Different Slants

(Originally posted on July 21, 2008, then reposted March 10, 2017 in frustration after the 2016 election, where insanity began to rule what was once a last best refuge for people seeking a chance to live, to be happy)

To me, being an American is an idea.

A concept.

An agreement of equals.

A willingness to tolerate the differences in others.

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.

(Read on …)

Copyright July 6, 2016

There is a fluidity and capriciousness to time and events.

There is no way to predict what will occur next based on what has happened before. Even a series of good events, one following another, doesn’t mean that kind of luck will continue, or the reverse, either. There is no pattern, no rationalization or balance as to why things happen in a person’s life. Why do I write this?

Last September, during a street fair in Racine, Wisconsin, a smallish town of less than 80,000 located next to Lake Michigan, just north of Kenosha, 30 miles south of Milwaukee and about 27 miles north of the Illinois border, my wife Joy and I met a very nice local couple named Brad and Rose Bliss.

In this nine months later follow-up story to what happened in that story, just about every single significant thing changed. No, none of us is or was famous and no one would have read about any of us in some newspaper; but what happened then caused our paths to cross during that street fair, and subsequently made a friendship bloom between two new settlers in Racine and a long established couple.

(Read on …)

Failing to Bribe a Chicago Judge: The Machine Fails Me!! 

By Robert M. Katzman

Copyright © January 2, 2014

In the spring of 1965, in Hyde Park, an area seven miles south of Chicago’s central Downtown area and home of the University of Chicago and jazz, my Father, Israel, felt it was time to explain corruption in the Chicago Machine and teach me the basics.

I was fifteen, and if you can imagine the setting, we’re in our small apartment sitting on either side of the scarred kitchen table. I was listening and playing with the salt and pepper shakers at the same time. He may as well have been explaining etiquette customs on Mars to me. I had no clue about what he was going to say.

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© March 20, 2015

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

Haym Salomon (April 7, 1740 – January 6, 1785) was a Polish-born Jewish American businessman and political financial broker who immigrated to New York from Poland during the period of the American Revolution. He helped convert the French loans into ready cash by selling bills of exchange for Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance. In this way he aided the Continental Army and was possibly the prime financier of the American side during the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain. He died at the age of 44 after the end of the war, penniless. He did more than help finance the war against the British. He gave everything he had.

(Read on …)

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

I originally wrote this poem on Friday, April 13, 2007, after interviewing Mike Hecht, the 88-year-old man who wrote the forward to my first book. He was the cantor on Yom Kippur (Jewish Day of Repentance) in my temple for forty years, the now sadly extinct B’nai Torah in Highland Park. His job, an honor in Judaism, was to blow the shofar, or ram’s horn to announce the beginning of a new year, every Rosh Hashanah, usually occurring in the fall.  Mike died May 16, 2009, a week after his 90th birthday. I saw him the day before, May 9th, and gave him a birthday card featuring Yoda from Star Wars on the cover with the movie’s theme music playing when he opened the card.  He laughed, as he lay on his bed, and then asked me as I turned to leave him, “But Bob, who is Yoda?” Surprised at the question I paused, thought about how to explain the connection and then said, simply: “Mike, he’s you. Yoda is you.”

That was the last time we spoke.

This is the link to my eulogy for him. I miss him still. http://www.differentslants.com/?p=701

I noticed there was a line in the last part of my description of Mike that seemed to vibrate. I thought about what it meant, what I really was trying to express and that line became the title of the poem. I realized it was a protest against the 2nd Iraq war began by then President Bush and VP Cheney, after false clams that there were weapons of mass destruction there. Years later, Iraq is now disintegrating into three parts.  A new war is now raging there, and the future of the area is unknown.

I also added this part (in 2007) for people to think about:

Today, beginning last night, is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Take a moment to think about it. Whether you are observant or not, whether you think about Judaism less than a minute a year, would have made no difference to Hitler. Who your grandparents or great-grandparents were, would be enough reason for the Nazis to kill you.

I think about that, and wonder what I would have done, if I were trapped in a situation like that, today.
What would you do today, if you knew then, what you know now?  Maybe the poem will motivate you to action. I hope so.

Robert M. Katzman

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

© March 31, 2014

It was a six foot by eight foot wooden box
I built it in Chicago
I was nineteen
From the heavy hinged door to the slanted roof
So the snow would fall off
A solitary window slid back and forth
The rain was defeated
The small structure was solid
And eventually I, too, was solid
Because one thing led to another

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