https://spectator.org/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Another Rant. (See 1 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Will Trump get tough with Qatar?See: https://foreignpolicy.com/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Costs a lot of money and you just have to "Tuft" it out. (See 2 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Professor Henry "Hank" Abraham was the faculty advisor of my college fraternity. He subsequently went to teach at The University of Va. as a Chaired professor. I had Hank come and speak many years ago on the history of the Supreme Court when I started the "JEA Speaker Series." Hank is an authority on The History of The Supreme Court and his closest friend was Justice Anthony Scalia. Every year there is a lecture in his honor to which I make a modest contribution.(See 2 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The market proved me wrong today. I also was wrong about dear old Maxine. She is 80 not 70.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)
The collapse of the Turkish Lira continues, even though it has had a bit of a rally. This will create severe issues for Erdogan as well as possibly some problems for EU banks holding Turkish bonds denominated in US dollars and Euros. It could create some contagion in emerging markets, although that is not likely to create a crisis like the Russia crisis once did. Turkey is relatively tiny economically vs the US, so whatever Erdogan does on tariffs, or whatever else, is meaningless to the US. (Florida has a bigger GDP.) Turkey is now in for severe economic dislocation, high inflation (now running at 101%) , limited credit, and nil foreign investment, other than the $15 billion Qatar just said it would invest, although it is unclear what that “direct investment” really means. It will not solve the inflation, nor the low interest rate issues. There is not much they can do to substantially mitigate that, short of letting the pastor and others go, cancelling the Russian missile order, and agreeing to not buy Iranian oil. All are highly unlikely to happen as Erdogan digs his hole deeper. They could do a currency control board which fixes exchange rates, and would likely work, but then Erdogan would be conceding. The central bank can make additional liquidity available and raise rates, but Erdogan has ruled that out for now. This is about far more than the pastor.
Right now Iran is the main oil supplier to Turkey, so November will be crunch month. Erdogan has put his ego and personal standing to look tough, on the line, so it will be very hard for him to back down now. He thought he could pressure the US to do what he wants by using the pastor and other things. He still has not learned, Obama is no longer president, and Trump will not roll over the way Obama did. Erdogan probably thought this is like the Iran nuke deal again. Huge mistake. He is now in classic rock and hard place scenario. He has almost no friends in the EU to stand with him because he has destroyed democracy and is now a dictator. Merkel, of course, says Germany will help- why?- because German companies do a lot of business in Turkey, so as usual, she is more interested in short term business than long term strategic geopolitics. Doubtful this will really be of much help to Erdogan. Russia cannot bail him out. If he tries to align with Russia, he alienates the military and the US even more. If he defies the US sanctions on oil, Trump can shut Turkey out of Swift, and then it is all over. The Sunnis would probably supply oil if he stops buying from Iran. Kuwait gave Erdogan $1.6 billion this week, but it is not nearly enough to make a real difference, so not clear why they did this, or what they extracted from Erdogan for it. Unclear what Qatar got for its $15 billion other than continued presence of Turkish troops to protect against a Saudi invasion. Israel is against him now. The Kurds are just itching to send in more guerillas.
The Mideast is a weird place where everyone has a hidden agenda, and nobody can be trusted. Erdogan is losing the merchants, and the economic problems will potentially weaken his support with the people. Turkey protects the Emir in Qatar, but Qatar cannot solve Turkey’s problems. The army has been seriously defanged by the coup round up, but that does not mean the remaining generals will not try to stage another coup one day if the people do rise up. That is what has usually happened in Turkey. It will be very tense and uncertain where it goes from here. Anything might happen, but it all depends on, can Erdogan continue to control the generals and his base, as the economy and the Lira crash. For Erdogan, this is a life or death fight. He has created this disaster for himself that he could have avoided, but he is about to make it much worse. It feels like the US intends to teach Erdogan and others a lesson that Obama is gone, and the US now plays hardball, not wiffleball. Turkey and Iran are facing the same economic collapse, and similar pressures from the US. We may see both in turmoil by December, and a very violent region going into 2019.
It is looking more and more that a hard Brexit is possible, although not probable. Very hard to determine right now. There is judged to be a 65% chance the final deal may be free trade for services and banking, stay in EU customs union for hard goods, UK controls its own immigration, but allows merit based immigration or work permits of some type. UK continues to pay some amount for EU operations. A half in, half out deal. Unclear if that can pass Parliament. The EU is making demands the Brits cannot accept. May is not in a strong political position to force through a deal that many of her party do not accept. This is another black swan that cannot be predicted, that will occur in early 2019. I don’t know that anyone has any real ability to predict the final outcome including May, but unless there is a lot of movement in the fall on reaching agreement, it will become more and more a possibility a hard Brexit will happen. If it does, it will further disrupt the EU and UK. The risks and uncertainty are much too high to be investing there now. The British trade secretary said as soon as Brexit is done they will do a fast deal with the US. No matter what, the UK will be fine in the long run and better out of the EU. London will remain a financial capital.
Notice through all of this that the price of oil has actually dropped. US frackers continue to pump and drill. Once the new pipelines are ready to accept oil next year, US production will increase further. It is a bottleneck right now. I continue to believe the US price of oil will remain under $70 for most of the time, which is very good for US inflation. It will pop when war breaks out in the Gulf, but that will not last long. The US can use the strategic reserve to get through. As the summer ends, the price will possibly go lower. Highly likely the Saudis and other Arab Sunni states will make up for Iranian shortages when sanctions hit in November. By then everyone will have had plenty of time to fill storage tanks to get through shortfalls. At a cost now of $40 per barrel, the frackers are able to keep going and make a profit. Combine the oil price stability with continued interest rate stability on the ten year, and it is a good story for the economy.
There is a very good chance now that the Q3 GDP will exceed 4%. All of the data are coming in very strong right now, and are on an uptrend. It is possible GDP could hit 4.5%, but much too early to tell. There will be a bump up from inventory because it was a 1% negative in Q2, as it was drawn down, and needs to be restocked now to meet demand. It could add .5%, or maybe more in Q3. Corporate earnings are up over 22%, and looking like they will do the same, or even better, in Q3. While inflation was up last month, it is unclear yet if that will continue at the same levels for the coming months. Producer prices are not rising too fast, so it is hard to know yet. If a tariff deal is struck with Mexico and the EU in September, as is highly likely, the tariffs might be ended before quarter end. The big issue will be what to do on steel, aluminum and autos. Possibly quotas. Unclear what happens to light truck tariffs. Farm products is the real sticky issue. There will be some sort of deal, but it will not be dramatic, and will appear to be more than it is, but tariffs will get lifted before the election, or at least adjusted down. China will be in DC in a week to start talks to resolve trade issues. The Fed will raise again in September, but everyone knows it, so the markets already reflect that. It will not be a big issue. Geopolitics in the Mideast, and the election are what will drive the markets in the fall and winter. If GDP is over 4% in Q3, and tariffs get resolved, Republicans win.
Canada has realized that maybe a carbon tax was a mistake. Canada has also ramped up other costly regulations under Trudeau- a lot like Obama. Total business investment has declined 17% since 2014. Private sector investment in factories and buildings is down 23%. Capital flight is now an issue. Due to a phase out of coal, energy prices have risen materially in Ontario where manufacturing is centered. In 2017, foreign direct investment was 56% lower than in 2013, near the bottom of the crash. Americans, especially in CA, should look across the border to see what excessive tax and environmental regulation generates vs lower taxes and deregulation in the US. There is no better real life comparison and example. You get clean air because business leaves the country, and nobody is left there to create carbon. Recent study by an independent group shows that CA forcing all new homes to install solar, will raise housing costs by thousands of dollars, which lower income people cannot afford, and that the state is lying about the cost and the return on investment for solar. Then CA wonders why there is no affordable housing. Maybe CA can become a new Canadian province.
If you did not sell your crypto coin many months ago- too late. Game over.
These events are why the black swans are swarming again. It is also why the US cannot have a fractured government now, and why electing Dems could be disastrous. Trump needs the strong backing of Congress through all of the international mess that is coming in the next several months.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)New course at Tufts University advances Palestinian narrative while shelving the Jews
“Colonizing Palestine,” offered by the school’s Colonialism Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments, will “explore the history and culture of modern Palestine and the centrality of colonialism in the making of this contested and symbolically potent territory.”
(August 15, 2018 / JNS) A new course on the docket this fall at Tufts University outside Boston has caused a bit of blowback even before students enter the classroom.
Titled “Colonizing Palestine,” it’s being offered by the Colonialism Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments, and will “explore the history and culture of modern Palestine and the centrality of colonialism in the making of this contested and symbolically potent territory,” according to the class description.
“Students will examine the region in which Palestine is embedded through a range of path breaking writers, filmmakers, and thinkers,” the description states. “These include novels by Anton Shammas and Emile Habiby, the creative non-fiction of Edward Said and Suad Amiry, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Nye, and the spoken word artistry of Suheir Hammad and others.”
The late Said was a Columbia University professor and leader in the anti-Israel movement, while Amiry has accused Israel of “atrocities” regarding the establishment of the Jewish state.
The late Darwish wrote poems demonizing Israel, calling it a “horse’s blood” and labeling a future Palestinian state as “a prize of war.”
Nye compared the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Miss., to “Jerusalem, a no-man’s land [that] separated people, designated by barbed wire.” Her poetry calls for violence against Israel, saying, “Let’s be the same wound if we must bleed. Let’s fight side by side, even if the enemy is ourselves: I am yours, you are mine.”
Hammad wrote a disturbing piece in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, titled “First Writing Since.” It reads: “[I] do not know how bad a life has to break in order to kill. [I] have never been so hungry that [I] willed hunger. [I] have never been so angry as to want to control a gun over a pen. [N]ot really. [E]ven as a woman, as a Palestinian, as a broken human being. [N]ever this broken.”
The poem also accuses the United States of “transgressions,” and that “if there are any people on earth who understand how new york [sic] is feeling right now, they are in the west bank [sic] and the gaza strip” [sic].
Per the course description, the class will also study the “burgeoning work of Palestinian filmmakers, such as Elia Suleiman, Mia Masri, Emad Burnat [and] Michel Khleifi, to name but a few.”
“By doing so students will address crucial questions relating to this embattled nation, the Israeli state which illegally occupies Palestine, and the broader global forces that impinge on Palestinians and Israelis,” the description states. “Themes covered include notions of nationalism and national identity, settler-colonialism, gender and sexuality, refugee politics, cultural hybridity, class politics, violence, and memory.”
The class will be taught by Thomas Abowd, who is listed on Canary Mission, a blacklist of anti-Israel activists, academics and organizations.
Abowd has an extensive history of engaging in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic causes. In 2015, he spoke at Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine’s Israeli Apartheid Week and declared, “We have apartheid right here on this campus, and we have apartheid right here in this city,” propelling the narrative that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
In 2016, he claimed that Israel “privileges [Jews] to the exclusion of others, so you get this deep sort of biblical historical notion of an unchanging Jewish essence and connections to the Holy Land,” and that Israel views Jerusalem as an “eternal place, an unchanging immutable part of Jewish history.”
He received a Fulbright award to conduct research and teach at Birzeit University near Ramallah, a stronghold for anti-Israel incitement, from December 2011 to October 2012.
“As an institution of higher education, Tufts is committed to the free exchange of ideas. The university’s courses represent a broad spectrum of ideas and topics that enable students to become familiar with a variety of perspectives on important and complex issues facing our global society,” Tufts spokesperson Patrick Collins told JNS. “University-facilitated discussion of these issues does not imply endorsement of a particular view, and we anticipate and welcome the Tufts’ community’s vigorous discussion of varying viewpoints and beliefs.”
‘Undermining the university’s academic integrity’
Rachel Rubinstein, 23, a Tufts alumnus who works at a biotechnology company, explained that as a liberal Jew who does not support Israel building neighborhoods in the West Bank, the course seems intriguing, yet is still troublesome.
“I think a large group of Tufts students do not support Israel’s existence, and probably think this class is necessary and important,” said Rubenstein.
“I support open dialogue on the conflict, but, of course, do not support anti-Semitism, which is why I would be interested in seeing if that is how the class is taught before trying to shut it down,” she added. “I don’t generally understand classes like these; coming from a science background, they tend to touch on [being] too emotional and blaming both sides, but that could be for lack of a political-science background.”
Groups including the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which is near Tufts, as well as StandWithUs, the AMCHA Initiative and the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET) condemned Tufts for offering the class.
“In addition to the title of the course itself suggesting a distorted account of the Palestinian-Israel conflict, the course professor, Thomas Abowd is an outspoken activist against Israel,” said Aviva Rosenschein, CAMERA’s international campus director. “He is on the advisory board for the Boston branch of Jewish Voice for Peace—an extremist pro-BDS organization that has hosted and honored the terrorist Rasmea Odeah.”
Rosenschein continued, “When students choose to attend Tufts University, they expect to be receiving high-level education—not to be inundated with biased material stemming from activists who support the end of Israel and demise of all its people, Jews and non-Jews alike.”
“Studying the impact of British and Ottoman colonialism on Arabs and Jews in the region is entirely legitimate,” said StandWithUs New England campus director Zach Shartiag. “However, if this course frames Jews as colonizers in their ancestral homeland, it will be erasing history, doing a disservice to Tufts students and undermining the university’s academic integrity.”
AMCHA director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin noted that “it’s important to point out that academic freedom protects Professor Abowd’s right to teach this course as he sees fit. However, the fact that Abowd is an ardent supporter of an academic boycott of Israeli universities and scholars, as is the director of the Tufts Colonialism Studies program that is offering this course, certainly raises concerns about whether the course will be used for education or political indoctrination.
“But even more troubling than the possibility of Abowd indoctrinating his students with one-sided, anti-Zionist propaganda,” she continued, “is the possible impact this course could have on Jewish and pro-Israel students at Tufts.”
EMET founder and president Sarah Stern said “this class is a paramount example of what has been occurring in the field of Middle East Studies over the last quarter of a century, where the truth—and a good solid education—is being sacrificed on the altar of mere political propaganda.”
She added that “the word ‘Jew’ derives from Judea, which was the place of our origin. It is beyond tragic that today’s youth are being fed an education that is built on a narrative of falsehoods and lies.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Below you will find a brilliant article on our brilliant hero, HJA, published last week by the Richmond Times Dispatch.
Sincerely, Barbara A. Perry
Chair, Abraham Lecture Steering Committee
CHARLOTTESVILLE: One year later
'All that is evil': 2017 white nationalist rally revived boyhood memories of Nazi Germany for retired UVA scholar
Within the year, Abraham would leave Germany — alone — in 1937 to come to the United States to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. The girl, Erna Strauss, would perish with her family in Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where nearly a million Jews were put to death.CHARLOTTESVILLE — Henry Abraham was 15 when he kissed a girl for the first time in a small town in Germany.
So, a year ago, chants of “Jews will not replace us” stunned Abraham, a retired scholar of constitutional law at the University of Virginia, as he sat in the study of his Charlottesville apartment and watched televised accounts of white nationalists marching with torches through the heart of his academic home.
“What really hurt me and bothered me so much was the language that was used, the utilization of all that is evil in terms of the language,” he said in a recent interview, weeks before his 97th birthday.
“I almost went through the years in Germany and saw myself flattened with an uppercut that ended up in my leaving public school and going to a Jewish school,” he recalled, reliving a traumatic attack from long ago.
The white nationalist march and violent confrontation with counter-protesters the next day was “shattering” to a man who had dedicated a career of more than 50 years to rule of law and the role of civil liberties in national life.
“His first statement to me was, ‘I can’t believe I’m living it again,’ ” said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at U.Va.’s Miller Center and a member of the “Tribe of Abraham,” as his devoted former students call themselves. “It was so poignant.”
The white nationalist specter would shadow him again in April, when the U.Va. Law School moved the annual Henry J. Abraham Distinguished Lecture — featuring Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who is Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter and a former Maryland lieutenant governor — to the Miller Center the day before it was to take place.
Perry, chair of the lecture committee, said the move arose from concerns about the disruptive presence of Jason Kessler, who had organized the white nationalist rally, and supporters who were “camped out” in the law school library.
“The last thing I want to subject 96-year-old Henry Abraham ... to is a neo-Nazi demonstration at the law school,” Perry said Wednesday.
Abraham, who uses a wheelchair, couldn’t do anything but watch on television last Aug. 11 as neo-Nazi protesters marched on the Lawn and around the Rotunda, as well as the violent clash between white nationalists and counter-protesters the next day in downtown Charlottesville.
But he took some solace from the phone calls of two former students — he described both as Episcopalians — who recognized the trauma of the events and offered their support.
“You wouldn’t have gotten that in Germany, I can assure you that,” he said, recalling just one family brave enough to help his mother and brother after his father was arrested during the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews in 1938.
Rule of law
Abraham has lived a life rooted in the rule of law. He returned to Germany in 1945 as part of a U.S. Army intelligence unit that mined captured troves of Nazi party documents to help U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson prosecute the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
His teaching career, spanning more than 50 years at U.Va. and the University of Pennsylvania, focused on constitutional law, judicial process and the history of the U.S. Supreme Court — “my métier,” he said.
Abraham has known 25 U.S. Supreme Court justices, 11 of them as quasi-professional acquaintances and four as intimate friends, including the late Lewis Powell of Richmond, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Antonin Scalia, and the late William J. Brennan Jr.
The ideological range of that quartet — from the liberal Ginsburg and Brennan to the conservative Scalia with the moderate Powell — “says to me he is so open-minded,” said Perry, a former researcher for then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and judicial fellow at the court.
The court’s political history is the subject of his most recent and popular book, “Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Bush II.”
Abraham has written 13 books, including eight editions of “Freedom and the Court,” an analysis of the legal framework for civil liberties in the United States that was first published in 1967, selling more than 100,000 copies in one year during the turbulent 1960s. Perry was co-author of later editions.
A moving memoir
But his most moving work might be the slim memoir, “Reflections on a Full Life,” which he wrote for his sons, Philip and Peter, in 2002, and revised 11 years later, using the 1937 Triumph brand manual typewriter his father had given him long ago.
“My dad is my hero,” said Philip Abraham, a veteran lobbyist and lawyer who has worked in Virginia political circles for almost 40 years and is a candidate for a judgeship on the State Corporation Commission.
He cites his father’s achievements in the face of adversity, his military service and his personal values, rooted in civility, public service and education.
“My father is proof of the value and power of a good education, to take a boy who left Germany at 15 to come to the United States and accomplish what he did in his career,” he said.
The self-published memoir begins with Abraham’s return to Germany as a staff sergeant for an intelligence unit in the Allied Expeditionary Forces led by then Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He commands a jeep to visit his hometown, Offenbach, retracing the route he rode by bicycle each day to the Jewish Realgymnasium in Frankfurt “after it was no longer possible for a Jew, or safe for a Jew — I had already been attacked physically — to attend school in Offenbach as early as 1934.”
During the visit, he reunites with a middle-school teacher who had been forced to retire early in the Nazi regime that began in 1933 — in part “because he had chosen me, a damned Jew, to recite a festive poem at a class celebration, where he had supported the presentation of an Agfa camera to me as the class’s best student.”
Abraham wrote.
He also paid his first visit to the town’s Reform Synagogue, which had been torched on Kristallnacht — often called the “Night of Broken Glass” — destroying all but one Torah saved by the Gentile wife of the temple’s caretaker. The next month, he returned for the first formal religious service in the refurbished building.
“It was a wrenching, incredibly moving service, highlighted by the reintroduction of the saved Torah, carried by the old caretaker and two American Jewish soldiers into the small adjoining building, where the service took place,” he wrote.
“Among the attendees were 15 elderly Offenbacher women, 10 of whom had returned from Theresienstadt (a concentration camp in the Czech Republic) and five of whom were Gentile widows of Jewish husbands who had been exterminated in concentration camps.”
Coming to the U.S.
Abraham came to the United States in 1937 at the insistence of his mother, Louise, known as Liesel. She acted soon after the Nazis took power to begin the four-year process of getting permission for him to immigrate and join members of her family who had settled in New Orleans and Pittsburgh.
“She was a fantastic person,” he said of his mother, who died in 1997, just short of her 100th birthday. “She gave me two lives — she brought me into the world and she sent me to the States.”
His father, who owned a leather-goods business confiscated by the Nazis, objected because he thought the family would be protected by his service to Germany in World War I, in which he was wounded twice at Verdun.
The night before Abraham departed, his father took him into his study and showed him the Iron Cross he had received for bravery. “ ‘That is why you needn’t worry at all about us,’ he stated confidently, ‘we’ll be safe and fine.’ How wrong he was!”
Abraham’s father was arrested during Kristallnacht, on Nov. 9, 1938, and sent to Dachau concentration camp near Munich. He was released a short time later “but his health was broken,” leading to his death at 61 in Pittsburgh, Abraham said.
“My father would not have made it out if he had not been such a hero — on the wrong side,” he said recently.
Other members of the family were less fortunate. Two of his father’s sisters were gassed to death in Auschwitz. His maternal grandmother, Oma, died of a coronary thrombosis as she and her husband fled their farm near Busenberg in the Rhineland-Palatinate during Kristallnacht. Her husband, Opa, ultimately reached the family in Pittsburgh.
“How he did it we never knew,” Henry Abraham said.
Abraham’s parents and brother, Otto, escaped Germany at the end of 1938, thanks to a Dutch couple that helped them cross the Rhine River and sheltered them after the train abruptly stopped short of the Netherlands border.
When they joined him in Pittsburgh, Otto stepped off the bus and told his brother, “I no longer speak German.”
In the end, 11 of the 30 members of Abraham’s immediate family escaped to the U.S.
A calling in education
Abraham was chair of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1960s, when student unrest rocked the campus and helped reshape his view on the limits of civil liberties.
“I was happy at Penn, until the administration I thought did not show enough courage to draw some lines when students got out of hand, in the ’60s especially,” he said, recalling the university president’s dramatic resignation in front of faculty during student rioting.
Abraham became a mentor to Perry when she was a graduate student in his class in 1981, studying the vital role of civil liberties in constitutional law. “The challenge he would put to the class was, ‘Where do you draw the line?’ ” she recalled.
Education has been his calling since he came to the United States and took night classes at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. After the war, he was set on attending Kenyon College, with which he had become enchanted while stationed there in 1943 in an Army linguistics unit studying French military government.
Abraham’s roommate for three weeks was Paul Newman, the future film star whose “major interest was applied anatomy.” Other classmates included future comedian Jonathan Winters (“who flunked out; school wasn’t funny enough for him”) and Olof Palme, the future prime minister of Sweden who was assassinated in 1986.
He attended on the GI Bill and graduated first in his class with a degree in political science, still wrestling with the question posed by his German elementary school teacher on whether he would become a lawyer, a rabbi or a teacher.
Abraham loved the law but had no desire to become a lawyer. “I wanted to teach more than anything else,” he said.
He attended graduate school at Columbia University, and then began looking for a position in a university political science department. His first rejection came from the University of Virginia in 1948 “in the form of a Xerox-like ‘sorry card.’ ”
Instead, he landed a teaching position in political science at Penn’s Wharton School, where he remained for 23 years. In 1952, he met Mildred Kosches, a graduate student in English whom he would marry two years later (“on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday”) and who worked 22 years in charge of special collections at U.Va.’s Alderman Library. They celebrated their 64th anniversary in April.
Abraham came to U.Va. in 1970 and taught for more than 25 years, not including subsequent pro bono teaching of older students in late-life learning programs. “I guess I was happiest in teaching right here,” he said.
Finding hope
He is hopeful about the state of civil liberties, despite the public display he found so “distressing” a year ago. He was impressed by the role students played, including those who stood at Jefferson’s statue in front of the Rotunda surrounded by hostile white nationalists.
“The students did very well, I think,” Abraham said. “I’m enough of an optimist to think that the forthcoming events will be generally mild.”
He added: “That doesn’t mean there won’t be some regrettable actions, but I’m confident that enough people realize what a horrible, repetitive arrangement this represented.”
The best response, Abraham suggested, “We have to embrace what we have learned through history.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment