Slavery Touches Us All

Please see my new article in The Times of Israel called, “Without Slavery and Genocide.”

Coming out of the museum, my daughter asked how anyone could actually do something like this to another human being. I had no answer to this…just like I have none to the Holocaust or any of the other incredibly cruel, sick, and wicked things that people do to each other. 

Hopefully we can all have a brighter future without slavery and without genocide.  😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

@Museum of Contemporary Art

(Source Photos: Andy Blumenthal)

When Evil Seems To Prevail

So there is this little Chinese restaurant–it sounds so cliche. 

But this one really is so small and bare that despite its name, which I don’t even know, we call it “The Hole In the Wall.”

This poor family with their children work behind the counter and kitchen serving up to the locals in the area. 

We know them from the neighborhood and they are always friendly and nice people just trying to make their way 

Well, over the weekend, this is what happened to their little hole in the wall. 

See the photo at the top!

I asked the lady, “What happened here?”

And she told me they had been broken into.

“That’s terrible! Well, what was taken?”

“Just a little cash box, but there wasn’t much in it,” and she half smiles.

Like this is what they smashed their door and broke in for…a few measly bucks. 

I told her how sorry I was for her and her family.

The people with nothing break into the other people who have nothing to steal basically nothing. 

While so many of the gazillionaires are choking on their wads and wads of money lavishly spending on mansions, yachts, planes, cars, drugs, prostitutes, clothes, jewelry, and endless parties. 

Let the others starve…except let me give a little to start a foundation…it’s a great tax shelter!

What type of world is this?

I’ve been sick the last few days and had the chance to watch a few movies related to this theme.

One was the Bitter Harvest about how Russia raped and pillaged Ukraine in the 1930s treating them as their breadbasket.

In the movie, Stalin says to take 90% of the food from the Ukrainian peasant farmers whose land they invaded and seized.

His henchman replies:  “But they’ll starve to death.”

To this Stalin responds, “Then takes everything!”

The movie well-portrayed the merciless killings and the people starving in the villages and the city streets. 

According to the postscript at the end of the movie 7 to 10 million Ukrainians perished.

Those were the days of great evil–Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, etc. 

Then another movie, The Birth Of A Nation, showing the horrors that the black people endured under slavery in this country.

The beatings, the rapes, the hangings, at one point, they even took a hammer and smashed the teeth out of the poor black man’s face as he hung from the wall in the barn in order to force feed him.

The brutality was unbelievable. 

What type of world is this (again)?

G-d must watch this evil and want to smite mankind for the seemingly endless evil, but for his mercy and love the world endures another day. 

Our challenge in the face of all the freakin’ evil out there is to do one good deed, say one good word, change the script of the evil doers…that’s all you and I can really do.

Change the script…mend the broken glass of the poor restaurant owner…mend the broken world. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Colors Of Race

With the race riots in Ferguson again this week, the divide between black and white is once again evident in America.

 

Coming from big city life in America, like New York City and Washington D.C., I’ve grown up in divided neighborhoods and united organizations.

 

For example, just this morning, my daughter and I walking down Las Olas had to duck into an Illy’s coffee shop when an impoverished (black) man in dirty clothes and talking loudly to himself turned around on the street and was coming up steadily behind us in a threatening way. Similarly, the day before, there was a (white) lady at the bus stop talking out loud, hallucinating, and thrashing…also scary in this otherwise posh neighborhood.  In other words, these issues are race-agnostic!

 

Simultaneously, I go to synagogue where blacks and whites (as well as “black hatters” and the modern religious) sit and pray and socialize together, and go to work where many of my esteemed coworkers are African-Americans, and watch as one of my daughter’s best friend in school and who she blabs with on the phone is a nice young man who happens to be black

 

Also, I remember last year I think it was having to move a heavy piece of furniture and one of my black neighbors went out of his way to help me get it upstairs–he was incredibly generous and he and many others where I live are friendly, neighborly, and we live side-by-side together.

 

We need to move from racial inequality to racial harmony!

 

We don’t have to wait for an alien invasion to realize we are all human beings here on Earth and that we share more than not.

 

In Fort Lauderdale, by Florida Atlantic University, Nova Southeastern University, and Broward College, the actual intersections of the street are pained in multi-color. 

 

I love it..not black and white, but the colors of the rainbow…mixed, flowing, getting along, and happy.

 

Let it be–black and white, yellow, brown, and red–a melting pot, together throughout the world in peace and prosperity. 

 

No more rioting in Ferguson or elsewhere, but celebration of humanity–nothing more, nothing less. 😉

 

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)