Out of My Mind (10 page)

Without the money it gets from the United States, Israel would collapse. We underwrite every action they take even when we disagree with the action.

This is an idiotic and unfair war between the Palestinians and the Israelis. No one is going to invade Israel because we won't let them.
Israelis wouldn't even have to defend themselves; we would defend them. We could also stop Israeli aggression by cutting off the cash and sophisticated weapons we give Israel.

Anti-Semitism is a cancer and it is irresponsible of Israel to encourage its reemergence.

It's difficult to write anything of substance about anything without offending someone. And then, sometimes I'm wrong, too.

It is not my intention to offend anyone—that would be foolish of any writer who wants to be read—but too many people refuse to face the truth about something they're close to. I may sometimes be illinformed, but I'm not biased. On issues, I know where the middle of the road is and usually take it.

I occasionally have been called anti-Semitic. It is a charge that should not be made lightly. I've been on the side of the Jews too long for that. I don't recall seeing any of my critics there on April 12, 1945, when I entered Buchenwald with the U.S. Army. I know something about anti-Semitism that someone who wasn't there will never know. No one entering Buchenwald that day could ever be anti-Semitic.

Although most Israelis are Jews, most Jews are not Israelis. I do not use these words interchangeably, as many of my cities do. They refuse to accept the fact that it's possible to be occasionally anti-Israeli, which I am, without ever being anti-Semitic.

There are people who are unwilling to accept that the Palestinians being killed, mostly by American weapons, are human beings who wail when their sons die and weep when their homes are destroyed. They won't admit Palestinians have a right to a homeland of their own.

I do not resort to the some- of-my-best-friends- are-Jews defense. Not some. Most of my best friends are Jews. When we argue, I often remind
the ones with a sense of humor about their Jewishness, of Ogden Nash's couplet:

I don't pretend to be a Middle East scholar, nor am I much interested in becoming one. The events of long ago in that area have been so often retold, rewritten, translated, embroidered and fictionalized that it seems unlikely they bear much relationship to what actually happened. Forget 200 B.C. You can't even be sure of today's report of something that happened yesterday. Nor does it matter. We have to deal with the world we have today.

If you're worried about your own problems, one of the good ways to stop worrying about them is to start worrying about the world's problems.

There are plenty of them big enough to make anyone forget worrying about money, marriage, the job, the kids, the dent in the car or a leaky faucet.

The first story big enough to worry about is the possibility of our being attacked with biological or nuclear weapons. If I were in the State Department, I'd be on the alert if large numbers of suspicious-looking people started leaving the country. This might mean they know something we don't know.

Before the destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City seemed impervious. Not any longer. The core of New York is the island of Manhattan, just twelve miles long and three miles wide at its fattest
point. It must look like a bull's eye to any enemy looking for a target. The bomb we dropped on Hiroshima would reduce New York City and all the 9 million people in it to ashes in a flash.

If an enemy didn't have nuclear weapons, it might choose to wipe us out with biological weapons by fogging the city with clouds of deadly bacteria that would kill us all in hours. Thoughts like this make me wonder why everyone doesn't move out of New York. That makes me worry about the decline of New York because I love New York.

Many areas of the nation are suffering from drought. Drought worries me more than torrents of water, even though flood pictures of houses being washed away and dogs in rowboats are more dramatic. In my worried little mind, the earth is more apt to dry out than drown.

Drought is a time-consuming worry that can take your mind off your own petty concerns for a long while because of the daily reports about global warming. There are stories of huge icebergs (the size of Rhode Island, they usually say) breaking away and floating out to sea where they melt. I worry a lot about icebergs melting.

One of the things that worries me is the report that as the icebergs melt, the seas rise. How can that be? If you put ice cubes in a glass and then fill the glass to the brim with water, the ice cubes float above the rim. When the ice cubes melt, the glass should overflow but it does not. Why then, I worry, do melting icebergs cause the oceans' level to rise? There must be a physical principle here that I don't understand.

One of the reasons we're drying out, in spite of the melting icebergs, is because we've depleted the ozone layer that acts as a protective screen from the direct and damaging rays of the sun.

Earthquakes are something anyone in California can worry about as a diversion.

If we survive these potentially catastrophic, civilization-ending disasters and the world doesn't come to an end, I'll be able to concentrate on worrying about cloning. The tinkering that scientists are doing with the genes of sheep is child's play compared with what they're going to be able to do with humans. And nothing's going to stop them from cloning a person.

The best we can hope for to end all our worries is that science will isolate the best genes and produce the perfect human being. Dishonesty will be eliminated from the human character. There will be no thieves, no evil corporate executives, no Adolf Hitlers or Saddam Husseins.

Meanwhile, though, there's a lot to worry about.

Most of us don't change our minds about anything important after the age of twenty. We get set in our ways early. One of the earliest mind-sets to form is about religion. Kids baptized as Catholics and sent to a Catholic church when they're too young to understand religion usually end up as church-going Catholics for life. No young child says to a parent, “I don't want to be a Catholic. I think I'll be a Baptist.” Or vice versa.

The training or indoctrination of young people can be good or bad but whatever it is, it usually sticks for life. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler, playing on the resentment some Germans felt toward the Jews, formed youth groups that taught hate. It was those young people who became Nazis. They weren't born Nazis.

If all the children in Peoria, Ill. (a city I pick at random), had been brought up as Muslims instead of Catholics and Protestants, they would be Muslims now. There wouldn't have been a lot of ten-year-olds stomping their feet saying, “I don't want to be a Muslim. I want to be a Presbyterian.”

One of the greatest dangers to the survival of a civilization is the rise of hatred within the culture. There have been recent pictures and articles about the extent of the training exercises in the Middle East that combine a philosophy of hate with education in murder. Young Muslims taking courses in terrorism are not going to grow up trying to win the Nobel Peace Prize. They will have been convinced in their youth that Americans are evil and that the right thing for them to do is kill as many of us as they can. There's no hatred like the hatred based on religion.

It's not easy to understand why the races on earth are so different and so unable to get along. We don't know whether there was always some basic, genetic difference between Eskimos and Africans, Asians and Europeans, or whether racial characteristics developed as a result of the differences in the environments in which humans with originally similar characteristics flourished over the centuries. However it happened, there's no doubt that now there are fundamental differences among races. Our philosophies of government, our personalities, goals, religions and even our beliefs in old wives tales differ. And those aren't going away.

It's hard to know what the United States should do about all this hatred. Spending more on weapons doesn't seem like the best way to eliminate the crisis in the Middle East. A thousand nuclear bombs are no deterrent to a few containers of anthrax.

I remember a college course in which I read a dialogue between two philosophers. One philosopher expressed dismay over the possible end of civilization as a result of the invention of gun powder.

I'm a little old to worry about it myself, but I'm not so selfish that I'm ready to have this great world end with a biological or nuclear bang just because I'm not going to be around to see it.

Last week, I attended a ceremony at the school I went to growing up for the dedication of several large brass plaques bearing the names of graduates who served in the military during this country's twentieth-century wars.

The emphasis was on the World War II plaque because it bore the most names. Many of us who had served were there. Someone pointed out how curious it was that the school had waited sixty years before honoring its World War II heroes. (The word “heroes” is used
with increasing abandon as the years between the action and the present expand.)

We're all more interested in our own world, our own history than in anyone else's. For years now I've been surprised and pleased by the attention being paid to WW II because it was my war
.
The interest in WW II was already growing before Tom Brokaw wrote
The Greatest Generation
. The movie
Saving Private Ryan
enhanced the memory of WW II. My own book on the topic,
My War
, has sold 175,000 copies and I'm acutely aware of how lucky I am to have had the cathartic experience of writing it.

I say “lucky” because there aren't many people who experienced WW II who haven't thought of writing a book about it. I get fifty letters a year from veterans who want to write a book, or have started writing a book, or who've finished a rough manuscript about their wartime experiences. They ask for advice on how to get their work published. It's sad for me because most of those efforts are sincere but seriously short of literary merit or any general interest.

The question in my mind about both world wars has always been why my children, born after World War II ended, know so much more about it than I ever knew about World War I. That conflict ended the year I was born. It is not just our children, either. Everyone's children know more about WW II than they know about WW I, and the only possible answer is that the methods of preserving historical information are better than they were after WW I.

Our knowledge of ancient events is based on flimsy evidence, and often myth substitutes for history. Little was written down in ancient times and no visual or oral recordings were made to provide a record of events. What historical information we have from ancient times is based on twice-told tales handed down by word of mouth until paper was invented.

There were some crude motion pictures taken of some of the events of World War I, but photography was still young and most of the sound-recording devices we have now were unknown.

It's easy to be pessimistic about civilization, but looking at the progress we've made in the past 100 years in our ability to preserve historical data is encouraging. If knowing history prevents our having to repeat it, then our ability to record the present for future generations is good.

My memories of the history courses I took are of wars and the evil deeds of modern and ancient kings, dictators and presidents. Wars, crimes and disasters are always the biggest part of recorded history. Historians don't pass down long narrative accounts of peaceful years because they're dull and no one would read them.

It's a pretty good world Americans have had to live in for the past sixty years. I hope that when future generations are exposed to the history of our era they get something besides Iraq, Watergate and Monica Lewinsky.

We've got such a good thing going for ourselves here on Earth, it would be too bad if future generations missed out on it, but things don't look good. Biological and nuclear warfare, global warming, the AIDS pandemic are ominous.

There's no doubt the world is endangered and no doubt that the future of civilization rests on the work that science can do to save it. It's only fairly recently, within the last 100 years, that human beings have understood the importance of science. Before that, they were impressed by scientific discoveries but unaware of the significance of science in the Big Picture.

The existence of humans is brand new given the millions of years the earth has existed. Other life forms that once dominated the planet, like the dinosaurs, have disappeared. We think of ourselves as permanent but there's no written guarantee. There are threats to human life on Earth that could end this whole ballgame we're playing.

There are three basic areas in which science can work for our benefit. Astronomy is crucial. We've got to keep studying the universe so the earth doesn't end up getting too hot or too cold to support life.

Second, science has to keep plugging away on health issues and finding cures and preventive measures against things like cancer, diabetes, heart disease and AIDS.

The third area in which we need immediate help from science is with our environment. There's a war going on between business and science. If we're going to survive, we have to concede the power of deciding what to do to science, not to industry. Scientists look for solid data; industry is guessing and trying to make money.

If we admit that it is our best hope, the next question is how to use science. Right there you have a problem because as soon as you say “use science,” there's trouble. Science, at its best, isn't used. Scientists should go off on their own and poke around in their labs until they find something. Pure science isn't trying to save the world or make anything useful; it's just being scientific.