I’ve got that (May 1) feeling

 

May 1 was a fine day for barbequing. This year, while some workers of the world celebrated International Workers’ Day, Israeli marked its 77^th Independence Day. With the long weekend, Thursday to Sunday, one would think that joy dominated both occasions but many felt the exact opposite. As in most impressions, each person viewed the event through personal lenses, pessimistic, fatalistic or even optimistic.

The negative thinkers among us noted that beyond the Potemkin village celebrations and fronts of joy , the situation is rather depressing. At this moment, Trump is doing his best imitation of Atilla the Hun and ruining the US economy and wiping the savings, not to mention the financial and  job security, of workers in the United States. Of course, when the United States sneezes, the whole world economy, including its workers, gets a cold and starts to worry. Israeli’s celebration was physically darkened by a serious fire in the Jerusalem area as well as other areas, which required a callup of all firefighters, meaning that all local events were cancelled due to lack of fire protection. Symbolically, many Israelis  feel that that the national situation is just as dark with the continued war with Hamas and never-ending captivity of the hostages. For many anti-Bibi voters, the political situation does not provide much hope. Thus for many, neither event was “an ode to joy”, as Beethoven would say.

Those fatalists that view local events as mere parts of larger systems shrugged off the holidays and the circumstances. A holiday is an arbitrary date determined by pollical organizations. Thus, there is no correlation with the date and any events that occur before, during or after it. The world seems in a mood for certain extreme solutions, back to the future if you will. Trump is merely an oversized example of this type of populism. Employment levels ebb and flow to one degree or another over time. Wars usually end long after they have lose any reason to continue just because of personal and national pride but they do eventually run out of gas. Unfortunately, this superfluous period merely creates more tragedy. As is written in Book of Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun and, therefore, no reason to get overly emotional.

However, it must be noted that many people, possibly the silent near majority, do count their blessings on these holidays. Marx would have been shocked if not entirely overjoyed that so many workers in the West actually own shares of those capitalist companies. In the West, the vast majority of the populations enjoys some kind of safety net when facing unemployment and even profits from two days off a week. Quite a few can even send their children to college so they can have better jobs. In Israel, despite the challenges of the last two years, and more importantly the last 77 years, Israel stands strong in terms of having an army, a democracy and a strong identity. Admittedly, the war and the period before it have challenged those elements but they have stood up to the test. The world may not be pink but it is not black either and will improve, hopefully soon. Optimists follow Kate’s (of Kiss Me Kate) advice and “accentuate the positive”.

So, as I was cooking my steak on the barbecue in the garden of my house talking to my friend and drinking a beer, I thought to myself, or at least choose to, “life isn’t bad at all”. In Hebrew, the expression is  יהיה בסדר [yehiye besder], everything will work out. May 1 can be a happy day.

Fledgling Help

Among the values that we absorb from our parents and surroundings, one of the most subtle involves preconceptions of how to raise children. I say preconceptions because most people revise these norms in some way once they themselves become parents. The effect of these assumptions is most obvious in people that immigrated to other countries, i.e. their values are in contrast with those around them.

Israel is filled with people that complain that were raised to be too polite or too open, too loud or too quiet, too punctual or too lax, to name just a few. In other words, their parents’ values made it hard for them to function in the general society. Israel is not unique in that way.

That being said, parents and children sometimes only discover the source of this dissonance on a certain matter very late. One issue of parental assumption is the transition to adulthood. Children reach an age, generally after 18, when they leave the house and go study or work. In other words, even if they are still not financially independent, they are on their own otherwise. Parents choose a variety of attitudes to their released offspring, from remote control of every detail to feigned indifference to their fate and everything in between.

In Israel, most 18 year olds go off to the army and come home on weekends. Parents tend to be deeply involved in their children’s lives, with mother’s doing masses of laundry and cooking every Friday and Saturday, fathers taking their kids to train stations and regular phone communication.  More recently, parents even lobby with the army for better conditions for their children. Interestingly enough, the young soldiers fully accept their parents’ involvement despite that the fact that they are technically adults.

I bring this up as I recently had a tense conversation with my daughter, who left the house and started working at the age of 18 at her insistence. In the year that followed, while I made sure that she had a roof over her head and food in her fridge, I patently refused to be her emergency chauffeur or agent, limiting myself to advice if she asked for it but insisting that she had to do everything herself.   She expressed resentment at my lack of parental support from the perspective of what other Israeli parents were doing for their children. Upon later thought, I understood that I had applied my upbringing and personal values, the typical American insistence to be “adult” and stand one’s own feet, albeit shaky ones. I later explained my way of thinking to her, which she accepted. Still, it brought to light how my cultural value had influenced my reaction to her requests for “routine” help.

I do not regret my throwing her in to the deep water as it has made her stronger and more responsible. Yet, I recognize that the chosen way to cut the umbilical cord reflects both general cultural and personal individual values.  In summary, on the subject of fledglings, listen to this song by Arik Einstein, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez1e2VPsRFw. He says it all in my view.