Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

Learning To Work With Your Hands…by Robert M. Katzman

by Robert M. Katzman © May 20, 2019

Learning to work with your hands changes your worldview and increases your ability to take care of yourself and be more independent. It also helps make a person more compassionate to other people’s physical limitations, because so many are one injury away from unemployment. Working with handtools builds muscles, focuses attention and keeps aging people stronger.

To me, judging another’s worth by what they do for a living is a sin. But then, my running a wooden newspaper stand outside as a shivering teenager in winter to allow me to pay for high school with privileged classmates, creates feelings like that in a person. Seven of my 160 classmates ended up working for me, at one time, or another. 

(Read on …)

My 68th Halloween. Trick, or Treat?…by Robert M. Katzman

My 68th Halloween. Trick or Treat?

by Robert M. Katzman © October 31, 2018

 

Well, of course, Trick

What did you expect?

The Trick for me is, this far gone

Is to remember what the Treats were

As life gradually unfolded

(Read on …)

September 1, 1939: Real History Matters…by Robert M. Katzman

Filed under: Life & Death,Old Fart Wisdom,Politics,Social Policy and Justice — Bob at 4:59 am on Saturday, September 1, 2018
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Real history matters.
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Today, September 1,1939, when almost no one remains alive who experienced it in either battle or government, Germany invaded France and Poland and World War ll began. The Asian war began much earlier.
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Most people likely have no idea which countries lost more than a million people. The answer may surprise you.
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For those strange people who deny the Holocaust ever happened, well, the greatest number of people killed in the two wars were overwhelmingly Christian or Asian. Many thousands of Muslims from both Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia were also killed. They are included in the numbers above.
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As you read the shocking numbers, it might help to remember that the civilians didn’t start the war.
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When you vote for whomever you vote, it would be good to remember the consequences of who makes the decisions which can make wars begin.
Generally, the war’s leader’s children survived.
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I found this list of 40 countries losses online, but in order of greatest number killed, those 11 countries were:

(Read on …)

South Side Boy in Flight:”I’m Fourteen. I Need a Job”…by Robert M. Katzman

By Robert M. Katzman © July 18, 2018:

“I’m Fourteen. I Need a Job”

At Midnight, June 8th, 1964, I escaped an insane home on the South Side of Chicago where beatings with thick leather belts, belt buckles, rubber hoses and clenched fists were an everyday event. I left running with only the clothes on my back, in freezing rain, two weeks before graduating eighth grade at Caldwell School.

Met up at some point with my father who took me to live with him in a one-room studio with a small kitchen and bathroom in Hyde Park, across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry. I was going to need the industry part. He wasn’t working. This is what happened next when I was essentially on my own.

(Read on …)

A “Chocolate Phosphate”, or What My Jewish Mother Told Me in the Fifties…by Robert M. Katzman

When I was very young on the South Side of Chicago, my Mother, a daughter of immigrants from the Jewish Pale area of Eastern Europe where Jews were forced to live by the Czar, was addicted to this drink called a “chocolate phosphate”.

She ordered this delicacy in Jewish restaurants which was essentially ice cubes, chocolate syrup and carbonated seltzer water. The basic point, she explained to me, was to make her “greptz” or belch after a heavy meal.

Decades later when I began going to New York City in 1980 for book conventions, I naturally assumed this common Chicago beverage would be available anywhere in a city with the largest Jewish population in America. But no one heard of it, didn’t know what I was asking for and quickly conveyed the impatience and rudeness that NYC was also famous for.  (Read on …)

Relationships Defined: A Reflection Closer to Reality…by Robert M. Katzman

Relationships Defined: A Reflection Closer to Reality

by Robert M. Katzman © New Year’s Eve, 2017

1) Friend: One of one, or one of many, a preferred person to call, go places with, share experiences, be with when sad or drunk, to defend or be defended by when threatened by words or worse and who when you ask for help, absolutely, positively, shows up.

(Read on …)

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