American Respect
Late last night I tried to record a documentary that appeared on the Sundance Channel, called "The Last Jews in Libya." It was about one of the last families of Sephardic Jews to leave Libya, when in the 1967 War the intolerance of the Arabs rose to such a pitch that it was no longer safe for Jews to stay in Libya, though they had been a part of the life there for hundreds of years.
When an elder of this family told one of his Arab friends that he was going to the U.S., the friend said something like, "The U.S. is a nice place, but you should know that there is one bad thing about Americans. They have no respect."
He meant respect for the wisdom of elders, which meant men only, and more especially the practice of all sorts of .expressions of that respect that had been built up in Libyan society over the ages.
A woman member of that family confirmed that when she mentioned how, for instance, in Libya women didn't dare to sit in certain ways in the presence of elders, such as cross-legged, but had to always sit up straight, etc,etc. She said that from her first day in the U.S. she had observed her fellow refugees discarding such customs by the boatload.
When I heard that, I was once again glad that I am an American. Though I am well aware that it is often carried to unpleasant extremes, all in all I like American sauciness and the Mark Twainian, Richard Pryorian, Lennie Brucian brand of irreverence for practically everything. It's the kind of thing that makes America great and that makes it so much of a pleasure and a privilege to be a citizen here, much more so than do hordes of men with guns and questionable feats such as sending men to the Moon and even the worship of goddesses like Britney Spears, whose frolics and follies must be religiously observed in the news daily (at least on the online news)..
One would think that since I am now elderly myself, I would welcome the idea of being respected merely because I have accumulated so many years. But not so. I have not observed that age automatically makes people wiser, and I have long thought that age merely intensifies what we always were.
.
Scientists tell us that we are born with all the brain cells that we will ever have, and that from that moment on we lose 500 of those precious items an hour, and that unlike all our other cells they are never replaced. I repeat, NEVER! This means that of the hundred billion that I was born with, so far I have lost close to 333 million, plus a few millions more that may have gone when as a child I failed to keep a close enough eye on a rock that was hurled at me by a contemporary when he failed to get the best of me during a serious difference of opinion..
That's not a bad number. I can live with it. But it also means that, like everyone else, if quantity of brain cells is any measure (it may not be), I am not as smart now as I was when I was only six. It was just that at that age I didn't have as much information to work with.
Until recently I liked a statement that Richard Pryor, the late great comedian, put into the mouth of one of his characters, Mudbone. "You don't get old being no fool, you know." For a long time that comment had the ring of absolute truth to me, even though I must have been aware that it had holes.
That awareness has been heightened so much since the elections of 2000 that now it can be said without fear of refutation that one has only to take a peek into the U.S. Capitol Building or the Supreme Court building or the White House to see gangs of old fools.cavorting about. Those are the kinds of rat holes down which a lot of American respect has disappeared in recent years.
When an elder of this family told one of his Arab friends that he was going to the U.S., the friend said something like, "The U.S. is a nice place, but you should know that there is one bad thing about Americans. They have no respect."
He meant respect for the wisdom of elders, which meant men only, and more especially the practice of all sorts of .expressions of that respect that had been built up in Libyan society over the ages.
A woman member of that family confirmed that when she mentioned how, for instance, in Libya women didn't dare to sit in certain ways in the presence of elders, such as cross-legged, but had to always sit up straight, etc,etc. She said that from her first day in the U.S. she had observed her fellow refugees discarding such customs by the boatload.
When I heard that, I was once again glad that I am an American. Though I am well aware that it is often carried to unpleasant extremes, all in all I like American sauciness and the Mark Twainian, Richard Pryorian, Lennie Brucian brand of irreverence for practically everything. It's the kind of thing that makes America great and that makes it so much of a pleasure and a privilege to be a citizen here, much more so than do hordes of men with guns and questionable feats such as sending men to the Moon and even the worship of goddesses like Britney Spears, whose frolics and follies must be religiously observed in the news daily (at least on the online news)..
One would think that since I am now elderly myself, I would welcome the idea of being respected merely because I have accumulated so many years. But not so. I have not observed that age automatically makes people wiser, and I have long thought that age merely intensifies what we always were.
.
Scientists tell us that we are born with all the brain cells that we will ever have, and that from that moment on we lose 500 of those precious items an hour, and that unlike all our other cells they are never replaced. I repeat, NEVER! This means that of the hundred billion that I was born with, so far I have lost close to 333 million, plus a few millions more that may have gone when as a child I failed to keep a close enough eye on a rock that was hurled at me by a contemporary when he failed to get the best of me during a serious difference of opinion..
That's not a bad number. I can live with it. But it also means that, like everyone else, if quantity of brain cells is any measure (it may not be), I am not as smart now as I was when I was only six. It was just that at that age I didn't have as much information to work with.
Until recently I liked a statement that Richard Pryor, the late great comedian, put into the mouth of one of his characters, Mudbone. "You don't get old being no fool, you know." For a long time that comment had the ring of absolute truth to me, even though I must have been aware that it had holes.
That awareness has been heightened so much since the elections of 2000 that now it can be said without fear of refutation that one has only to take a peek into the U.S. Capitol Building or the Supreme Court building or the White House to see gangs of old fools.cavorting about. Those are the kinds of rat holes down which a lot of American respect has disappeared in recent years.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 12:49 PM
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