To Blog or not to Blog

Greetings, Programs: (from TRON - the original movie)

(Sorry, Bill, for stealing your words (in the title) from Hamlet.) You know, my last blog (please forgive me for taking so long since then) was back in January on the free-software-policy aspect of Drools. I was thinking of going to see "TRON" in 3D tonight but it's already off the movie screens. (I saw the original many years ago- before Star Wars - and was entranced with what Hollywood could imagine such things happening.) OK, off to the main subject:

If it is that you have a blog, I think that you should write at least once per month minimum to that said blog. Having two blogs is incredibly time consuming on that premise. So, I'm back to having only two rather than the three or four that I had before. So, with that done, let's move on to another subject: Yom HaShoah Week. (See? Sucked you right from one subject to another that has nothing at all to do with the other - and no apologies for such disgraceful journalistic behavior. Disgraceful.) Yom (meaning "day" in Hebrew), Ha (meaning "the" in Hebrew) and Shoah meaning "calamity or destruction" in Yiddish/Hebrew, is actually a hard-to-understand mixture of words in Hebrew that make sense to us. Yom HaShoah is the Day of The Rememberance of the Holocaust from only one perspective. "The Solution" was Adolph's (you haven't forgotten his last name already have you?) idea to get rid of the Jewish "problem" in Germany - and eventually the world - but just getting rid of them. Sometimes in movies it's called "The Ultimate Solution" but even the high-ranking German SS spoke of it in low tones because they KNEW that it was wrong. So, so wrong.

So, this week (today? After all, it it still Shabbos) find a DVD copy (Blue Ray is a waste of money - unless you have a great sound system - since almost everything is Black-and-white in the movie "Schindler's List." Made quite some time ago, it is historically accurate and is kept on the correct historical track by Steven Spielberg (J-Director), Thomas Kneally - Author and historian, Poldek Pfefferberg (Leopold Page) - Author and historian, and many more.

Sadly, it is justifiably rated "R": but mature children, especially Jewish children, should see a part of their heritage and their parents should explain most of the concepts before the movie. The F- word is used extensively and my explanation to my children was that this is a gross, un-educated word used by persons of small minds who can think of very little and these persons think that this makes them sound intellectual. Not good but it worked.

For more on this subject you might want to go see Shoah and other movies (a Google search should be sufficient.) Today, we still have our Holocausts, blood-lettings, and things of that nature, but none that can surpass the callousness as we look back as see the pure (real) killing of people simply because they are of an ethnic minority.

Questions: How did Hitler get away with this when 80 million Germans were watching?? Didn't anyone have a sense of smell any more? Couldn't anyone hear the screams? Yet, today (I went to Munich for six months) nobody was a Nazi and nobody had a relative who was a Nazi. Amazing - just amazing.

I hope that I haven't led you too far astray nor forced you to look (now, how could I do that?) at our own flawed humanity, our own callousness and uncaring attitude. If you want to see the same thing and the same attitude today, just drive through the homeless part of your own town, especially near the missions, see the little old women pushing ALL of their worldly belongings in a shopping cart (they can barely walk), watch as the drug thugs rob them of any thing of value. Dear G-d: Come back soon and rescue a perishing world where saving a puppy is looked upon as something of value (which it really, really is) while we let our own humanity, our own brothers, sisters, mothers, aunts, sons, uncles, grandfathers, etc suffer on the street EVERY DAY and watch as those who are actually willing to work passed by; rather they are allowed to starve to death with only one meal per day in the mission. (That's all that the Nazi prisoners got, remember? One meal per day.)

Better things next time,

SDG

jco