Whenever non-Jews ask me about my conversion to Judaism one of the most common concerns is how I could have ever given up Christmas. From the tone of their voices, I get the impression that they view this as the ultimate sacrifice.  After all, unlike people who were born Jewish, I’ve actually celebrated the holiday.  I even grew up in a house with a Christmas tree. I remember the joy of the holiday and the thrill of the gift giving and yet it wasn’t enough to prevent me from converting away from Christianity.  It all seems unimaginable to them, and yet it’s really not an issue for me.  

First, let me clarify the fact that I don’t have any feeling of hostility towards the Christmas holiday.  I’ve never suffered any great trauma on Christmas that I’m trying to bury in the depths of my psyche.   I have plenty of other neurosis to keep my psyche busy. In fact, I have wonderful memories of my childhood Christmas experiences.  I like looking at Christmas trees and spent a pleasant hour this evening driving around looking at lights with my Mother. However, I must confess that I do get a little tired of the music, and the excessive gift giving leaves me weary.

The reality is that I really haven’t given much of anything up when it comes to Christmas.  It’s virtually impossible to live in American society and not have your life impacted in some way by the holiday season.  Granted I don’t have a Christmas tree in my house, but every Jew I know participates in the larger society where office or social holiday parties are the holiday custom.  Given the high rate of intermarriage in the American Jewish community, most Jews have at least one or two non-Jewish relatives who celebrate the holiday, so there’s a lot of Jewish gift giving going on.

What is different for me, and what I truly have given up, is the fact that I now sit on the outside of the holiday looking in.  While I may take part in the holiday celebrations, and even find myself immersed in a culture which adores Christmas, it’s no longer my holiday.  I visit Christmas like one would visit an old neighborhood.  It all looks familiar, but it’s not home anymore.  In fact, it often looks quite different than I remember. 

What you see when you look at Christmas from the outside, especially after having been an insider for many years, is a very bizarre holiday that is absolutely contradictory on many levels.  First of all, it’s a celebration of the most sacred event in Christian theology, yet there is really very little that’s religious about the holiday.  The date isn’t mentioned in the Bible, nor is there any Biblical instruction for its celebration.  Any Jew will tell you that people are always inviting you to take part in the celebration on the basis that there’s nothing religious about the holiday.  Then there’s the gift giving.  People say it’s the thought that counts, not the gift.  Yet, as any child sitting on Santa’s lap will immediately tell you, the gift matters.  Christmas is done large in America from the excessive gift giving, to the over the top light displays, to the extravagant holiday parties. Maybe the thought is what matters, but more often our generosity is measured not by thoughts, but by excess. 

I’m at a loss to explain the whole Santa Clause thing.  Maybe he’s supposed to be some kind of reincarnated Jesus figure in a red suit. After all, he has all these magical powers that allow him to fly around in a sled pulled by reindeer. As every child soon learns, Santa also knows the secrets of children’s behavior and rewards them appropriately.  He’s like this completely secular aspect of the holiday that’s somehow bestowed with divine powers.  Of course, as children grow up and learn that he’s completely fictional parents are often dismayed when the children become skeptical about the whole Jesus and G-d thing. I guess the parents miss the parallels.

My house doesn’t have a Christmas tree, which seems very normal to me these days.  Indeed, my house is my refuge from all the holiday chaos.  I see plenty of Christmas trees as I go about my business during the holiday season. There’s one in the middle of the Courthouse that stands several stories tall and is covered with red bows that I really like. So far my office remains a Christmas tree free zone, but I’m sure that’s only a matter of time.   My Mother always has a small artificial tree that she keeps on a table next to a dancing penguin display that sings Christmas tunes.  I really like enjoying other people’s trees, and am so grateful that I don’t have to put up my own. I can just play with other people’s trees and then hand them back when the needles begin to shed.

In a way, that’s really my perspective these days.  I like to watch the holiday season, partake in some of its social aspects, but I’m happiest not to have to actually do the holiday season.  When I think about the spirit of the season, that is, concern for your fellow man, an effort for kindness and generosity, I realize that I’ve adopted a tradition where those concerns are never ending and not confined to one portion of the year.  As a Jew I’m commanded to care for the homeless every day, to visit the sick whenever possible, to give charity, and to always strive to make the world a better place.  If you look at Christmas from that perspective, maybe there are Jewish elements to it?  After all, Jesus was Jewish, why shouldn’t his birthday be celebrated in a Jewish manner? Latke anyone?

The Republican Party has managed to create a hot-topic issue out of immigration to which the Democrats are only too eagerly taking the bait on in absolute distraction against the real issues of concern for most Americans. I guess anything is better than having to debate your political opponent on the more difficult issues such as the war in Iraq, the escalating deficit, the credit crisis, or G-d forbid, healthcare.

 Quite frankly, I could care less about people coming to the United States seeking jobs picking vegetables, cleaning houses, or doing the other dozens of other difficult low-paying jobs that most Americans refuse to do.  I don’t want to do these jobs and I don’t see many American’s out of work or wages depressed because immigrant workers are willing to do them.  Nor, do I buy that there’s a great security risk of terrorists sneaking in over the Mexican border.  So far, all the nut-jobs, such as Timothy McVeigh or the world trade center bombers, who’ve succeeded in committing acts of terrorism on American soil were either born here or entered the country lawfully. 

No, my concern isn’t at all about what’s coming into the United States.  In fact, it’s the complete opposite. My concern is what’s leaving the United States in search of better opportunities across the border or overseas.  Anyone who has called tech support in recent years knows that those jobs are no longer in the United States.  It’s not just manufacturing jobs which are leaving anymore.  Accounting is now being “outsourced” as is software development and a number of other formerly lucrative career fields requiring specialized skills and education.  I’m told that even legal research is being farmed out to foreign lawyers who are not licensed to actually practice in the United States, but who have graduated from American style law schools located overseas.  Perhaps, what we really need to be concerned about is the fact that people no longer need to come here to take our jobs. Instead, they simply need to wait until the large Amercian corporations, to whose every whim our government absolutely caters to, moves the job out of the United States and brings it to their neighborhood. Why risk crossing the border when emmigration brings the good jobs to you? 

It’s not just jobs which are leaving our nations, but the very essence of American greatness.  We are falling further in further behind the rest of the industrialized world in important measures such as infant mortality and access to health care.  We no longer manufacture the world’s largest airliner. We continue to have excellent Universities, but our public school system is abysmal and rapidly returning to the segregated system that existed in the 1950’s.  Our own citizens are seeking medical care out of the country in order to access affordable care.

Of course, we continue to lead the World in some areas, but I find little comfort in some of those numbers.  For instance, we have the world’s largest prison population in both raw number and percentage of our population.  We also lead the industrialized world in prosecuting juveniles as adults.  We’re quickly becoming a leading debtor nation and in the process we’re exporting financial instability throughout the world.  On a more positive note, we export more arms than any other nation in the world.

I honestly don’t expect that any issues of importance will be dealt with by our current crop of Presidential hopefuls. After all, if you take a stand on something meaningful, people might disagree with you and vote for your opponent. Instead, I expect we’ll be treated to more the same distracting and meaningless nonsense that we’ve seen so far.  The Republicans will continue to set the agenda and the Democrats will continue to simply react.  However, when some idiot tells you that you need to be alarmed by “illegal immigration” consider last week’s story about the nine year old boy who was in a car accident along the border. His Mother died in the crash, leaving him alone at night in the desert.  One of these so-called undesirables, who was sneaking over the border in search of work came across the boy, kept him warm, protected him, and stayed with the child until help arrived the next morning.  Of course, that help immediately arrested the guy, held him in jail, so he could be sent back to Mexico.  Don’t you feel safer now?

http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_7635622

I’m not a happy camper right now. I’m sitting in a wooden rocking chair located in the atrium at the Charlotte-Douglas airport.  Actually, the chair has little to do with my unhappiness, rocking chairs in airports are truly rather nice.  My unhappiness arises from the fact that I shouldn’t be sitting here at all.  I should be home in my own bed, or just getting out of my bed, preparing to go to work.

Indeed, I have once again become victim that most unpleasant of modern afflictions known as the cancelled flight.  My flight home from Washington last night was cancelled due to mechanical problems. This I can understand. As a pilot I know it’s much better to be on the ground wishing I were in the air than in the air wishing I were on the ground.  So, I don’t fault the airline (US Airways) for cancelling my flight.  However, I what I do fault them for is everything else that has served to make this such an unpleasant experience.  Couldn’t they staff the ticket counter at a major airport like Washington National with more than 3 slow moving people?  Couldn’t they teach their employees the very basics of civility and customer service? Maybe they couldn’t create a corporate culture where what they tell their customers is what actually happens? I know they have training because I’ve watched a half dozen employees all go flawlessly through the sales pitch for the new US Airway Visa Card that gives you free flights and the unspoken potential lifetime of debt.  I’ve watched them do the sales pitch in the airport, and for 5 minutes on the airplane as the flight attendants hand out credit card applications.  Is there no shame in US Airways that they want to be associated with predatory credit card industry? Why don’t they just hand out crack on the airplane?

Fortunately, it looks like I’m going to get out of here headed for home in about an hour.  I’m tired, I miss my wife and dogs, and I’ve had enough of US Airways to last me for another couple years.

Well, the jury is in and the guards and nurse of the Bay County Boot Camp have been acquitted of all charges in the death of Martin Lee Anderson. In Tallahassee protestors are in the streets blocking traffic in front of the State Capital building in what appears to be a futile effort to make people care about this story as more than entertainment news.   My review of the internet press is that the outside world is trying to figure out what happened. After all, there’s a video that clearly shows the guards beating the young man until he collapsed.  How do go from that video to an absolute acquittal on all charges?

I think several factors need to be considered in understanding this verdict.  First, I don’t think the jury acquitted simply due to racial issues. However, I do think the jury recognized that the defendants, several Sheriff’s Deputies and Nurse, are not your run of the mill common criminal defendants either. That is, none of the defendants set out with criminal intent. I suspect it was very easy for the jury to buy into the idea that the death was accidental, which I also believe. However, the other reality is that their actions were clearly abusive and that abuse accidentally caused this young man’s death.  Are they murderers? Not in the classic sense, but I do think they have blood on their hands.

The problem with the boot camps is that they were founded in a desire to punish that evolved into a system of torture and abuse.  Those of us who worked with juvenile delinquents back when the boot camps were running all heard stories of the abuse, but never had any proof. Our clients are generally viewed simply as delinquents and their stories as lies. Also, the idea of a teenaged hoodlum suffering through military style disciplines appeals the societal blood lust which I believe is tacitly, if not overtly, condoned.   However, to be fair, I’ve also had clients tell me that they felt they got more out of the boot camp program than they did the more traditional behavior modification/counseling programs. I know for myself, Marine Corps boot camp made a great difference in my life.  However, I also know that my Marine Corps drill instructors were given strict guidelines in our training and that we were never abused in that way the video showed Martin Lee Anderson being abused. 

There’s a lot of speculation regarding the outcome of the trial. One of my colleagues, who watched the closing argument, suggested that the Prosecution of this case was done very weakly. The Tallahassee Democrat quotes the defense attorney as saying the Prosecution’s witnesses killed their case due to conflicting testimony.  You’ve got to wonder how supposedly experienced prosecutors managed to so screw up a case.  I wonder about this, after all the relationship between the State Attorneys and Law Enforcement is a very close one.  Add in the fact that most prosecutors endorse the idea of boot camp programs and it’s conceivable that a prosecutor might not get fired up about the case.  I read online that the United States Attorney’s Office is now looking into the matter and is conducting a review of the trial.  It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the review.

My personal feelings about the trial are that I don’t think it was such an easy case to win.  You’ve got very sympathetic defendants who were acting in a completely undisciplined system. The rumor mill has it that the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) had protested the Boot Camps violations of DJJ rules only to be politically silenced and ignored.  My guess is that abusive treatment was so common-place and accepted in the boot camp that nobody even thought to question it anymore.  After all, it’s difficult to say something is morally wrong and abusive when your job depends upon playing along and there’s tremendous political support for your actions.  I am not at all fearful that any of these defendants will ever harm anyone again and I’m sure the jurors weren’t either. They’re simply not “evil” people in the classical sense.  On the other hand, they are examples of that most fearsome and dangerous of all humans, the otherwise good person who through self-interest and blind obedience, has become insensitive to the suffering of another human being such they stand idle in the face of government sponsored torture and abuse.