Voted Out

My home state has voters that run mostly blue.  Being a small state geographically, access by voters to those the majority has elected comes much more easily than in places with millions of people but the same number of senators that we have.  Little nobody me has seen virtually all my elected representatives from county coucil to US Senator.  I've spoken to most, written to some, worship with one, and heard all live.  Like everyplace else in America we had our 2018 mass political participation in the form of voting.  I voted a straight ticket, only the second time I have ever done that, knowing that I will be voting against the more personally capable incumbent candidate and knowing that I would be casting my preference against the one candidate that I know best.  By late night, the results were known, Democrats swept statewide and in pretty much in my county, unseating my friend who had been in place for twenty years and a very professional state official who is a pro at the role the previous voters had elected him to do.  Had they worked for me in a company or in a non-profit, their jobs would have been in no danger.  No boss would accuse them of underperformance or undermining company goals or bringing discredit to the firm in any way.  More likely they would have gotten performance bonuses.  But they are not employees of my company.  They are more like contractors sent to fill a position by the Republican Party.  If I do not wish to maintain relations with their sponsor, their fortunes follow.  So two very good public officials of significant tenure and achievement fell victim to their standard bearer in the White House who does his best to create victims, most intended, a few like these men and two people in other districts of long tenure become his victims unwittingly and probably undeserved, though the intentional victims are also mostly undeserved.

This has come up in a different form.  I do not buy Papa John's Pizza, haven't for a while.   I found their pizza inferior the two times I bought some.  The standard bearer's presence favorable or not would not make me a customer and the amount of pizza that I buy would not move the fortunes of any company in any direction.  But I did find some of his public positions offensive and superimposed that on his company.  I do like Barilla pasta.  It always comes out better than Ronzoni or Shop-Rite brand but costs more, so when it went on sale for a comparable price I would get a box or two.  No more.  The spokesman takes a public stance that I find offensive, the gradient between his brand and the other brands is small, and my life and those who eat at my table will be no different whichever brand of pasta goes into the meal.  Barilla is gone.  I do not clip the coupons for it from the weekly circular.  There is never an incentive to divert my money to his pocket to demean groups of people he doesn't like.  I won't knowingly be an accomplice in that.  But my purchases do not change a stock price so if my mutual funds want to own some of the stock, they can buy it for my portfolio.

Who represents you matters.  It is not just a matter of personal competence, which is widely distributed among both parties and among companies with stellar reputations and among companies you choose to shun.  As a physician, my reputation depended on my employers and on the other people within the upper tiers of the organization who create policy.  The political parties are no different, even at the sacrifice of at least two men of real talent and professionalism.

Staying Upright

Having retired three months ago, my days are now unstructured and I can largely do what I like when I like.  And I've been productive, submitting articles, cleaning the house, indulging in my fondness for cooking and pursuing a thus far unsuccessful quest to catch a fish in a nearby pond.  I can also head off to one of our two sofas or to bed and lie down pretty much any time I want.  This has gotten out of hand with zero days avoiding the horizontal posture.  I can be productive when supine.  Reading goes well.  Screen time with a hand held tablet can add to some projects while destroying others.  I have a Torah read coming up that needs polishing.  Easy to work on that with the photocopied portion while lying down.  However, there are also things I should be working on, my twelve personal initiatives for the second half of 2018 set a few months back, that would proceed better if I did not have the supine at will option. 

Yesterday, for the first time since retiring, I committed myself to not lying down from the time I first arose until 9PM, and kept that pledge to myself.  Indeed, I did a lot of things during those waking hours.  I also had to force myself out of the house even if to go to a store, in order to escape the lure of the couch.  Milchig dishes done.  I made brownies.  Got some more bagels from Trader Joe's.  Surfed some other people's blogs for inspiration in further developing my own.  Read some newspaper.  Rid the study of papers.  Cleared the surface of my downstairs desk.  Read some more Bowling Alone.  Responded to some Facebook postings.  Responded in a substantial way to a KevinMD article.  Did a load of laundry.  Made supper.   Many are chores that eventually would have been done anyway, but a few get me ahead.

This took a little physical demand, as it is not what I am used to.  I didn't tire but could tell that I would rather not be walking around an outdoor shopping center in the drizzle in mid-afternoon.  And I kept entirely to myself. 

Stay upright again today, though a little sleep deprived surfing through last night's election returns.  And make some effort to not be quite as solitary, the other feature of my retirement.

Voting

Having been to Canada in 2017 and Italy/Greece in 2018, America has a mucho big problem.  People are getting imprinted to be confrontational.  We didn't see that there.  It is agenda by indimidation.  We no longer seem to have machers, those operators who manipulate the result they want but do it in a way that leaves you annoyed but not isolated.  We have a very big problem here, one that has created winners and losers, but very insecure winners.  My kids have already done well for themselves.  The children of confrontation and manipulated suppression are very unlikely to measure up.  A national jingo pageant.

I will go around the corner later today and cast my opinion in the direction of national dignity.

Getting Up Early

Off Topic, maybe.

I'm now three months into retirement, planned for five years, financially secure my adviser tells me.  I find it hard, indeed unfathomable, to start a workday at 7:30AM when I would typically leave home and go straight through to 6:30PM when I would get home.  My day has become short bursts of activity with lulls or diversions, though some are productive.  That's not to say I haven't done worthwhile things.  I've been to Europe for the first time.  I exercise on schedule, interrupted by days of quadratus lumborum pain.  My diet is better but my waist circumfrence and weight have not changed in the two years I have kept records.  Each day I have a list of more things than I can do, but focus on two or three, sometimes substantive like decluttering the study to be my reclusive space, more often trivial like doing the laundry. 

I have a few time restrictions that have served me well.  No food from 8PM to 6AM based on a study that showed better weight control by doing this irrespective of what is eaten at the other times and no internet from 11PM to 5:30AM, originally intended to sleep better but not terribly successful at that, though with other merits to justify keeping the restrictions going.

Today I woke up in the middle of the night, tried to return to sleep, almost did and arose at 6:30.  Thought about going to a new local diner for breakfast, but opted for coffee at home via K-cups instead.  I did the rest of fleishig dishes, cold laundry, worked on Thanksgiving dinner, which is one of my annual projects, and in general feel more prepared for the rest of the day.  I've taken my weekly weight and waist measurements.  Uncertain on treadmill as I am still achy.  Limited Facebook and email which are my time sinks. 

I always knew I was a morning person. 

Hanukkah Gifts

It has been our family tradition, a carry-over from my wife's family's tradition, to offer one gift of nominal value each night to everyone in the household and one total to the others on the list, slightly above nominal value.  We tried to have the kids each get three, one for each parent, one for the other, but that system has been very inconsistent.  Our household is now depleted to two, with kids semi-settled just a plane ride or UPS delivery away, so the talley for this year and the previous years comes to eight for wife, four for each child, with wife getting eight for me and four for each child.  That way we each open one per night. 

I'm doing well.  Got three for my wife, one for daughter, all things difficult to duplicate, though with online purchasing, nothing is really difficult to duplicate. 

This year the festival arrives shortly after Thanksgiving which spares me the ordeal of traditional post-Thanksgiving retailing.  Categories help.  One edible, maybe one wearable, one with our sports team logo.  It's a challenge for me, but has always been one of making me think more about the recipient than I might otherwise have.  And that's probably the essence of gift selection.

Massacred

I've never known a terror victim before, or even somebody murdered on the street.  Along the way patients, mostly minorities from the cities, have related a child or other relative who had been murdered, though I never knew one personally.  Shootings are common, appearing in the news pretty much every day.  Terrorist explosions have become all too common.  But those are other people with names, with families, but known personally to other people.

An old friend from college, however, became the first for me, a victim of a mass shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue where he attened Dor Hadash, a Reconstructionist congregation that rented space in the building.  I suspected it might be him as soon as the names with ages were released the day after the assault, confirmed within an hour or two.  Jerry Rabinowitz, UPenn C'73/M'77 had been my friend in college for four years.  We served together on the freshman rowing team, both as coxswains, he departing wisely at mid-year when the coach had a hissy-fit and made us all run beyond our reasonable capacity.  Jerry went on to excel at his studies, gaining admission to UPenn medical school and then settling in Pittsburgh as a primary care physician.  I would learn from the tributes and more formal obituaries that he got in on the ground floor of managing AIDS, being among the first to introduce anti-retroviral medicine as it became available to those with low CD4 counts.  We lost contact, and when the photographs appeared in public media, I probably would not have recognized him in a social situation but the identity would click in a minute or two with name tags at a UPenn event.  I remember Jerry as kindly and maybe somewhat direct in our conversations.  I do not recall him going to shul or having a girlfriend.  I cannot even remember for sure his major, though I think it was biochemistry as we shared classes into our junior or maybe even senior years.

Forty years of separation can be reconnected up to a point in an obituary.  He had only been married 21 years, he served as a pillar of the Reconstructive synagogue that rented space where the massacre occurred during shabbat morning worship.  In doctor fashion, his first inclination was to attend to the wounded in his presence.  His mother and his in-laws survive, though he had no children.  Some relatives, likely on his wife's side, had made Aliyah with many characteristic Israeli names among the survivors. 

For a while, I considered driving to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  That was not to be, as I had a deadline project that would delay travel and unknown to me, the funeral took place this morning, the first set of funerals for four of the eleven murdered.  I just could not have gotten there.

Does knowing a victim change how a mass murder of this type registers?  I do not know yet.  There is the function brain part of me that is well aware of targeting of Jews through history, whether by spontaneous pogroms, pre-meditated Holocausts or inquisitions, assassinations targeting individuals, or terror attacks where randomness that creates a who's next is integral to the plan.  The hatred that drives this is never rational, but there is usually an agenda from not allowing Jews who Islamists regard as dhimis from owning land to diffusing perceived economic power, to keeping the Church free of non-believers.  While murder usually gets condemnation, at least in America, the underlying desire to identify an external target to avenge one's social travails, often does not.  That's where we seem to be now.  Prosecution of perpetrators does not stop this.  Elections sometimes do.  We have an opportunity for this in just a couple of weeks.  My friend Jerry's shooting was random, but indirectly enabled.  It has to be disabled and I am optimistic that enough people will have connected to this to make for a return to some of the decency that America's electoral leadership has not seen as important enough to protect.

If I am Not for Myself

One of my twelve initiatives for this half of the calendar year has been to read or listen to three books, a self-driven task brought to completion a few days back when I concluded Herman Wouk's The Hope, an historical about the early conflicts of Eretz Yisrael that brought the relative security that we have had the past forty or so years.  Unlike Torah, where you read again what you just finished, my custom has been to read something else, typically something that I cite from time to time but never actually read.  So I went to the public library and extracted from the shelf Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone which I started reading last evening.

From the onset, book now in its Chai anniversary since publication, has evoked some divided opinion, but basically he traces the decline of people banding together either to solidify common interests in an exclusionary way or to broaden common interests in an inclusive way.  Having just returned from Venice which has basically a skeletal Jewish presence but preserved synagogues and museums, I quipped to our Rabbi that our shul is like that, nice building about to be sold to a church leaving us essentially homeless, but mostly schvok on people.  We are hardly historical so no reason for the curious to scatter through our vacant rooms.  And once we vacate the building, we will have only people and a quick surge in our bank account balance.  This may be the optimal time to look to the future, maybe even hire and independent consultant, and not a Jewish.

For me, one of a few hundred "for me's", it may be time for a break.  I was not at all involved in this process, received no invitations to do anything off the bimah, and for the most part treated more like a spectator than a resource.  There are some things where I like being a spectator.  Football with two teams that I have no reason to root for.  If you root for one you become a communal participant.  The political world.  Even though I vote, it's effect on outcome is minimal.  I've offered my talent and energy to the Democrats from time to time but they are pretty self-absorbed, which may be why they underperform despite an ideology that would bring a better public outcome.

No, the time for a Me Month has come.  No AKSE.  Maybe a bus trip to NYC.  Thanksgiving.  Finish Bowling Alone.