Different Slants

I published a true, inspirational story on this blog on July 4, 2008:

Depression, Despair and the Human Voice, https://www.differentslants.com/?p=72 

(If link doesn’t light up in blue, try cutting and pasting it)  

It has become one of the most visited stories on Rick’s and my blog, to date.  Many, many people must know someone who suffers from the tyranny of depression, and that frank, unfiltered stories can help explain what it actually feels like, from the inside out.

Here is one more incident that I left out of this story.   I am adding it at Christmas time, 2008, because it serves as a reminder of how good strangers can be.  Sometimes, we all need that. 

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There was a small fresh fruit and vegetable store in Hyde Park, in 1978.  It was under the Illinois Central Railroad tracks and did a good business with the commuters rushing to their jobs in Downtown Chicago.  There was a bright, colorful public mural of grapes, apples, pears, carrots and so on painted on the brick exterior wall of the shop that faced my newsstand, just west of it, across Lake Park Avenue.

The owner was a short, stocky, Black and muscular man.  He worked hard, all the time.  We didn’t talk, but we nodded to each other when we caught each other’s eye.  I knew his name was James. He was kind of reserved.  I assumed he was wrapped up in his own world of business and other problems and not in any way aware of what I was involved with in the hostile world outside of intimate Hyde Park.  He had a formality about him, a kind of dignity.  But we weren’t friends.

The only indication James might have had that I was doing something besides selling newspapers on that corner was when my enormous black and white Gulliver’s Periodicals truck was parked outside of the store loading or unloading bundles of  thousands of current magazines.  The brick newsstand also served as Gulliver’s base of operations, initially. (Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

In June of this year, I wrote a heartfelt opinion piece about ten very specific things that Obama should do, when, not if  he’s elected, to help America be all it can be for the greatest number of its citizens.

You can click here: http://www.differentslants.com/2008/06/12/obama-a-blueprint-for-a-better-america-this-is-what-you-should-do-dont-waste-your-time-by-robert-m-katzman/ and read each item and see for yourself if you agree with me.

I knew Obama would smash through the primaries and arrive at this point today, four days before a momentous election in this country, because there is a momentum to history and sometimes, positive forces among men and women become too powerful to hold back, and a good man with wonderful qualities is put in the position to positively affect millions of lives.

We’re in a period similar to when Herbert Hoover was this country’s President during the Great Depression’s earliest years, just before FDR was swept into power by that same sort of unstoppable momentum. So much was going wrong for so many ordinary, hopeless, jobless people, that a man with energy, good will, an imagination and a first-class mind was too essential to the survival of the nation to not be given the opportunity to turn this country around.

That is the same situation we’re in now, except that in fact, Herbert Hoover was a man with good intentions and a generous heart who did much to organize and feed the starving post World War One Europeans, but was somehow not temperamentally suited to be our President. It happens. Hoover was fundamentally a decent man in the wrong executive position.

George Bush with his thieving, scheming, self-serving gang of incompetents with their blatant indifference to this nation’s terribly frightened and suffering average people whom he has surrounded himself with, is not.

The price we will pay in too many ways, long into our nation’s future because of the bottom-of-the-barrel gang of them, is a signal to the voting population that NOT voting gets you the worst common denominator. And if anyone is “common” it’s Bush. America deserve a higher level of motivation and intelligence than has been on display nationally and regrettably, internationally, for the last eight years.

There are tens of millions of wonderful, decent, caring, responsible people who believe in the Republican philosophy of governing, and I respect that. But unfortunately, Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt are not available right now, when we need them, so vote for a man as good as either of them: Barak Obama.

God save us, we sure need the best we can get, right now. Please vote. Thank you!

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About the writer and his other life in Skokie, Illinois:

Bob Katzman’s Magazine Museum: 100,000 periodicals back to 1576!
Wall of Rock: 50 years of cool Rock periodicals on display & for sale
4906 Oakton St. (8000 north and 4900 west) Skokie, Ill 60077
(847)677-9444 Mon-Fri: 10 am to 5 pm / Weekends: 10 am to 2 pm

Katzman’s Publishing Company site: www.FightingWordsPubco.com
Katzman’s online non-fiction stories: www.DifferentSlants.com

Poetry? For me, writing poetry is not an option.
It’s a response to emotion. Like cigarette smoke,
it’s fast-flowing, shapeless and with little time to capture it.
Writing poetry in an imperative. I say what I feel compelled to say.

I sell my five published books via mail order and accept major credit cards.
I don’t use PayPal. I just talk to people on the phone.
Fast, reliable service. Read my stories and see what you think.
I’m also available for hire to read my true Chicago stories to organizations
and answer all questions. I autograph my books when I sell them.

I am currently seeking an agent to do more readings.
Feel free to call me at the number above.

To me, being an American is an idea.

A concept. An agreement of equals.

A willingness to tolerate the differences in others, and a celebration of the beauty of cultural diversity.

While maybe originally, ours was a government,

“Of the Protestants, By the Protestants and For the Protestants”

We’re bigger than that today.  A numerically insignificant People like my own family, Jews, now represent less than 2% of the total American population, but I believe that our Constitution includes me when I read it. I don’t live in fear, here.

Soon, there will be more Moslems in America than Jews, but I don’t care.  They came here to escape the same killing chaos that brought my family here, as well as looking for a new start and a fair chance to become successful.  I welcome them.  Besides, when the hating is missing, they may remember that we’re linguistic cousins who speak two versions of the same Semitic language, as do the Assyrians, who are Christian Arabs.

I’m happy to live in a country where the African-American and Hispanic populations overwhelm my own culture, because diversity doesn’t threaten me.  I like living in a country where being different doesn’t limit you, like being Cypriot, Cambodian, Armenian, Ethiopean, Roma, Kazak, Slovakian or Bulgarian.  Or Chechen, Bosnian or Somali.

The prospect of learning Spanish because the ever evolving tide of immigration and history now favor Latin America is not intimidating, because it will soon be the principal “American” language and my grandchildren will speak it fluently and wonder why I’m inept at it, like my immigrant grandparents whom were native speakers of Yiddish and found English to be daunting.

Damn frustrating English, impossible to spell but so rich in variety for songwriters and poets, has only been the lingua franca of North America for about three hundred plus years.

A speck in time.

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

This is what I’d do, and I’m older than you are, so listen to me:

1…Stop funding expansion of the Interstate Highway System.  Maintain what there is, but no more widening, lengthening or any new entrances and exits.  It just beckons more cars and delays our conversion to sophisticated rail transportation.  Make cars increasingly unnecessary and make the trains run on time, like it matters.  Because it does.

2…Create and fund a National Railway Authority, some kind of public/private organization.  Hire both retired, existing RR workers and also the unemployed to create a national railroad that will rival or exceed Europe’s in efficiency and economy.  Map out and immediately begin building tracks coast to coast and into every little town on the map.  Knit the whole country together.  Make everyday travel by train inexpensive, realistic, convenient and possible by running trains everywhere.  Put a food car back in the system where the food is actually good, reasonably priced and the service is polite.  It’s possible.  Just hire people who like people.

Build them in America.  If we don’t make trains anymore, then hire people from wherever they still do make trains and create (or recreate) a new industry right here.  Shift the national priority from individual car mode to mass, and pleasant, transit.  Stop consuming oil.  Let OPEC dry up and blow away.   Put millions of men and women to work.

3…Create the “ONE HUNDRED MPG”  prize to be given to the person or company that can invent or convert or modify a type of engine that can be mass produced NOW for a basic 5-passenger car to replace what we have now as fast as possible.  The time is right for people to change their minds.  Offer a billion dollars or whatever your administration feels would be a sufficient inducement to bring the inventors out into the sunshine and get them to thinking.  A billion dollars is about a day in the Iraq War, so let no one bitch about the cost.  We can’t afford to wait until existing major American industries deems it the right time to retool.  Their economic priorities are not in the national interest.  The “Of the people, By the people, For the people” concept should rule the day here, in the interest of helping the most people in this country as fast as possible.

Insure honesty and fairness (to the degree such a thing is possible) by having the awards committee composed of engineers, physicists, metallurgists, chemists, materials engineers and transportation experts.  No car industry types should be allowed anywhere near that committee.  There should be no national boundaries to who gets the prize.  Anyone, from anywhere, if they have a brain…then they’re in the game.   Keep the identities of the committee members a secret so they can’t be corrupted.  Pay them enough, legitimately, so they can make decisions that are in the best interests of this country, and not for themselves.

4…Create a new Tribal Council of Indian Affairs run by a committee of twelve qualified and committed individuals from a dozen different tribes representing all parts of the continental USA and Alaska with ten year terms and annually rotating chairmanship so nobody dominates what ought to be a joint effort to improve the lives of America’s neglected and endlessly cheated Indians.  Keep the Anglos away from it.  They’ve done enough as it is, for the past 300 years.

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

This brief moment in my life lingers on in my memory, because it reminds me that a little compassion can make all the difference–when the world is crashing down on a guy.

I know that is so, because at different times in my life, I was that guy.   Because when your luck turns, or everything you’ve tried to do goes south, suddenly, no one has any time to bother with you, as if bad luck rubs off, or something like that.

What follows is true, and this is exactly how it happened:

On a merciless July scorcher of a day, in 1969, so hot that the very air shimmered, I was working the lunch shift in my kosher delicatessen in Hyde Park, which is part of Chicago, on the South Side of the city.

I was looking out of my big glass windows, over the round pale green paper sign that advertised:

Lunch Special!!  

          Hot Dog–Chips–And a Cold Coke!!

                             $2.50!!!

when I saw this young black kid get forcefully tossed out of the drugstore next to me, where he lost his balance and fell to the ground, scraping both hands on the hot concrete walkway.  And there he sat, looking morose, rubbing his sore hands together, and occasionally, wiping tears off his face.  People walked around him.  No one stopped.

He was this neighborhood punk, then about fifteen, whom I’d known about for years.  When I was running my corner newsstand, he’d run up and try to swipe a comic book off the display rack and then run away.  Sometimes I would catch him, and sometimes he was too fast for me, and then he’d run off laughing.

I was only a few years older than he was, still a teenager, and pretty fast myself, except he knew I couldn’t leave my newsstand so, that gave him an advantage to exploit, which…he did.  He was a little, local, pain in the ass, and not just to me.

(Read on …)

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: www.differentslants.com/?p=355

August 8, 2007

One morning some years ago, near Chicago, I was at a currency exchange where I would go to pay my utility bills. I suppose I could have mailed my payment, but it was faster for me to pay it in person. Besides, the dark-eyed girl working there behind the glass had a great rack on her and she always smiled at me, her blood-red lipstick gleaming on her soft, luscious lips. And when she walked over to punch my account numbers into her machine, I got a global view of all her…assets.

I didn’t mind, she didn’t mind, and the whole day was better for the experience.

So, on this particular day, I was waiting in line to see my favorite cutie. I was on the left side of the small room where she always worked behind the bullet-proof glass, and there was another young guy at the teller down the way from me paying a bill too, with about a four yards between us.

I am white. He was black. I think my sexy teller was Assyrian, but that wasn’t crucial to what followed next, on what seemed to be just another ordinary morning.

It was very quiet with the four us going about our business. Then, another young white guy, about twenty, blonde and thin, maybe five foot eight, walked in the exchange and stood silently behind me. I was almost ready to go, when the chime on the only door to the place clanged loudly as the door was suddenly shoved open and three adorable, very young black children scampered into the room, followed by a short, hesitant, and thin to the point of appearing to be nearly anorexic, man of about thirty or so. The kids were full of energy and called the petite man “Dad.”

Then, to my disbelieving eyes an enormous blob of a woman ended this little parade. She was close to six feet tall, and for lack of a more accurate description, the woman most closely resembled the evil Jabba, (Read on …)