Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman asked rhetorically, 'Why doesn't the Bible say, in the Commandments, Love your children.' Appropriately dumbfounded, I found his answer more cogent. It was, 'The Bible doesn't tell us to do what comes naturally.' 'We love our children.' I am reminded of this in the controversy over the Weatherman Ayers. Aye, there was a time in American student history when the Weathermen were 'like Wow.' Faced with the arduous complexity of adapting to America's involvement in VN, it was, I think, easiest for us to think, 'OK, I give up. I'll be superior to the President and the Generals. I'll settle for the happy solution that their picking on me too.' That's where the 'like Wow' comes in in relation to the Weathermen. The usual title of this blog 'A Psychiatrist who learned from Veterans' suggests my evolution in relation to this issue.
So the child gets mad at the parents, the country, and yet still accepts that the parents, the country love him. That's what I see in the Weathermen.
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3 comments:
Mike...I remembered that you said you had a blog, googled irving psychiatrist and voila! Is it a coincidence that I happened upon this posting? It seems that if you are going to "learn" and "evolve," then you need to remember what it was that you believed. As someone who knew you in the 60's, what we believed was that we were not in the war for a justifiable reason, thousands of young people were dying needlessly, and we needed to get out. The same can be said for the current war. It's not that we felt we knew more strategy than generals and presidents, but we did know more, in human terms, what it was costing America. I believe history has proven us right!
It's nice to hear from you. You can affirm the first part of my blogpost as history, not that anybody but us cares. As for history has proven us right, the liberal Ron Rosenbaum has a nice blogpost about what history has proven. There is a great book which I refer to somewhere in the blog which covers VN well and which I don't think you would consider conservative.
Books mentioned on the blog about VN.
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