Bernard Sandler finds new motivation in his life from reading Spider's books.
My dear Spider Robinson,
I don't know if you remember a letter that came out of the ether to arrive in your inbox a couple of years ago. It was from a lonely soul in a mental ward who needed a kind word from an author he admired. You told me to laugh.
The road has been a rocky one. I have seen some dark places of society and the mind. My mother has been torn away from me by the ravages of cancer of the everything. I have held a tenuous grip on my sanity for a long time. But it turns out that I was sane after all. It turns out that feeling somewhat positive about myself is not a disorder. It turns out that having an ego is not a disease. And I'm laughing. And I have a fiancé. And three cats. And an overgrown dork of a German Shepard.
So a few days ago I was reading your Stardancer series for the umpteenth time and enjoying the pot that I just wasn't able to get in months and it finally struck me: It is time for me to live up to my potential. In the arrogance of my mania, I am going to attempt a declaration: I have potential.
I really do. I know that declaring one's talent almost invariably puts that talent in doubt. Boasting leads to bad repute. Interesting, that. But this is a moment for me to relish. This is a moment I won't forget. And I wanted to thank you for it.
Thank you. Your words were always there in the darkness. I'm glad to see that they still apply in the light.
Now, to business. Again with the arrogance. Sorry about that. They day I stop apologizing every second sentence is the day I shall be truly free. I am scared shitless by our planet right now. The United States is on a holy war. The Middle East is going to explode. North Korea is either going up in smoke or is unleashing the worst psychic nightmare to ever ravage history. There are pandemics, droughts, and racial and religious friction everywhere you turn. And as much as everyone likes to say that there is nothing new under the sun, this is new. This is very new and very frightening. The world is hanging in the balance, and the scales are not tipping in our favour.
But there is hope, and I think I have part of the key to that hope. The answer is complicated and simple at the same time. The simplicity is startling, the complexity is almost daunting. Quick story, I promise I'm not proselytizing: The stories following the Old Testament chart the progress of the Jewish people while in Israel after they returned from the exodus. They had lived in peace for quite a long time with prophets as guides that would periodically walk around and piss people off. But there came a time when Israel looked about and saw that all of the neighboring nations had kings and that they wanted the strength and leadership of a king as well. They wanted the security and the sense of safety in a monarchy.
And God said, are you really sure you want this? Are you absolutely certain that you want a king? Are you convinced that this is a good idea? I can give you a king, but you are going to have to live with him, and kings are sometimes hard to live with. But the people were resolved, they wanted a king. And so passed the age of the Prophets.
It is time to return to that age. The age of the kings have ended. The age of the warlords must be brought to a close. It is time to stop letting our leaders throw our corpses at each other. It is time to flatten out the management structure of the world. It is time for the people to rule themselves.
Ok, I know this all sounds like pie-in-the-sky foolery. Another prophet ranting on the street corner. Great. Just what we need. But seriously, it all sounds very impractical until you consider how practical it can be. Solving the Middle East conflict is very easy. It is incredibly simple. Let the Palestinians and Israelis ignore their leaders. Let them do something by themselves. And what can Jews do well? What can Jews do better than any other nation on earth? We build hospitals.
We have always been physicians. We have wandered for two thousand years. Portable professions are helpful in such circumstances. We turned ourselves into indispensable assets of whatever nation we joined, just to stave off the day when we would be chased away again. We were doctors. Many of our best philosophers were doctors. They knew something about life, about how the body and soul must interact, and the way to remove pain and hurt and to give peace. Jews have been healers for two millennia. Why we ran into trouble is a bit sad.
Jews are clever. We have consistently maintained a literacy level of over ninety percent even during the darkest ages in Europe. Call it social Darwinism. Adapt, or die on a cultural scale. So we adapted. Now leaders that had popped up all over the place and were consolidating their power realized that an agrarian economy, while nice and idyllic, did not offer up the kind of concentrated wealth that allowed for the building of armies. You can't fund an army with a farm. Armies are expensive. So they had to push their economies forward, encouraging some form of urbanization, and shifting the labour force over to manufacturing trades. But there is a problem: you can't industrialize without the ability to take out loans. There has to be a flow of wealth that does not have real dollar value. It is the only way to fund an army. You can't fund an army on a farm, but you can do it with a bank, and the only way to have a bank work is if you introduce interest into the equation.
But world leaders were loathe to do it. Usury is unpopular. It can help an economy, but it can hurt individuals. So they needed a scape-goat. Enter the wandering Jews. No home, no security, no wealth, no status, victim to pogrom after pogrom. What were they to do? They were given an option. Serve as usurers and live. Don't serve as usurers and die. That was the choice handed to the Jews wherever they went. Fix the economy for the leaders or meet a catastrophic end. So we did. I wish we hadn?t, but frankly, I don't know if anyone really bothered to think about the long-term consequences. The study of global economics is not a new subject but the ability to truly think globally is a more recent side-effect of space flight, the internet, and television.
So now the Jews are huddling in Israel, terrified of the world. Only recently our landless nation was very nearly completely annihilated. Six million people. Two Torontos. Out of a population that consists of just under one half of one percent of the crowd of humans that jostle about on the spaceship Earth. We know very well that the world may very well decide to kill us and be done with it. The hate has begun, the pitch is getting dangerous, the fire could burn soon.
But I did say that there was a way out, and it has everything to do with what the Jews really do well. Hospitals. Lots of them.
We need to build a giant teaching hospital in Jenin. The profs may be Jewish doctors. I don?t see this as being a majour difficulty, medical personnel on both sides are kind of tired of patching up the nearly dead. Stock the hospital to the roof with solid diagnostic equipment, a decent well-run pharmacy, excellent surgical suites, and a very quiet peaceful place for people to pray. Make it efficient; get the best construction workers, the most competent designers, the most imaginative medical consultants to build the most economically well-run medical facility ever. Hire the absolute minium of people and have the most intelligent management structure imaginable. Let common sense rule supreme.
And make sure that as everything is being built, Palestinian engineers and construction crews are being taught the latest techniques. Give them construction material, let them go fix houses. Let them go build schools. Have young Palestinian interns learning under benign Jewish profs. And when they know something; when they know how to run a well balanced hospital, give the hospital to them. Make it a gift. As long as the project takes a couple of years, goodwill should be in place and there will be someone reliable to hand it to.
In the meantime, get on with building hospitals in outlying areas. Smaller hospitals with good diagnostics and lots of family care who can take care of most stuff and will pass the overflow on to the main teaching hospital. The Palestinian construction industry may be able to handle this task. It is critical that those outlying facilities go up quickly. If too much development happens in one place too quickly, the population will shift around making things worse.
I've heard that some of the missiles being used in conflict cost over a million dollars. How many missiles to build a house of healing? It can't be that difficult. And the will, I think, is there for now. The Jews are fighting for their lives. They are faced with an enemy that believes that Israel is a blight on the earth and should be pushed into the sea. The thing is, the enemy is not the Palestinian people. It is their leadership. And those who are fighting on behalf of the Jews? They don?t want to fight, but the leaders tell them to go engage the enemy. But what if I could get a breather long enough for sane people from Israel to run over with bulldozers and shovels and backhoes and concrete and wave a wonderful olive branch. Screw the branch, plant an olive tree in the courtyard of the Bernice Sandler Memorial Hospital. (Sorry..I?d love my late mom, a family doctor, to have a say in this.)
This doesn't actually sound impossible. Israel has a thriving economy when it isn't pouring its resources into defence. It has a huge clean tech industry. It does more research per capita and more tech startups than anyone else. It also is the only country that has a net increase in the number of trees. But it is frightened and it is getting defensive and something awful has happened that is breaking my heart. We have forgotten how to hope for peace. I spoke about it with my father the other day who became more and more agitated and in answer to a question about what alternative to war there might be, he said that there was going to be perpetual war. It would never get better.
It is time for that generation to pass on. It is time to take the torch away from the baby-boomers. It is time to take the power from the war children. We are not the children of war. We are tired of war. We know how to sing and play music and write and dance and build and program and film and paint and photograph. We speak a myriad of languages and walk the ether of the net with ease. We are the first of those who can think globally. Perhaps that is what you were talking about when you allowed your characters to think spherically. (Thank you for that concept, by the way.) It is time that our parents retired.
But here I get stuck. I see the relationships between data. It is what I do. I see the forces that bind people, I see what makes them happy and what tears at their insides. I understand their hurt, I understand their pain, I understand their hatred. You crystalized it so well in all of your novels. I have learned to empathize, and I have learned to pay attention. I don't feel angry. I feel sad. But I think that is healthy. I can also tell fairly good stories that are lucid for whole sentences at a stretch.
I don't know where to go from here. I feel like I have just crept out of a hole and am blinking at the sunlight but I don't have time to get my bearings. I don't have time to dick around. I need to start writing now and more than that, I need to get myself read. (More arrogance....sigh) . Actually, the writing is starting to back up. You can see it on my webpage at http://members.rogers.com/bsandler.
And here I grit my teeth and utter the words that scare and terrify and make me cringe. I think that the world needs me. Not only me. I don't think I'm a Me or anything off the wall like that. But I do think that I am a me that is needed. And I think that I have the words that might help make humanity feel a bit better.
Help me. You've been helping me for years. You've put guideposts of the mind for me to follow. I've done my best to gain some measure of peace, to gain some confidence in my own gifts. But now I need another kind of help. I need practical advice.
What do I do now? I'm a writer, not a business man. I am a law student and I'm learning a great deal about intellectual property, media law, and internet law (I have no intention of writing the bar) but I hate trying to sell things. I worked at Radio Shack. I never want to sell anything else again. I can read contracts, I can help form intellectual property policy, and write intelligently about the ins and outs of modern technology law, but I don't network well without help. I hate cold calls. I'm just not good at them.
I'm also poor. I hate that. I want to get married, have kids, buy a decent bed and afford to get cheese once in a while, not necessarily in that order. I don't want wealth. I just want a quiet little space where I know that I am safe and there is food in the fridge and a book or two of mine on the sagging bookshelves. I want really good shoes. I want my fiancé not to have to work for the bank and to let her get on with the frighteningly wide range of talents she has. I want to send her back to school. I don't even want fame. I'd be thrilled if the only recognition for most of my work came in the form of royalties and social change. I want to help plan hospitals. I want to work out how to make people smile. I want to gather artists under my roof and serve scones and bongs. I want summer back. I want friendship and peace and the general well being.
But I have no idea how to go about doing that. Help!
Of course, I would also one day like to hear you play your guitar. I think that would be interesting.
I'm going to be tossing more recent work up on the webpage if you are interested in getting an idea of what I am capable of. I also have a fairly extensive if erratic blog on www.livejournal.com as caliban18.
Be well, and thanks in advance and once again.
With the greatest of sincerity,
Bernard Sandler
