WHY I WRITE, THE PURPOSE OF MIND CHECK REVISITED

I am pleased to announce that I have launched a new website using the following address: http://www.sasaftwrites.com. The purpose of sasaftwrites is to serve as a comprehensive reference for all of my writing and to make it easier for the Internet user to find me. For example, sasaftwrites will contain the first few paragraphs of each of my Mind Check postings at the time each is posted.

At sasaftwrites, the website visitor will also find one of my poems, a synopsis of one of my novels, and an excerpt of one of my plays. In addition, I hope to be adding an index of the many topics that I have covered in Mind Check since starting the blog in early 2007.

The Moral Imperative

As the current year draws to a close and a new one looms ahead, this is a good opportunity to revisit the subject of why I am doing the Mind Check blog and in fact why I am motivated to write period. When I first started Mind Check, I said I had a purpose and that that purpose contained within it a moral imperative, namely to make myself better and in so doing to do my small part in making the world a better place.

Specifically I was dealing with the intersection of mind and that external to the mind which I will call “the other”—the other as linked to “I” by that metaphorical bridge we call writing. At the center of this process are the groupings of words with their rules that we call language. The concept that explains words and language is known as communication. Communication is also another way of explaining this intersection of self and other.

Informing Myself What I Think

Okay, so getting down to basics, why am I writing? I write to bring out what I believe for my own benefit and for that of others because I believe that I have something to say that has value to me and to others. And I write because I must, because the need to write is very strong inside me.

Is one of the things I am saying that I do not know my own mind without resorting to the process of writing to bring out the ideas inside my head? That’s exactly what I am saying. My thoughts exist inside my head as fragments, as the incomplete parts of a whole. I need the writing process to objectify those fragments, that is to put them outside of myself to improve my ability to see them or understand them and thereby to aid my mind in filling in the gaps in logic or reasoning and imposing on them a structure.

Pursuit of Fame and Glory

When I was younger I also had another motive for writing, and that was to win myself what I perceived as fame and glory. I believe that such a motive is common among younger writers, and I am pleased that it is not nearly as strong in me as it once was. The pursuit of fame and glory is a good way to add to one’s unhappiness.

Let’s look at the concept of morality and see how it fits in with the topic at hand. The issue of morality must be brought into this discussion because earlier I used the value judgment concept of using writing to make myself better and the world a better place. The key words are “value,” “judgment,” and “better.” All three words raise the probability that a morality is at work in what I am saying.

Code to Measure Against

Morality is a code of behavior or a standard of behavior against which attitudes and behaviors can be measured and having to do with judgments or values, underlying which are the concept of good and evil. That said I have to quickly play devil’s advocate and admit that if writing were inherently a moral act, then what we call hate literature would not exist. As a subset of communication employing language, writing is a way for the self to reach the other. However, we may choose to use writing to exhort the other to hate.

On the other hand, I still believe that by aiding the process of objectification referred to earlier, writing facilitates our being able to see what is moral and what is immoral, what is right and what is wrong more easily. This is why all of the literature acknowledged to be great (admittedly another value judgment) is moral. The fact is morality and aesthetic judgments are inextricably bound together.

Stilted Morals in Literature

The last two statements urgently need clarification. Do I mean that all literature acknowledged to be great has a moral, that is, that it contains a statement of precepts having to do with right and wrong? I do not. In fact, such literature is often quite stilted and is often anything but great.

Do I mean that great literature always presents its subject in a morally positive manner in order to convey its supposed message? If that were the case we would have a very difficult time coming up with a fair assessment of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks—Oedipus Rex and Medea, for example—or the tragedies of Shakespeare such as Hamlet, to cite a small number of examples.

Example of Medea

No, I mean that great literature even when the subject is powerfully negative--a mother who murders her children, as in Medea, for example--derives its power from the presupposition and the foreshadowing of a moral universe in which such behavior is a gross violation.

An exposition of the underpinnings of mortality—the concepts of right and wrong—can only take us so far. Ultimately we must acknowledge the need for a leap beyond reason into a realm where what we know we know before reason or we know before experience, a concept encompassed in the word “apriori.” Whether we are deeply religious or consider ourselves not religious at all, even an atheist, we cannot free ourselves from value systems. They are hard wired into our brains and have everything to do with how we look at the world and how we communicate with others.

Twisting of Values

Yes, but values can be twisted as in the example of hate literature cited earlier. Correct. If this twisting takes place (alert, value system again at work!), the mind is capable of knowing that some defect in reasoning has taken place, although it may not do so. Hence we have people, too many of them, who are steadfast in their hatreds.

The logic behind behaviors and actions deemed to be good is quite compelling, and it is good to remind ourselves of it frequently. However, ultimately the mind has to make a leap and accept the proposition that correct action is good action because it is good because it is the right thing to do. For religious people this is what faith is all about. For them it is a basis, perhaps the most important one for some, for a belief in God.

A very happy new year to you all.

To reach the author of Mind Check, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com. Comprehensive website at http://www.sasaftwrites.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

FIGHTING THE CANCER WARS WITH A NEW DRUG CALLED VELCADE

And so we begin a new chapter in this saga called surviving with cancer. I’m subtitling this chapter or posting Velcade. What is that? Velcade is the trade name for a new product developed by Millennium Pharmaceuticals to fight a nasty blood cancer called multiple myeloma. Recently the uses of Velcade expanded when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved its use for fighting a version of NHL or non-Hodgkins lymphoma known as Mantle Cell B Lymphoma.

Readers of Mind Check may recall that Mantle Cell B Lymphoma is the disease that I was diagnosed as having back in late 2001 and for which I was treated first with a mixture of chemicals known by the acronym CHOP and later, that is, in October 2002, with a bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins Hospital. During both episodes I also received several infusions of a product called Rituxan.

Bad News, Right?

Readers of my previous posting to Mind Check will recall that I have just recently undergone a biopsy at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital. That posting did not include the all-important pathology report of the two specimens removed from me laparoscopically because at the time I had not yet received it.

From the way I began today’s posting, you’ve concluded that the report was not what I was hoping to hear, that the pathologist saw evidence of the return of Mantle Cell B Lymphoma on the two slides that the surgeons made of what they took out of my abdominal area. Bad news, right? Yes, bad news, but I’m not ready to give up.

Problem with Procedure Repetition

As a relapsed victim of Mantle Cell B Lymphoma, I could repeat the procedures I went through in 2002—that is, the witches brew called CHOP followed by another bone marrow transplant and the extensive use of the agent called Rituxan, which is taken by infusion and which works by binding to a particular protein (the CD-20 antigen) on the surface of normal and malignant B-cells and thus triggering their elimination.

Back then, however, I was warned by an oncologist and expert on lymphoma that I should be prepared for the fact that each repetition of this blood cancer fighting combination could be expected to be less effective than the one before. How much better then to be taking a brand new agent, one that my body has not been exposed to before.

Learning Biochemistry of Cancer

Okay so that brings me back to Velcade and the reasons that I remain extremely hopeful despite a disappointing pathology report. Velcade did not exist as a viable option for fighting Mantle Cell B Lymphoma in 2002, but it’s available today. Trying to figure out how Velcade works has pushed me even deeper into trying to understand the causes of cancer and specifically blood cancer. It has pushed me to make my aging brain absorb complex biochemical concepts having to do with cell development including mistakes in cell development and cell death.

Velcade, generic name bortezomib, is a proteasome inhibitor. It is the first proteasome inhibitor to be approved for use in humans, but in reviewing some of the information on proteasome inhibitors on the Internet I see that it is not the only one and I am sure we will soon be hearing about the use of other such agents in the blood cancer battle.

Proteasome Inhibitor, What Is It?

What is a proteasome inhibitor? Sometimes when the body puts together groups of proteins to make cells it makes a mistake. What is supposed to happen is that these mistakes die, a process known as apoptosis, and are eliminated from the body. But what if they won ‘t die? What if they insist on growing? We call that process cancer.

“Proteasomes are responsible for the selective degradation of proteins when cells no longer need them,” says the Peptides International website. “Inhibiting proteasomes in cancer cells can disrupt protein regulation, which ultimately can lead to apoptosis or programmed death.” (http://www.pepnet.com/proteasome.html) This death is a good thing. We want errors in cell development to die and be eliminated, not to be perpetuated as cancer.

Helpful Publication

The best description of mantle cell lymphoma for the lay person that I have seen including causes, diagnosis and treatment options is published by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and is available by calling the society at 800-955-4572. (Ask for the document entitled “Mantle Cell Lymphoma” Number 4 in a series.) It is also available as a downloadable document in PDF format on the Internet. (http:// www.leukemia-lymphoma.org)

In reading this document one learns that the cancer causing error in Mantle Cell B Lymphoma has to do with a protein called cyclin D1. “MCL [Mantle Cell Lymphoma] is distinguished by over expression of cyclin D1 (a protein that stimulates cell growth) in almost all cases. The over expression of cyclin D1 is usually caused by a translocation between chromosomes 11 and 14.” Chromosomes carry the genes that convey our hereditary characteristics.

Transformation of a B Lymphocyte

Later the document tells us how this error gets turned into a full fledged disease. “Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is the result of a malignant transformation of a B lymphocyte in the outer edge of a lymph node follicle, called the mantle zone. The transformed B lymphocyte (lymphoma cell) grows in an uncontrolled way and the accumulated lymphoma cells form tumors in lymph nodes leading to their enlargement. The lymphoma cells can enter the lymphatic channels and the blood and spread to other lymph nodes or tissues such as the marrow, liver and gastrointestinal tract.”

Thus the war resumes for me using a new weapon called Velcade. What is at stake is something very dear to me, namely my life. I got through the first battles of this war in 2001 and 2002, and my hope is I will do at least as well in 2008. One of the things I have going for me is that I am still feeling strong and vigorous. I am no beaten warrior forcing his weakened carcass back into battle. No, I am beginning to see myself more like the biblical hero Samson once again doing battle with the Philistines.

I was reminded of the Samson image in a recent discussion of my medical situation with my friend Brooks Townes. After hearing of the latest twist in the saga of my battles with blood cancer, Brooks said, “I think of you as someone in a huge building that is about to collapse on him. Then the building does collapse. Huge pillars and huge ceiling pieces are falling all around you, but somehow nothing touches you, and you come out unscathed.” Let us hope that Brooks’s vision applies in this case as well.

To reach the author of Mind Check write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

BIOPSY FINALLY CARRIED OUT. LAPAROSCOPIC PROCEDURE WORKS.

Sometimes, especially when we are older, we are grateful for postponements of traumatic medical procedures. Yes, it would be better if they became permanently unnecessary, but then such miracles are extremely rare. And so I am grateful for the six month postponement of the medical procedure I previously wrote about in Mind Check, a postponement brought about by wife Harriet breaking her left or, in her case, “good” wrist.

My latest PET Scan, performed Oct. 19, showed that the small mass in my abdomen, previously the size of an olive, had grown to the size of a quarter and that it had gotten even brighter, indicating an increase in activity. Time to take action, right? That’s what my new oncologist felt, and she had previously recommended a conservative wait-and-see approach. How could I protest this time?

Target: Mass in Mesentery

Off to the surgeon, off to Carl Westcott, Assistant Professor of Laparoscopic and Bariatric Surgery at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The target of Westcott and his team was located by the two CAT and two PET scans (the latter actually combinations of both PET and CAT procedures) in the mesentery, a web of tissue linking the organs of the abdomen, which also happened to be in the blood supply for the small intestine.

Was this mass evidence of the reoccurrence of lymphoma, cancer in the lymphatic system, for which I had been treated extensively in 2002? Was it evidence of cancer in one of the nearby organs such as the small intestine? If so, why had the two PET scans failed to show the possibility of cancer in these organs? Or was it a response to infection, infection generated by the chronic condition known as diverticulitis, a problem in the intestines which had first been spotted in me during a procedure known as endoscopy in early 2002?

Envisioned as Diagnostic Procedure

Whatever the findings, it was unlikely that the surgery would include the cure for my problem. No, the surgery was always envisioned as a diagnostic procedure, as what is called a biopsy. As such, it was always seen as a method of finding answers, not a cure in and of itself, and it was always envisioned as requiring the services of a pathologist and his or her microscope to complete the inquiry.

My fear going into the procedure was that the minimally invasive device called the laparoscope would not work. In fact, Westcott himself had first planted doubt in my mind about the effectiveness of the laparoscope the first time I met with him in May. At that meeting, he raised the possibility that the mass, then the size of an olive, might be too small to find using the narrow pointed laparoscope.

Just One Night in Hospital

Now that the procedure is behind me, I’m glad to report that in fact the laparoscope did work. Because it did work, my recovery was quick. In fact, I only spent one night in the hospital –Wake Forest Baptist Hospital, that is. At first, I was shaky and needed to be very careful when I attempted to stand, but the fact is that I was able to stand on my own within about an hour of being moved from the recovery area to a regular hospital room.

On my shaved stomach three small incisions are in evidence. The largest of these—lower left—is just a little more than an inch in length. I assume that this was the entrance point for the initial scope, the fixture for the light source and video camera that are key to carrying out this kind of surgery. I’m thinking that the gas used to inflate the abdominal cavity was introduced using a tube through one of the other two incisions and that the third incision was used for the tool containing the extraction device for removing parts of the mass.

Two Samples Extracted

In laparoscopic surgery, the abdominal cavity is filled with a gas to force organs away from each other so that the surgical team can get a better view of the organs. As for the extraction, the goal of the team was the preparation of samples to present to the pathologists. In my case, two samples were extracted. Together the two samples added up to a large part of the mass itself—this according to an assistant surgeon who spoke to me the day after the procedure.

What are the results? I don’t know at this point. The chief surgeon told my wife that he thought what he was seeing through the laparoscope was evidence of the return of lymphoma, but he acknowledged that he could not be sure and that no one could be sure without detailed pathology studies. And so why am I not including the results in this posting? Am I being coy?

No Preliminary Pathology Report

Herein lies the most disappointing part of the whole story. Harriet and I had been led to believe that we would be presented with a preliminary pathology report at the time of the laparoscopy itself, but that didn’t happen. The surgeon gave my wife his supposition from his observation, but that is as much as we got. The pathology report is still awaited. In the next posting I will be reporting on its findings.

As I’ve indicated, I made a rapid recovery from the procedure. Only one night in the hospital after abdominal surgery—that’s pretty impressive, I think. The value of minimally invasive surgery is hard to dispute, but I would be remiss if I did not make clear that this surgery was not without its side effects. I had three. Two of the three were related to the process of being sedated for a period of three hours. The third was the result of taking a particular painkiller and also the discomfort to be expected from abdominal surgery of any kind. Two of the three had to do with elimination functions. The other had to do with having a breathing tube stuck down my throat.

One last observation. I found it very interesting how the incisions from laparoscopic surgery are put back together. No stitches. No staples. Surgeons are now using Superglue to close up such wounds. Anyway that’s what one of the nurses told us, and it explains why my small incisions are so bright and shiny. Superglue for surgery—that amazes me.

To reach the author of Mind Check, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

WIND FARM GIVES HOPE THAT WE CAN CURE OUR ENVIRONMENT CRISIS

You can call this posting Atlantic City Part 2 or you can call it Atlantic City and Our Environment in Crisis. As impressed I was with the casino and commercial development that I saw during my fiftieth high school reunion in Atlantic City in early October, nothing impressed me more than what I caught sight of as my wife Harriet and I were heading out of town in our rented dark purple Hyundai and back to the airport in Philadelphia.

There, to the right of the Atlantic City Expressway, were five giant wind turbines, each towering well over 300 feet in the air. That glimpse almost took my breath away, and I felt I had to know more about this awesome sight.

Atlantic City Wind Farm

Thanks to the Internet, I was able to find out a lot. Operational since December 2005, the Jersey-Atlantic Wind Farm is located at the ACUA (Atlantic County Utilities Authority) Wastewater Treatment Plant, near the Marina section. The five turbines stand 380 feet high, and each is capable of producing 1.5 megawatts for a total of 7.5 megawatts, enough energy to power approximately 2,500 homes. The equivalent of 23,613 barrels of crude oil are expected to be saved per day by the facility. Multiply that out over a year, and the number is an impressive 8,618,745 barrels. (Source: http://www.acua.com/alternative/)

That Atlantic City is the location of a wind farm, a wind farm that is making such a contribution to lessening our dependency on oil increases my pride in the fact that I once called Atlantic City home. About 20 years ago, I saw my first wind farm when my friend Brooks Townes, writer and photographer, took me for a memorable ride in his dark green Volvo sports car a hundred miles or so due east of the place where he was then living on Morro Bay in California.

No Al Gore Back Then

I was impressed with that facility as well, although none of those turbines were anywhere near as tall as those in Atlantic City, but the experience didn’t have the impact that it should have. Although I was well aware of the danger of the depletion of the world’s oil reserves back then and could readily see the value of a wind farm as an oil saving method, I was no Al Gore. The danger to the environment posed by hydrocarbon burning and the resulting elevation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not in my range of awareness.

Now everywhere on earth the glaciers and ice caps are melting. They are melting as a result of the rise in the average temperature. And why is the average temperature of almost every spot on earth rising? Al Gore and every other creditable climate expert alive today has told us why. It is rising because of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The increase in the carbon dioxide concentration is known as the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is the byproduct of hydrocarbon burning. In other words, the more oil and coal we burn, the more we are contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Polar Bear in Trouble

How much warming of the earth can we tolerate? How much melting of the glaciers and the ice caps can we tolerate? We are just starting to find that out. We already know that rising temperatures are having an adverse effect on some of the world’s flora and fauna. We know that low lying areas of the world with large populations such as Bangladesh and parts of Indonesia are especially vulnerable, vulnerable to flooding and the high loss of life. Animals that depend on the Arctic ice pack such as the polar bear are in grave danger because of it. At the same time, those communities that have depended on hunting on the ice packs of the world are faced with a radical change of life if they are going to survive.

On the other hand, global warming is resulting in longer growing seasons in areas on earth that previously were not as hospitable to agriculture as they are now or previously not hospitable at all. Examples can now be found in places like Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. The idea of Greenland as an agricultural powerhouse remains a startling concept, but some of us may live to see that reality.

What About Weather Extremes?

An increase in the arable areas on earth due to global warming is a positive, but what about the effect on weather? Are the increases in weather extremes—for example, between the areas receiving an excess of rain and too little rain, that is, between flooding and drought, such as we have been witnessing in the eastern United States—a temporary phenomenon or a permanent fixture of global warming? Are more powerful storms, that is, more Katrinas, what we have to look forward to?

Landfills and Overpopulation

The fact is that global warming is only one of the challenges we have ahead of us with respect to the environment. What to do about all the waste we have generated since World War II and have not made the effort to recycle represents another immense challenge. Landfills are no longer a satisfactory answer. A related issue has to do with population. We need to face facts. There are just too many of us, for example, too many of us to tolerate the continued use of landfills. I will be returning to these topics in upcoming installments of Mind Check.

As for the twin problems of oil depletion and global warming from hydrocarbon burning, the Atlantic City wind farm and the wind farms everywhere else show us a path to a solution. We must have our alternative energy forms. Not just wind farms, but solar power, power generated in outer space and beamed to earth, and nuclear power.

Overcome Nuclear Fear

Yes, we must overcome our fear of nuclear power and start building nuclear power plants again. An increase in nuclear generation of electricity will take us a long way toward putting a damper on the global warming danger. In this respect, we need to follow the example of the French and their commitment to this technology. As for the issue of nuclear waste, improved reprocessing procedures are showing the way toward lessening the nuclear waste challenge, but, yes, more research needs to be done on nuclear waste reprocessing to make the approach even more effective.

Nuclear Power and Fresh Water

Nuclear technology can do something else for us, and that is to fuel desalination plants. The droughts being experienced in many parts of the United States and many other parts of the world may be with us for the long term. Meanwhile sea levels are rising due to glacier and polar cap melting. Why not get our fresh water from the sea? No way do we want to fuel our desalination plants with oil or coal or any other hydrocarbon, and we don’t have to. Nuclear technology can do the job and take care of a large part of our electricity needs at the same time.

In this time of global warming and the resulting excess of salt water and deficiency of fresh water, we need to get busy converting the former to the latter. I hope that the message that lies just below the surface of what I am saying is coming through loud and clear. When it comes to the environment, we have an enormous amount of work to do. We need to quit wasting time and get busy.

To reach the author of Mind Check, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

ON THE BOARDWALK IN ATLANTIC CITY, THE THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS OF A FIFTIETH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

I recently attended my fiftieth high school reunion in Atlantic City, the casino gambling center on the New Jersey coast. It was the first high school reunion that I attended, and what a mixture of emotions, thoughts and memories it awakened. I had had many reasons for not attending a high school reunion before, and one of them was that I saw myself as too busy earning a living to take the time to go. Another reason was that I had some less than happy memories of my time as a teenager in Atlantic City, many of which had nothing to do with high school per se.

By no means were all my thoughts negative, however. In fact wherever I lived in the ensuing years following graduation, I always felt some nostalgia for Atlantic City. As a lover of the sea and as a lover of performance and show business all my life, I was proud of my Atlantic City roots and was never hesitant to tell people about it.

Steel Pier, Quite a Phenomenon

One of the Atlantic City facts of my life that I have always been very quick to tell people about was my four summers working on Steel Pier in the food services department, known then as “the refreshment stands.” Back then, Steel Pier was quite a phenomenon—a huge entertainment complex that extended a half mile out to sea. It included three large theaters, one of them a vaudeville house presenting some of the best known performers of the day, the second a vaudeville-style venue for performing kids, and the third a first run movie theater.

Near the end of the pier was a huge dance hall where the best known big bands of the day could be heard and danced to. And at the very end was the water circus. Here divers demonstrated a bevy of Olympic style maneuvers as they plunged into the ocean, and here the famous diving horse made the audience gasp as it culminated every show with a jump into a large tank of water.

Business Reversal, A Wrenching Affair

My summers on Steel Pier then couldn’t help but form the basis of many of my happiest Atlantic City memories, but the circumstances of my family’s decision to relocate from Philadelphia just as I was about to start high school had a dark side. At the start of the 1950s, my father had suffered a business reversal, a wrenching affair that involved two other families—his in-laws, that is, my maternal grandparents, and the family of my mother’s sister, that is, my aunt.

As the major investors in the failed business, my grandparents took a severe beating. In their late fifties with their retirement savings severely depleted, they now needed some way to survive financially. They decided to take their remaining funds and to invest in a business they knew well from their earlier lives raising a family in a coal mining town in central Pennsylvania. They bought a small building in Ventnor, an Atlantic City suburb, took up residence in the apartment on the second floor, and opened a dress shop on the first.

In Poor Shape Financially

It was no accident that they had found their way to the Atlantic City area. One of my grandmother’s sisters, Rose Segal, had been a long time resident of Ventnor and had raised a family there.

My father, meanwhile, was having trouble getting a new career going in Philadelphia. Financially we were in poor shape. My mother saw my grandparents’ business as a possible salvation for our family. She would help her parents run the store in return for a small salary, and my father would start some kind of business of his own in Atlantic City. At the time, he told me that he was thinking of opening a hardware store. However, the reality was that he was not happy at all about leaving Philadelphia, and he would continue to complain about our having made the move for many years to come.

Best Job of a Lifetime

We found a house in Margate, another suburb, adjoining the marsh and the then undeveloped bayside, and as I have previously written, I quickly got swept up in the life of the bay including boat building with purloined house lumber. Meanwhile my father made no serious attempt to find work in Atlantic City, not that I could see anyway. Not too long after the move took place, as luck would have it, he would land the best job he would ever have in his life—as the Philadelphia-based East Coast manufacturer’s representative for a Minnesota manufacture of appliances, of which the home freezer was to be his hottest product.

Hence in 1954 I started the ninth grade at Atlantic City High School as an Atlantic City newcomer with a mother helping to run a dress shop in Ventnor and a father living five out of seven days a week in a combination office and apartment in Philadelphia. When my parents would get together in the house in Margate on weekends, the conversation would inevitably turn to the big issue in their lives. This was always the grist for my parents’ anger mill, especially my father’s, and he had a caldron of a temper.

Mother Holds Her Ground

My father would make clear how unhappy he was that we had made the move, and not backing down one iota my mother would make clear that she could not and would not abandon her parents and the dress shop in Ventnor.

By now, both of my grandparents were ailing, especially my grandfather who suffered from diabetes and a weak heart. And, it must be quickly added, that guilt over the business failure and the substantial financial loss incurred by my grandparents was still upper most in my mother’s mind.

No Unqualified Welcome

This then was the baggage I brought with me when I started Atlantic City High School. The social situation I found there is what I have come to believe was fairly typical. No, I was not given an unqualified welcome, but if I had expected that I would have been very naïve. I hadn’t gone to junior high or elementary school with any of these kids. I was an unknown. Given that fact, it is amazing that I did as well as I did socially.

First of all I was fortunate to have been accepted as a pledge by one of the two Jewish high school fraternities. Exactly how this came about is a mystery to me now. I did know, but I’ve long since forgotten the exact circumstances. However, it must have had something to do with family connections through my Great Aunt Rose, who was always “Aunt Rosie” to me.

Rough Pledge Experience

Through the fraternity, I had access to friendships and a social life, but first I had to get through my pledge year, which proved a rough time, particularly one less than wonderful hazing experience. This hazing experience left its scars, the worst of which were the emotional ones. These scars had everything to do with my decision not to join a fraternity when I went on to college.

I am speculating, but I now think that my less than happy experience as a pledge had to do not just with my newcomer status, but with the fact that I did not live up to expectation among certain segments of the fraternity. As a very tall person, I was expected to be an accomplished athlete, and in this regard I was a disappointment. I have always loved athletics as a participant as well as a spectator, but especially with regard to the ball sports where hand-eye coordination is important I just never measured up to my own or many others’ expectations.

Reality of Cliques and In-Groups

That said, I have to quickly point out that there is probably no secondary level school in the country and probably the world that does not have its cliques and in-groups. Atlantic City High School was no worse than any other secondary school in this respect and probably not as bad as many. Also I have to say that as a shy person I did not do myself any good. A more socially aggressive person might have been able to break through more barriers more quickly than I did.

Though barriers existed, by no means did I feel overly circumscribed. I remember many happy Friday and Saturday evenings, that is, once we got our licenses, driving through town with my high school friends and singing the latest hit songs at the top of our lungs. Singing was something I always enjoyed doing and continue to enjoy to this day. These drives would often include stops at a great pizza joint in the inlet called Maria’s and later stops at a Chinese restaurant in the center of the city where we would finish out the night with a succulent appetizer like roasted, bright red Sha-shu.

Great Swimming Adventure

During summer nights, one of my friends and I found a way to work off the excess energy in our teenage bodies, energy that remained despite our seven-day-per-week day jobs. We’d go swimming from his house on a lagoon in Margate. Our most ambitious feat involved swimming to the Ocean City bridge, a distance of over a mile in each direction. Swimming remains to this day my favorite form of physical exercise--swimming and ballroom dancing, that is.

And so these are the memories that I brought with me to my fiftieth reunion, held at the huge casino resort Trump Taj Mahal, a complex right across the Boardwalk from what remains of the Steel Pier, now strictly an amusement pier and maybe a third of the size of the original. As I rubbed shoulders with my classmates over a period of two days—about half of the original class appeared to have made it, half of a class that was not small by any measure--I was at first struck with feelings of self doubt. It’s a complex of feelings that I’m sure is not unique to me, a feeling that is bound to be awakened by something as momentous as a fiftieth reunion in almost everyone.

The Awful Reunion Comparisons

How did my life compare with that of my classmates? Had I come anywhere close in 50 years to accomplishing what some of them had accomplished? Toughest thought of all, had I come anywhere close to measuring up to my own expectations for myself? Also there were the memories of the classmates who hadn’t survived, who were taken from us much too early.

Soon, thank goodness, a more positive emotion took over. That thought went something like this: “Damn it, you enjoy this thing called a reunion. Fifty years---it is an amazing milestone.” That was followed by still more good feelings: “What a great group of people. I’m only sorry now that I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know more of them back then and then to stay in touch, but at least I’m starting to make up for it now.” Let us hope all of us have many more good years ahead and many more happy reunions.

As I say, one of life’s amazing milestones—a fiftieth high school reunion.

To communicate with the author, write to Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

SEEKING JUSTICE? THEN TRY TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE AND RISE ABOVE ANGER AND HATRED

Once again Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proven himself extremely adept at making people’s blood boil. His recent visit to New York with its speaking engagements at the United Nations and at Columbia University is the latest example. The overt purpose of this exercise in political theatrics was to gain sympathy for Iran’s insistence on an unrestrictive nuclear program, including the development of nuclear weapons, an idea that is an anathema in the U.S., Israel and in many other parts of the world.

As several commentators have stated, the visit was a flamboyantly graceless effort to lay claim for Iran and by extension for Ahmadinejad himself to a role of importance on the world stage. It’s also no big stretch to see it as Iran’s attempt to convince world opinion that its nuclear program could not possible have any hostile intent and to appeal for sympathy against would-be attackers of that program. How could anyone attack such a principled nation, Ahmadinejad seems to be saying by his presence, whether Iran is developing hydrogen bombs or sending arms to Iraq to be used against the U.S. military or to Hizballah in Lebanon?

Inflammatory Position on Israel

The main reason that Ahmadinejad is such a disturber of the peace, of course, has to do with his position on Israel. In fact, his pronouncement on Israel has frequently been translated into the assertion that Israel “should be wiped off the map.” As an anti-Israel extremist, Ahmadinejad has further stirred up emotion by aligning himself with those who deny that the holocaust ever took place, calling it “a fabricated legend” in a December 2005 telecast, and then a year later hosting a two-day conference of holocaust deniers.

Questioned in New York about his stands on both Israel and its right to exist and the holocaust, Ahmadinejad responded with a rhetorical question. “Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event that they had nothing to do with?” he asked. His past denial of the holocaust notwithstanding, he is telling us that his problem with it now is that, in his opinion, it has been used as a justification for, first of all, the establishment of the state of Israel and, second, as justification for the alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians.

Maddening, Short-Circuited Logic

This linkage of these different assertions makes for a maddening, short-circuited exercise in logic and is not all that dissimilar to the line I have heard from others, particularly from some of those on the left of the Israel-Palestinian issue. Those who see the establishment of Israel, whether with approval or disapproval, only as pay back for the holocaust are drastically undervaluing the reason the nation of Israel came into being, and they play into the hands of the Ahmadinejads of the world and their sinister intent.

As I have previously said in this forum, establishment of the state of Israel was the right thing to do in 1948 for many reasons, of which making a homeland for abused and dispossessed people was only one. However, seeing the establishment of Israel as the be-all and the end-all of a comprehensive verdict in the name of justice for the lost Jews of Europe is entirely unsatisfying. Israel as a nation came into being for a whole slew of reasons--religious, historic, political, economic, social—that is, for reasons as broad and diverse as the founding of the United States of America itself.

Separate Nation in Europe

Had an attempt to mete out justice for the atrocities of World War II been truly made in the years immediately following the war, then what we might have seen would have involved creation for the survivors of a protected area, that is, an independent country, within the area in proximity to their home and the home of generation after generation of their ancestors. I speak of creation of a separate nation in Europe as well as Israel.

Such a protected area in Europe should have been taken from the country whose government, military establishment and people were the perpetrators of the atrocities called the holocaust, that is, from Germany.

That said, it must be acknowledged that the concept of justice when applied in a historic and political context is never clear cut and free of Byzantine complexities. What we have to hope for is that people of good will and compassion on all sides of the issue—people who have risen above anger and hatred, however understandable—will prevail.

To communicate with the author, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c ) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

TO BE ALIVE IS TO KNOW DISAPPOINTMENT

Periodically I think about people who have disappointed me, and people that I have disappointed. I wish disappointment were not so common an occurrence in life, but the fact is it is. The older we get, the more disappointments we accumulate. We are always disappointing each other, and in turn we are always being disappointed by others. In some cases, the disappointment we feel is unreasonable. In other cases it is eminently warranted from whatever the perspective.

To understand disappointment, we have to understand another important emotion—expectation. We come into most of our relationships with high expectation, and sometimes our expectations exceed good sense. We are expecting more than the other can possibly deliver.

Often our attitudes toward our parents include such unrealistic expectations. We expect our parents to be perfect. Because they are human beings, perfect is something they cannot be. Even their deaths are sometimes experienced as a disappointment. We find it hard to get over what we see as their abandonment of us.

High Expectations in Romantic Involvements

High expectation and even unrealistic expectations are also true in our love relations, that is, in our romantic involvements. We do not pursue a romantic relationship with the assumption that we will be mistreated or hurt in the process, nor do we pursue such a relationship with the intention of hurting the other. We enter into such relationships full of optimism. Sometimes, however, mistreatment is exactly the result, and the cause may be an obsession we dwell on for the rest of our lives.

Workplace: Source of Much Disappointment

In the last 30 to 40 years the workplace has become a source of many of the disappointments in most of our lives. This is partly the result of the fact that the workplace is not an isolated entity, but part of a dynamic known as the economy. As the economy has become more and more global in nature, we may experience in our individual workplaces the results of events that originated on the other side of the world.

Layoffs or reductions in force, also known as RIFs, are the painful economic phenomena that come readily to mind. These workplace disappointments always have a personal side to them. When we are laid off, we feel considerable anger towards other members of the rejecting organization, the survivors of the massacre and especially the boss, that is, if he is one of the survivors.

Trust, A Feeling Related to Expectation

Like the parent child relationship we knew growing up, the workplace presents us with a relationship hierarchy where trust, a feeling related to expectation, is assumed. Our assumption is that the boss, the parent substitute in the workplace, will treat us well. For example, we take for granted that promises made to us at the time of hiring will be kept.

We take for granted that the boss will make wise decisions with respect to the hiring of others with whom we have to work and with respect to the expenditure and allocation of limited resources. We do not assume that the volatility of the greater economy will be adverse to our own situation, and we do not assume that we will be victimized by leadership or management problems within the organization itself, such as one misguided decision after the other driving the entire organization into ruin.

Expectations of Those We Hire

In turn if we are the one doing the hiring, we have a feeling of trust in the people we bring on board. Something impressed us in their resume and the interview when we were considering them, and we have high expectation for their performance with us. We assume that they will give us their best effort. We do not deliberately choose people who have a drug or alcohol habit and thus, it may be assumed, will exhibit a high rate of absence or, worse, will steal from the organization to support that habit.

During the last years of a long career as an employee, I experienced both satisfaction and disappointment in abundance. I was working for a branch of a university that specialized in career education. Given our mission we were expected to be more entrepreneurial or business-oriented than is normally the case with universities.

Start Media-Rich Educational Program

I had the satisfaction of starting my own program involving the creation of computer-delivered media-rich applications and guiding it through to financial stability, but then I had the pain of seeing my good works squandered in an ill-conceived reorganization and a series of very poor hiring decisions and other poor management choices, all engineered by someone whose glibness I had previously admired and long mistook as a sign of intelligence and good judgment.

To teach in the program, I had hired several very capable instructors. I also taught in the program. With the loss of the program, these jobs were no longer tenable. Some of those I hired were resentful toward me, but there was nothing that I could do to intercede in their behalf. Thus what had been a very good relationship turned more than a little ugly. I, the founder of the program, had disappointed them.

How do we cope with disappointment? First we must accept that to disappoint and to be disappointed are part of the normal process of living. As long as what we did or what was done to us was not the result of intention or malice, we need to make ourselves get over it. Even if intention or malice was a factor, we need to practice acceptance. If we are the victim, we need to remember the importance of forgiveness. If we are the perpetrator, we may need to forgive ourselves.

Embrace the richness of possibility that is life at its fullest and move on. Yes, we must forgive.

You can reach the writer at this address: Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft