When I was growing up® there was an old joke (which I may have told here before, but I only remember about three of these so I have to recycle): An American is walking around in Moscow and falls into an unmarked open manhole. He screams: “I can’t believe some idiot left a manhole open here without any warnings! Where were the cones, tape, warning red flags?”
An old Russian passer-by says “When you were crossing the border did you see a giant red flag?”
“Yes” -American replies,
“That was your warning!” (I need to brush up on my dialogue punctuation, but you get the idea)
Few Americans who comment here have actually been to Russia and they will confirm that being a foreigner there is like running a plow through a minefield, you never know when it’s gonna blow, but you are pretty sure it will, sooner or later. The only protection is your wallet but you can’t just go around openly paying people off, it’s an art. Apparently at there are enough foreigners who have not mastered the art of bribery to have a special international prison described by one unfortunate victim in his book Zone 22 ( I am pretty sure the same book is published in the US as Tomorrow You Go Home: One Man’s Harrowing Imprisonment in a Modern-Day Russian Gulag)

I haven’t read the book yet, I am waiting for my turn at the library, but there are plenty of blurbs around to suggest that if you don’t know what you are doing you may come back from Russia with a couple of prison tattoos instead of Matryoshkas for your girlfriend.
If I like the book I may review it in a few weeks.

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I thought that Miley would be someone that my girls who they could look up to, but I guess that I was wrong. Thanks a lot Miley!
Posted on Kansascity.com

Many comments left in response to the article about Miley Sirus’ Vanity Fair cover fiasco are way more entertaining than the story itself. These comments are from parents who are upset because their kids’ role model is now disgraced after posing for “inappropriate” pictures for the magazine. What’s inappropriate is their kids even having a role model such as Myley Sirus. What do people even know about her to encourage their kids to look up to her? Is she a future Nobel Prize winner? Maybe she will cure cancer? Is she a great artist, composer, writer? Winner of American Idol? Up-and-coming porn star? (that may be). For all these people know, she could be torturing kittens, be a bully on a rare day when she shows up at school, she could have eating disorders, she could be a pathological liar and steal her neighbor’s paper.How can you possibly present her or any celebrity as a role model for your kids based on her 30 minute show on Disney Channel and an occasional concert is beyond me. No wonder these children have problems when they grow up.

Of course when I was growing up there were no shortage of role models offered to me and they weren’t some creepy child-actors who could sing and jump on stage. They were bona fide heroes: Pavlik Morozov – a 13-year old boy who denounced his father to the authorities and was in turn killed by his family, Yuri Gagarin – the first man in space, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – a 17-year old who was caught trying to sabotage Germans during the war and was tortured and killed, or Alexei Maresiev – a war pilot who was shot down, lost both legs trying to get back to the hospital, then trained himself to fly with prosthetic legs and returned back to being a pilot. There were hundreds and thousands of others. There were books about them, songs, movies, poems, their portraits hung in our classrooms. Years later we found out that some of their stories were nothing but well produced propaganda. Others were true heroes who are still honored many years later. Despite the abundance of supplied role models, I never wanted to be like them or look up to them. I admired their actions, cried when their lives tragically ended but I could always separate the action from the actor. This may not be the case with the false role models of today.

The only people who I knew in real life were my parents and relatives. They were my real role models. My Father was a doctor with a gift and a selfless dedication to his patients and profession; a writer, a poet, with great sense of humor; a true intellectual. From his childhood in the Jewish ghetto under German occupation, his father never returned from WWII, he went on through discrimination and poverty to become a beloved and respected physician. Many people whose lives he saved or touched came to remember him at his funeral. He was a hero to them. He is a hero to me.

I hope that if anything my daughter gets from me (besides liking strange-for-Americans Russian foods) it’s enough common sense to tell the difference between someone like Miley Sirus or whoever else Disney Channel thinks she should look up to, and real everyday role models who are around her and not on TV. Miley Sirus’s come and go, sometimes forgotten, sometimes disgraced, their likenesses scattered amidst garage sales and donations to the Salvation Army. That’s not the road you want your child to follow. Or maybe you do. Then reread the title of this post.

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This question was on my mind every time the light rail in Kansas City was discussed. While the light rail in Kansas City is pretty much a done deal, I don’t remember trolley buses ever being offered as one of the options. My interest was renewed after a recent trip to the West Coast where I was surprised to see perfectly working trolley bus systems in Seattle and San Francisco. As recently as last year, Seattle’s trolley bus network was evaluated and shown to be superior to an equal system using diesel hybrids.

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You can complain about the Missouri Legislature, but you cannot accuse them in the lack of the sense of humor. Rick Hellman, the heir to Hellman Mayonnaise fortune editor of the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle reports that the Missouri legislators passed a bill meant to tweak the Springfield chapter of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.

In the beginning of the year local news reported that a neo-Nazi group has joined the state’s “Adopt-A-Highway” volunteer litter pickup program, taking advantage of a free speech court fight won four years ago by the Ku Klux Klan. Now they will be picking up litter along the “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway.”

Rabbi Heschel was a steadfast supporter of the Civil Rights and marched along with Martin Luther King in the Selma Civil Rights March.

Heschel’s concern and action have been pivotal in two issues: race and peace. On the first, many will remember the picture of his striding alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., in the protest march at Selma, Alabama. Mrs. Coretta Scott King, in recalling that event, called Heschel “one of the great men of our time.” Rabbi Heschel described the march in these words: “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was both protest and prayer. Legs are not lips, and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”

Said Missouri Nazis: “Oy Gevalt!”

View Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway in a larger map

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t101rO7WuAM

Read about it: HB1197

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In 1989 I was in the military and the events in Berlin went largely unnoticed in our little installation. We watched the news as long as it didn’t distract us from the our main occupation – counting days until the discharge. 20 years later, when the excitement of breaking down a hated symbol of the Cold War died down many people are still not sure if it was a good thing.

In a poll this year, 50 percent of easterners agreed with the statement that “East Germany had more good sides than bad sides.” Eight percent signed off on the statement: “People there were happier and better off than today in reunified Germany.”
Just as some easterners long for their lost paradise, many westerners think they would have been better off without reunification.

In the end, the Wall couldn’t really exist any longer and the resentment most likely resides in the generation who had to bear the brunt of  the reunification and all the hardships associated with it. History is moving along and today is a good day to take a look back at the way it was just a short 20 years ago.

The image below was painted in 1990, later destroyed and was being repainted last summer.

The best and the funniest movie about that time is the award-winning Good Bye Lenin! It’s truly worth suffering through the subtitles.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJb4efZcFUM

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