so I couldn’t see well for 90 minutes or so. Seeing it happen live is embedded in my brain forever.
I understand that. It was life changing, no doubt about it. Seeing it, watching the videos and so many other things afterwards sticks with you.
Always a ‘pleasure’ to get our eyes dilated.