P.S.,
in
case, you, my dear Friend, will not find the time to read
through my rambling
letter, written as it was this a.m. in haste on getting up, my
therapy for the
day: and then I can go on and do my work: here are a few
thoughts I wish to
leave with you:
1)
while
frustrated that I cannot convey Hesse’s poetry to you (e.g.,
Jesus and the
Poor, or The Song of the death of Abel, or To the Children,
1914/ Den Kindern,
1914, I stumbled on Hardy again this a.m. and I want you to look
up Hardy’s
poem, The Subalterns, a poem obviously lost on most young
people, un-initiated
into the trials of life;
2)
I usually
hammer away on the same old theme, variations of it: a)
guaranteed income; b)
full employment; c) production of essential goods and services;
d) overcoming
the tyranny of money; e) the biggest revolution ever needed, to
save the
planet; (people will not voluntarily act); f)
capitalism/materialism, as we
have it now will destroy the planet, take my word for it; g) no
one should ever
have to leave his homeland where he/she is born; etc. etc. etc.
add one more:
h) people of good will and insight will have to unite to change
things, e.g.,
Occupy – it is happening.
Dear
Physicians of
the World
(Loved, Respected, Admired, and Pitied and in-Demand: our modern
Saints) (And
Puzzled: why would anyone wish to be a physician?!)
And yet, I was
really curious the
other night as I took my “tablet” – what goes on in my Head, in
my Body as this
stuff interacts with my electro/magnetic/bio-chemistry, or
whatever I am?
Numbers were
actually my strong
subject in elementary school, next to History and Religion. My “Waldfacharbeiter”
(logger) father must
have been really proud of his son who came home with a report
card, our
evaluations being No. 1 to 6; 6 was the worst and 1 the best,
and I never
failed to get that 1 in “Rechnen”/Numbers, and most of the time
in History and
Religion.
In Vancouver then
(anyone alive and
around still, attending Shurpass College, 1954/5, the time when
Einstein and
Stalin died, and Ghandi, Schweitzer and Russell were still with
us), my name
this really Jewish name (no idea if we had any Jewish in us, but
every sixth to
seventh German is allegedly “enriched” with Jewish blood) one
can find in the
very second little verse of the New Testament, and I should have
been proud of
the name but that is a long story that does not belong here.
We were adult
students, most of
us. I had this very
intelligent friend,
Heinz Krebs, son of one of Adolf’s brilliant generals. This boy could have been
anything in life. He
topped the class in whatever he undertook
and wherever he went. (Except he did not outsmart the “gambling
machines” in
Reno and had to pawn his expensive camera to make it home to
Vancouver.
Heinz! If by
chance, fate, or by the
will of the Almighty, we should still yet meet just once more in
this life,
there could practically no bigger wish being granted me. Whatever happened to you?
You started UBC,
again top of the class whatever you did and then you disappeared
on me? (Hardy
has a poem on this.) Why and without a good-bye. Remember: I
suggested
Medicine, but you could not see it: seven years of study and you
had already,
unlike myself, had a Life in Germany, earning money and very
anxious to find
that lady as a life companion. – that silly girl, the waitress,
that played the
piano in the old auditorium, accompanying
me playing “cadenza” clarinet solos – what did we call it
-- (whatever happened to
that stuff?!)! You had a
real crush on her and she rejected you, you a very good looking
guy but a
little shorter than average. Did
that
silly girl not realizing the brain power she would have been
able to bequeath
her children …
The clarinet
determined my life, why
I ended up in Vancouver and did not pack up after one year in
the logging camp
and head back home to Germany and apply the money saved in the
camp to get
educated. If I have one
regret in life:
A German older guy, previously prisoner of war in Canada, said,
“Bill, you know
how to make money as a logger. Stay
five
years and buy one square mile of land in Canada. But when you are 21/22, I
needed to know the
world. Yet, if I could live my life over again, as I have
already indicated, I
would have stayed five years and supplied my father back home –
retired early
because he needed a hip replacement and there was no such thing
in those days –
with plenty of money, becoming a respected village citizen by
buying back the
meadows he had to sell when mother was sick and died when the
kids were still
young.
One of the ugly
moments of my life
has to do with the village doctor, believe it or not, I hate to
bring this up
(but maybe we could/should at times count our blessings and what
these
“socialists” have done for us.). I saw the doctor enter the
house, the 300 year
old house that was probably build after the 30 Year War when the
village
deserted to Bischofsgruen (we are 32 km east of the Wagner City
Bayreuth, but
no one took me there, the later opera lover – which reminds me:
I promised Dr. Lawrence
a copy of the Gesamte Gedichte (poems) of Hermann Hesse for his
opera singer
son, and I actually managed to get a copy) … as I was to tell
you, I overheard
the doctor ask father, could he pay his bill?
Children today, how I suffer we do not have a guaranteed
income for all
($610 for a single person, minus $375 for their ‘room’, leaves
them $7 (seven)
per day. (And our PM
wants to build more
jails!) Should they find a job and earn some money, they have to
report it and
it will be deducted from their $610. Now
don’t argue, I have checked it out myself the other day. – As
this
Jewish/Canadian socialist/lawyer and alderman in Vancouver said,
Harry Rankin:
THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT MENTALLY ILL; THEY ARE ONLY POOR! Shame on this country where
the big
corporations own the oil companies and the mines, as against in
Iran, Cuba,
Venezuela, where even in Egypt one can get a free university
education.
Which reminds me! Just before I was leaving
for Canada, our
“Forstmeister” died suddenly on an appendix operation and a
“Weissbart” (white
beard) of a forester said, when he heard I was going to Canada,
“Go East young
man, there is where the Future is” under communism. I do admit he had a point. I could have studied
forestry and as long as
I kept my mouth shut, I could have had a successful forestry
career. – have you
any idea the kind of life some of us have lived in this country,
not to
mention, 60,000 times I have this word, this ugly word,
Holocaust, in my ears,
without ever being followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Tokyo
and Hamburg
where I lost my first love, Ellen, a very fine young lady who
may have been my
wife some day. (She was on holiday in the village and we then
wrote to each
other but after the attack, letters did not arrive anymore.
“Meine Beatrice!”
(That is why I am a peace nick, and a very convinced one. (Stop
producing these
bloody weapons!)
Isaiah 2/4,
“turning weapons into
plowshares” and why are the Americans still spending 480 billion
$s worth on
weapons and armies, when the Russians spent $18 billion, and I
am sure you did
see one of my ads re: buy the book and read it, House of War/The
Pentagon/The
Disastrous Rise of American Power by (priest educated, as was
his general
insider father, Joseph) James Carroll. How close we came a few
times to nuclear
war. Had the Russians not kept their cool!
Read the book. I
bought 12 copies
at the time and now can’t even get it from Chapters anymore, so
I found a new,
a really exciting one, Christianity/The First Three Thousand
Years by Diarmaid
MucCulloch, published in 2009, and only 1200 pp., the work of 40
years of
scholarship research, and he suggests a similar work should be
produced for
Islam. Anything you ever
wanted to know
about the Christian religion you will find in this book. I make sure that everyone
in my future
families (I have six children, the result of a 14 year search of
a once lost
child to me, and then marrying a 30 year younger woman, a woman
I would not
exchange for her weight in gold – and she is of a good size,
managing Rexall in
Port Hardy, for quite a while without an assistant manager; we
have five UBC
degrees and a very good family income but considerable student
loans too. (Six
degrees if I add the Mormon, Utah, university one of the lost
child, found by
the CBC TV.) At least the pharmacist daughter earns a good
income. Ever since
she was a little kid she wanted to be a pharmacist, and she
maintained a Dean’s
honour role standing right throughout university and one
pharmaceutical company
was nice enough to give her $52,000.00 non-refundable, provided
she stay with
the company for two years. A nephew I have did it with the
Canadian air force,
studying dentistry, and this is how long I am in Canada – nine
years longer
than our PM; why do you think I am so upset about his disastrous
decisions he
makes, the worst government Canada ever had. I wonder how many
Canadians we
have, here in Canada since 1951? (Must look it up.)
THE
STUDY OF
MEDICINE SHOULD BE TOTALLY FREE.
I WOULD
PUT ALL PHYSICIANS ON A SALARY, A VERY GOOD ONE, SO THEY COULD
FORGET
CAPITALISM WHILE PRACTISING THE ART OF MEDICINE. What an ugly
system we have!
So, I was actually
going to write a
totally different letter. I was trying to explain why I did not
study science
in high-school and why I am ignorant of science. I only had a Grade 8
village school
elementary education, 24 years old and it was a matter to get
educated in a hurry,
get a teacher certificate as fast as possible and start earning
money before I
ended up under a bridge (not on top, under it). Yes, Math had
fascinated me but
unlike Russell, who stated he wanted to commit suicide as a
young man (the poet
Hermann Hesse was another one, suicidal and barely made it
through the teen
years) but he wanted to know more Mathematics. (I was never
suicidal, never
depressed, never even a headache, and after overcoming the
ignorance of the
twenties totally healthy until … 81! Not bragging. I needed a
little bit of
help, recently. Why do you think I write this letter?!)
China adds on in
3.5 years a
population the size of Canada, with a .67% annual increase and
by 2050 will, in
spite of heroic efforts to keep their population down, 1.4 plus
billion. India
will be 1.6 billion. Japan will be reduced from 127 million to
90 million, but
some of the country who least can afford the increase, will
mushroom.
I told my family I
may have to go
back and spend some extended time in my home country (not that
politics would
not frustrate me there too, but at least I did not spend my life
there, except
for the first 21 years and obviously they did not have enough
room for me,
although my successor kept my/his position for 39 years, the
foreman’s job in the
Bavarian forests my father had, which would have been mine, had
I not been able
to enter the forest service. The
politics
in this country is disgusting.
As Nehru said, sitting in jail, jailed by the British:
the Americans do
not necessarily want your country; they only want your economy.
And now of
course it will be the Chinese. From
a
communist society they will now all end up little capitalists,
real go-getters,
and I suspect, human nature being what it is, they may prove non
the better
than our fine neighbours to the south …
My
apologies. I know you
all have a
story. I have three web
sites.
I
must not
neglect to take the opportunity and advertise my main objectives
yet left to me
in life: I am still trying to get a forestry/sawmill/house
(affordable for all,
wiping out mobiles) company established in a respectable way and
my natives
need jobs. I am looking
for at least one
son-in-law, a guy like myself who would be able to cut down one
of these big
trees, yet able to earn a degree at a university, if he so
chose. (A
“Schreinermeister”/master furniture maker craftsman, would be a
good
prerequisite for the challenges awaiting him here.)
word, H E
I M A T not in the
English language. As
one of the Huxleys said: In England a dog feels more secure than
in America.
I
wish you a
Happy, Healthy, Harmonious, Prosperous New Year, Wilhelm
Waldstein