Day: May 1, 2018

I went to Albany today to meet Saad, he is a refugee from Baghdad, he has been in the United States for a little over a month. He came to Los Angeles from a refugee camp in the Middle East, he worked for the United States Embassy in Iraq during the war as a guard and a maintenance  supervisor.

He was a successful business person after the war, and then the Iraqi government confiscated  his business to help support the country’s civil war with the Islamic State.

He lost his business and most of his money. He has a wife and eight children. They are in Baghdad. it is not likely they will ever get to come here, not in the foreseeable future.

Several years ago, Saad was targeted for assassination by religious militants in reprisal for his work with America. He had to flee Iraq immediately.

He nearly lost his life in Iraq.

He was forced to leave everything behind, including his family.

He was given shelter in a United Nations refugee camp. He asked me not to reveal its name or location. He was able to gain entry to the United States on an emergency basis and was flown to Los Angeles and released. He had no work or support or  any kind of assistance.

It was too expensive for him and his fellow refugees to live in Los Angeles, and he couldn’t bear the crowded apartment. He had already had his heart attack in Baghdad.

Saad heard about the refugee community in Albany and also learned that RISSE, a refugee and immigrant support center, was there, and that  he might be able to get some help.

He has been living in a one room apartment with another man, and has  desperately been seeking an apartment of his own – there was no room for him there.

He is trying hard to bring his family here. He has heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, his doctors say he cannot work, he is trying to find a job so he can support  his family if they are permitted to come here. That is his dream.

Some mornings, the staff at RISSE find  him shivering out in the cold, he sometimes is hungry or very cold when his city welfare check runs out.  He just stands outside, said Ali, hoping for help.

Ali knows him well now and has been trying to help him, he says he was once a very wealthy man who lost everything, in part because he supported the United States.

This week, Saad found an apartment in a senior citizen apartment complex in downtown Albany.

He has $144 for the first months rent, but he needed a security deposit of $215 in order to be allowed to move in. The money is due tomorrow, Wednesday. Saad has been frantically trying to find work, but could not.

I wrote a check for $400.

Saad only speaks Arabic. His life has been shattered, broken into a thousand pieces. He may not see his children again.

Because it is a non-profit, RISSE cannot give cash to the refugees or immigrants, only other kinds of support – help with taxes, language classes. Saad is taking an English language class there, he speaks very little English.

Ali was worried about Saad.

He called me and asked if the Army Of Good could help. I said we would. That is what we do. I met with Saad for an hour this afternoon in Albany. Ali translated in Arabic.

Saad is a very sweet man, and is deeply appreciative of this help. His eyes are filled with pain and loss. He speaks in a whisper. His hands sometimes tremble.

As he left, he turned and put a hand over his heart, a gesture of thanks to me. He then clasped my hand and hugged me. I did almost cry. But I never felt better than I did in that moment.

Ali drove him over to his new apartment to give them  his security deposit.

Next week, Ali and I are going to a local grocery store to bring  Saad groceries for the month, Ali isn’t sure he has any money left after paying his rent and some medical expenses. He says he takes eight pills a day.

On the way home, i called an immigration lawyer in Albany, and he said there was  no chance that Saad’s family could gain entry into the United States  under the current  immigration policies of this  administration.

Since he does not have a high-paying job,  and cannot realistically work in any job – he is ill and in  his 60’s – there is no way he could support eight children and their mother. So our government will not let them in. But the lawyer said he would investigate.

Saad is getting a small monthly stipend from Albany and there may be some additional assistance available through New York State. But he does at least have his own place to live, his own apartment for the first time since fleeing Baghdad several years ago.

I am going to keep in touch with Saad, I gave him my number and Ali will see him regularly.  It is a heartbreaking story and I would like to help him to the extent that it is possible.

This is the kind of work I want to do, the reason I got involved with the refugees. It is so much better to do good that argue about what good is. I am grateful to Ali, he has a huge heart and loving soul.

I thank the Army Of Good. And we are going to continue our support of the soccer team, now called the Albany Warriors. Ali has a great heart, we work so well together, a Jew and a Muslim trying to help these vulnerable people, caught in a storm not of their own making.

There are many stories like this told by the refugees I have met. My idea is to perpetrate small acts of great kindness, to fill the holes that can be filled. I think small and do what I can – what we can. I know our limits.

It was such a gift to me, to see Saad’s face when he took the check, and clutched it in his hands. He actually rushed outside and lined up some refugees because he thought I might want to take their pictures.

If you would like to help support this work for Saad, and this kind of work for me, please send a contribution to the Gus Fund, c/o Jon Katz. P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or me via Paypal, [email protected]. Your contributions will go precisely where they are supposed to go, and quickly. They are needed.

Please mark  your donation “refugees,” or Saad, if you prefer. And thanks.

The other day, in my message to people who think differently from me,  I had sharp words for Michelle Wolf,  the comedian who upended the staid and pompous and  hoary White House Correspondent’s Dinner with her penetrating and uncomfortable assault on the politicians and journalists in the room.

I said she was coarse and cruel and guilty of spreading hatred and alienation in our world.

I followed the mob of serious and sometimes stuffy people who thought she went too far and were shocked, shocked, and  who felt the need to balance the scales of the left and the right. We are all defensive in this world, as we are all constantly under one kind of attack or the other.

I have since read all of her comments, listened to all of the posturing and hand wringing, and was able to put her and her comments in context. It’s true that some were over the top, and brushed against the line of civility.

It’s true that she stretched and pushed the boundaries and pulled no punches – not to the fatcat journalists or the fatcat politicians. The President and the media love to pretend that they are enemies, and that they hate one another, but Wolff punctured the balloon and pointed out that they love each other, profit from one another, and have each made the other successful and rich and powerful.

The rattled White House Correspondents said she obscured the spirit of the night, but what, really, is the spirit of the night if it isn’t to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted, the creed of every good journalist in the world? What, truly, are they celebrating?

This needed to be said at an incestuous dinner where honest reporters have no business being, breaking bread and sipping champagne with the very people they are supposed to be  watching and prodding and tormenting. The comments aimed at  Sarah Huckabee Sanders were sharp and perhaps hurtful, but they were not cruel and coarse, they were pretty funny. Sanders is a big girl, she can take it.

Wolf made much nastier comments about the men – people like Chris Christie – and nobody said a word. I think Wolf was correct when she told Terri Gross that people accept women to be “nice” and respectful. I’ve already put Wolf’s new show on Netflx into my stuff.

Sorry, Michelle, for being a sheep and following the pompous a bit too quickly. I am old, after all, and sometimes remind myself not to think that way.

Michelle Wolf’s comments were not that bad, really, she poked the powerful and made them squirm, precisely what satirists and comedians are supposed to do.

She did her job, and in doing so, she committed the unforgiveable crime of reminding everyone in the room, Republicans and Democrats, journalists and bureaucrats, that most of them are not doing their jobs, and if they were, our country wouldn’t be such a mess and so full of hatred.

It was embarrassing to see all of those hard-ass and righteous journalists abandon Wolf and grovel afterwards, when they should have been among the first and loudest to defend her. So should I. This feels much better, it feels like me.

It doesn’t matter how hateful Donald Trump is or isn’t, or what Sanders really feels, Wolf was doing what she does. She was  honest, she was funny. And if you read over her words, they weren’t even all that shocking. She was only jarring in comparison to the tepid words and ideas of what we call the media and the political establishment.

Wolf was the only person in the room who was actually doing her job, and that, I think,  was why the reaction was so severe and overblown. I do stand by the rest of what I wrote. Things are getting too nasty out there. But that is not Michele Wolf’s fault. She was just telling the truth. Some comedians still remember that is why they are here.

In any case, you can read the transcript right here for yourself, and make up your own mind. Feel free to let me know what you think.

 

You do not have to be good, you do not have to walk in your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting to be good, wrote Mary Oliver in her beautiful poem Wild Geese. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, I will tell you mine.”

In recent  weeks, the tone of many of the comments I receive has changed.

There is plenty of challenge and disagreement, which there should be,  but much less cruelty or hostility. I hope people are getting sick of cruelty.  I also think this is because I am changing, I do believe you get back what you put out.

Many of these comments are quite thoughtful. We have a contract, I hope to make people think, and I don’t care if they agree with me. In return they make me think, and they don’t usually care if I agree with them.

A good deal.

In the past few days I’ve been writing about what i see as my need to walk softly and gently in the world, there is so much anger and division. Yesterday, I wrote that I had begun to hate both the left and the right, and I hated them even more because of the fact that Ihated them.

I wrote this:

“I’m with Dr. King, I’ve decided to stick to love, hate is just too great a burden to bear, and I’m no good at it. It does seem I am quite out of sync with much of my country and many of my readers. But I do truly hate the Left and the Right and I hope they devour one another completely, as many are beginning to do.”

And in response, Michelle thought I was a hypocrite and wrote this:

“If you truly want to espouse Dr. King’s views and choose love you don’t get to say you then hate people who are on one side or the other even if they attack you. I don’t remember Dr King ever saying he hated the racists that were attacking him and killing people. So if you want to quote Dr. King Please don’t then say you hate people. Because I am on one of the sides. I urge you to truly choose love.”

And I replied in this way:

“Michelle, thanks, Dr. King often used humor  and irony in his speeches and pointed out, as the Dalai Lama did, that he was not a perfect man or angel. He hated, he angered, he was impatient and unthinking, he was unfaithful to his wife. I have read a great deal about him,  he has always fascinated me. Dr. King was essentially very human, he was no saint, as you can discover if you read the wonderful biographies of him, like the one by Clayborne Carson, among others.

Dr. King always reminded people that we are human, and that he was human. That made him wise and empathetic, humble in my eyes. That is what humility is, not pretending to be a saint, or a perfect human. In this way, he related to the rest of us. I use the term “hate” with irony, and how can you hate a whole ideology? But I will never pretend to be perfect, that would just be a lie. I choose love every day in my life, and still often stumble, sometimes hate, succumb to anger or envy. Just like Dr. King admitted in so many of his letters (I recommend Letters From A Birmingham Jail to see how much he could hate, and thus learn to love. I do not aspire to perfection, and I don’t need lectures on love. It’s best that you choose your own words, I’ll choose mine. We don’t need to tell each other what to say.”

Michelle, I would encourage you to learn more about this very real man, the beauty of him wasn’t that he was perfect, but that he wasn’t, he was the very embodiment of what it meant to be human. And if you want to espouse Dr.King, you say what you believe, and from the heart.

Almost every great man or woman who I have read about – Dr. King, Gandhi, Mandela , Washington, Jefferson, Mother Teresa,  the Dalai Lama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eudora Welty,  Merton – were humble people, they were flawed and said so, they were able, as all great  writers are, to see the worst parts of themselves and acknowledge them. They didn’t pop out of the womb noble and self-effacing.

Life taught them to grow and  feel, and even then, they were full of contradictions and imperfections.

Mandela said he had to learn to be humble to survive. Gandhi could be cruel and sexually exploitive. King often wrote that he could hate and feel rage, he never claimed to be a saint. Mother Teresa said she did everything she had to do to raise the money she needed to do good.

If I’ve learned nothing else in recent years, it’s that you don’t have to be a saint to be good. You don’t have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.  You don’t have to feel the awful pressure to be something other than human, and to not feel what it is that a human being feels  – love, hate, envy, resentment, despair.

Sure, Michele, I hate sometimes, and get angry.

You might want to read the Dalai Lama’s hilarious writings about what a pain in the ass he is to work with, just ask his employees, he says. I don’t need to be told to choose love,I choose love every day, and the reason I do is that I very often  don’t feel love, I need to remind myself to do that, I try to be the person I wish to be, not just the person I am.

It’s wrong in my mind to put these awful pressure of perfection on people, it’s too easy to give up the spiritual path, the pathway to love, because it so often seems impossible. You do not have to be good to do good, and you surely cannot be good and do good every minute of your life. When you come to believe you have to be perfect to do good, then it’s to easy to skip it.

Many people in our country hate our President, Mr. Trump, and I’m not wild about him either. But he is capable of doing good things, even for all of the lies and rage that come out of him.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,” wrote Oliver at the end of her poem, “the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

We are human, that is our place in the family of things.