City of Brotherly Love

 

I'm glad I'm living in the land of the free, where the rich just get richer and the poor you don't ever have to see.

— Randy Newman

Two worlds were on view outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center, host this week to Expo Expo, the tradeshow for tradeshow organizers.

One was the world of wealth and conspicuous consumption; the other, the world of poverty and homelessness.

Perhaps because we're aware of the coming holidays—an occasion to reflect on good fortune—more than one attendee mentioned to me that they found Philadelphia's efforts to hide the homeless from visitors' view wanting.

The homeless hovered in doorways and alleys around the convention center, and the streets were squalid, littered with their debris.

Meantime, the caviar and cocktails flowed at the Jean-Georges SkyHigh, atop the nearby Four Seasons Hotel.

This kind of dichotomous display isn't what you'd expect in the US, where we're adept at hiding poverty from visitors' view. In the Philippines, yes. In Indonesia, yes. In the US, no. 

But Philadelphia has bigger problems to worry about.

Visitors' discomfort be damned.

Learning the Lindy

In the mid-1980s, my ex-wife and I got it into our heads we should learn ballroom dancing and enrolled in a 12-week class.

The instructor was a world-class dancer, as graceful and lithe as Gene Kelly. He showed no sympathy or patience for plodding, lubberly clodhoppers like me.

He devoted the class to a single dance, the Lindy, insisting that, if you learned its steps, every other ballroom dance would come easily. 

(For you squares, the Lindy, named for aviator Charles Lindbergh, is a swing dance made popular during the Jazz and Big Band eras. It's better known today as the Jitterbug.)

The Lindy proved too much for me, as it turned out. 

By the end of the class, I not only failed to learn it, I failed to learn any discernable dance step—and nearly forgot how to walk.

Technophobic seniors—of whom there are millions—should heed my experience.

To participate fully in today's world, you need to dance with technology; but you don't have to master the digital equivalent of the Lindy.

For a tech clodhopper, that's a fool's errand.

Instead, just learn how to open a PDF, for example; download and install an app; click through a website; and post on Facebook or Instagram. 

Those steps will do nicely. 

Technophobic seniors are legion: one-third of American seniors—over 18 million people—have never used the Internet, according to Pew Research Center, and two-thirds have never used social media. Of those who do, one-third say they have little or no confidence in their ability to navigate digital technology.

I've encountered my share of these technophobes working as a volunteer for several nonprofits and can tell you their digital incompetence really gums up the works.

I can't imagine how it must gum up their lives, when you can't pay a bill, retrieve a document, order a prescription or make an appointment without using some company's portal.

Technophobic seniors say laptops, tablets and smartphones are too hard to use and that the Internet is an unfathomable labyrinth.

And there's truth to that.

But there are IT and digital literacy crash-courses galore for seniors at public libraries, churches, community centers, storefront academies, and two-year colleges; and, during pandemics, there friends and family members willing and able to tutor.

After all, you don't need Gene Kelly to teach you a few basic steps.

NOTE: If you know a technophobic senior, please print this post and hand it to him. You'll be doing all of us a favor.

Remembrance

 

Americans have no sense of history.

— Howard Fast

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, our parents' and grandparents' 9/11.

Occasions like today's are good reminders that tyrants have no fondness for America.

Ignoring tyrants doesn't help. 

Cozying up to them doesn't help.

Only vigilance does.

And vigilance requires remembrance.

Apologies

We are so busy winning we can't concede our mistakes.

— Aaron Lazare

To err is human.

But to apologize—?

“Never apologize, mister" John Wayne said. "It’s a sign of weakness.”

That seems to be the code of most men. (Women, on the other hand, "live lives of continual apology," as Germane Greer said.)

An apology, according to psychiatrist Aaron Lazare, is really a reparation: you've wronged someone, and you owe them your admission of guilt.

Apology is a 15th-century word borrowed from the Greek apologia, literally "sprung from divine speech" (apo + logia). An apology was the pronouncement of a god, channeled through an oracle. 

To the Ancient Greeks, an apology wasn't just manly; an apology was godly.  

The English word apology first meant a "defense" or "self-excuse." Samuel Johnson defined it as such in his dictionary, adding "Apology generally signifies excuse rather than vindication, and tends to extenuate the fault, rather than prove innocence."

It gradually came to mean an "an admission of error." In other words, a guilty plea.

Like John Wayne, a lot of Americans feel no urge to apologize.

And they're sick of other Americans apologizing: apologizing for genocide and slavery and imperialism; for witch trials and lynch mobs and McCarthyism; for redlining and segregation and the caging of immigrant children; for strip-mining and gas-guzzlers and deforestation.

Apologies aren't manly.

Apologies are for losers.

But one form of apology worth considering is the apologetic.

An apologetic was an early Christian's defense of his faith.

Apologetics—short essays—were published at a time when the Romans would execute a Christian merely for refusing to worship the pagan gods (a lot were executed, and often in grisly ways).

Of the hundreds of written apologetics, On the Testimony of the Soul, penned in 198 AD by Quintus Septimius Tertullian, stands out as an especially persuasive one (Tertullian was a lawyer).

In the apologetic, he argues that there's little difference between Christians and pagans, when you consider that both believe in God, demons and souls.

Both, Tertullian says, admit expressions like "God help us," "God bless you," and "God wills it." 

Both, moreover, admit that souls can become corrupt—that demons exist who can capture and bend souls to their will.

And both admit, finally, that souls experience an afterlife; some a pleasant one; some an unpleasant one.

Given these common beliefs, Tertullian says, it's easy to see that Christians and pagans are bound by their humanity, and that their differing faiths are inborn and don't derive from religious discourse, but from the "testimony of the soul."

"Every race has its own discourse, but the content is universal," Tertullian says.

"God is everywhere and the goodness of God is everywhere. The demons are everywhere and the curse of the demons is everywhere. The summons of God's judgment is everywhere. The awareness of death is everywhere and the testimony of the soul is everywhere."

The testimony of the soul provides the evidence clinching Tertullian's case: pagans shouldn't execute Christians; for, in doing so, they only snuff themselves.

We'd be wise to remember with Tertullian that we're all one people, united by the fact that we all have a soul; and that, sometimes, apologies are due.

"When you forgive, you free your soul," says the writer Donald Hicks. "But when you say 'I’m sorry,' you free two souls."

The Real Danger of Inflation

I filled my gas tank yesterday and realized it costs 33% more to do so than when I bought the car five years ago. 

A lot of the price increase has come recently.

I'm as wary of inflation as the next guy.

But the real danger of inflation isn't to our pocketbooks.

It's to our republic.

As columnist David Brooks observed this week, run-of-the-mill, white-shoe Republicans are in a lather over federal spending, and will vote for Trump simply to damper it.

They're unaware of the evil Trump and his followers embody.

To these naïfs, he's just a good Republican. 

If inflation becomes chronic, they'll rally to him.

You'll recall from your history books a troubled time in Germany after World War I. 

The government had been forced, by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, to pay war reparations to the Allies.

To fund that debt, the German government printed money—tons of it—sparking runaway inflation.

At one point, German housewives burned piles of Reichsmarks, because they were worth less than firewood.

The inflationary spiral gave rise to extremist political leaders and movements, in particular Hitler and the Nazis.

Burning money soon gave way to burning books and, eventually, to burning people.

Don't think for a minute it can't happen here.

It can.

Inflation—and pocketbook-issue voters—can return Trump to office.