How Much Do We Care About Our Grandchildren?

I have two one-year-old grandchildren. They are happy and healthy, learning to talk and feed themselves and make their desires known to the adults who control their world. I am lucky, but it wasn’t just luck. Their parents were thoughtful about changing their lifestyles to give the babies the best possible chances at healthy lives – less alcohol, less caffeine, heathy diets, paying attention to doctors’ advice. Good luck and good care.

In 2050, Vera and Leo will be 32. They may just be starting their own families. They might become great parents, but what if the world is collapsing around them?

By that time, unless we make great changes, the earth will be hotter. Where I live in central Illinois, summer temperatures will be 6 degrees warmer than in 2000, and 4 degrees warmer in winter. After 2050, the Central Plains states may suffer from droughts much worse and much longer than the 1930s Dust Bowl. Each year, Chicago will have a month of days when the heat index reaches 105 degrees, compared to four days in 2000. Peoria and St. Louis are among the 25 cities that have warmed up the fastest in recent decades.

Each region in the US will face different combinations of severe hazards due to the warming climate. The greatest hazard on our coasts will be rising sea levels. More and more powerful storms will especially threaten Florida. Some cities in Texas will see the heat index rise over 105 degrees for more than half the year. Droughts in the Southwest and in Indiana, insufficient rainfall in much of the Midwest, but heavier precipitation from Maine to Alabama represent the most significant dangers. Each region will suffer several simultaneous severe climate hazards by 2050.

Climate hazards translate into human suffering. Heat waves cause increased heart and respiratory problems. Drought leads to more intense wildfires. Floods cause contamination of water supply, and thus spread of water-borne diseases. Pregnant women exposed to increased smoke from fires or contaminated water give birth to less healthy children.

Heat waves, floods, fires, droughts and storms also damage agricultural land. Warming oceans harm fisheries. In California, the source of over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of our fruits and nuts, the severity of summer drought will triple by 2050.

Wealth can protect some humans from the immediate effects of climate hazards. More expensive food, the need to purify water, increased medical attention, even moving away from storm-threatened coasts, dried out forests, or hot cities present little problem for those with extensive personal resources. Economic inequality within the US and across the world will translate even more forcefully into unequal life chances. The infrastructures of poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are much weaker, meaning that severe climate events have much greater impact. The World Bank predicts that more than 140 million people will be displaced in developing regions of the world by 2050, mostly in Africa. In wealthier countries whose populations will not suffer as much directly, heightened pressure will result from increased immigration, more expensive raw materials, and more violent conflicts.

Our planet is now nearly 2 degrees warmer than in the early 20^th century. The economic effects thus far have been staggering: the number of extreme weather events that cost over $1 billion in economic losses has quadrupled since the 1980s. Continued burning of fossil fuels, contributing to warming and air pollution, will cost the US economy $360 billion a year in the 2020s.

My life will barely be affected by climate change. By the time the accumulated results of human activity create disastrous effects in America, I will probably be in a nursing home. But Vera and Leo will not be so lucky. Wherever they live, the climate will be unfriendlier, the infrastructure will be overburdened, the costs of coping with severe hazards will be higher, and the economic inequalities will be deadlier. The future for them and their children will be bleaker. People will be angry.

I am angry now. Angry at the professional liars who have claimed for years that nothing was happening. Angry at the politicians who pretend to believe them. Angry at the corporations who care only about this year’s bottom line.

I’m angry at the self-proclaimed Christians who say they are pro-life, but put the lives of all future generations in danger by denying climate change; who quote the Bible at every turn, but ignore those passages they violate every day: “You shall not defile the land in which you live.”

I am angry at those who want responsibility, but are irresponsible, who not only do nothing to preserve the earth for the future, but do everything to further pollute our planet.

We have already gone past the point of no return. More carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels in 2018 than ever before. Glaciers are melting, seas are rising, storms are getting stronger. It will take more than recycling, more than a few electric cars and wind turbines, more than the kind of minimal lifestyle changes recommended by trendy columnists.

In order to prevent climate catastrophes by 2050, the nations of the world must cut fossil fuel use in half within the next 15 years and nearly eliminate their use by 2050. That means no more gasoline engines, no more heating homes with oil, complete restructuring of manufacturing plants. No more throwaway economies.

We have to change our lifestyles now. That will be uncomfortable, even scary. Do we care about our grandchildren enough to do that?

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 26, 2019

It’s Not Over Yet

The #MeToo movement has revealed deep fault lines in modern society, between those who persist in accepting and engaging in traditional male domination of women and those who reject and condemn those behaviors. It may seem as if this split has suddenly developed, but we have been approaching this moment of reckoning for many years. The current crisis of gender behavior means that the tipping point has at last been reached.

The controversy over whites costuming themselves as black represents the racial side of the same phenomenon. What was once accepted as normal white behavior can now cost prominent people their exalted positions.

It was never okay for men to use their social power to coerce sex from women or for whites to amuse themselves by lampooning the racial subordination of blacks. Sexism and racism have always been moral transgressions. But in the American society in which I grew up, these transgressions were ubiquitous, rarely challenged, and socially accepted. They were wrong, but normal.

The challenge to normality, the recognition that not just individuals, but society itself was immoral, has been a shock to my generation, to anyone who learned how to behave before, say, 1970. The fact that these lessons were long overdue, that they reflect obvious ethical and religious precepts, has not made them easier to absorb.

I excuse no form of racist or sexist behavior, then or now. But I understand the wrenching difficulty of realizing that we were taught to emulate inhumane behavior, to acquiesce in a deeply flawed system, to perpetuate the denigration of our fellow human beings. When I remember the jokes I laughed at, the derogatory names I repeated, the lines of thinking I followed, the attitudes I carried around as I grew up and went to high school and college, I am ashamed. But it was not easy to stand apart from the culture of male superiority and the distinct, but overlapping culture of white supremacy, to see the undeserved privileges they conferred on me and the pain they caused those on the outside.

I believe I was helped toward enlightenment by being Jewish. Not that Jews are smarter or better. But our position as not quite insiders, subject to occasional reminders that we were never safe from racism, helped me perceive other forms of social condescension embedded in daily life. My rejection of normal antisemitism made rejection of sexism and racism easier, more logical. When I realized that there was a profound difference between Jews joking among ourselves about ourselves and Christians laughing at Jewish jokes that they made up, it was an easier step to recognize how male jokes about blondes proclaimed permanent sexual supremacy.

But I could never have made this transition from complicity to awareness by myself. I had to learn hard lessons from female and black friends, from writers, filmmakers, singers, and countless others who have been teaching these truths for years.

It is nevertheless difficult for anyone to give up a learned superiority. The implications of undeserved superiority go beyond language, the so-called “political correctness” that retrograde voices lament, because they don’t want to change. Men still continually interrupt women. Whites still view unfamiliar blacks as potential criminals.

The categories deeply embedded in our subconscious do not dissolve even when we consciously agree that they are inappropriate. I don’t remember how I learned the concepts “woman driver” and “slut”, but they were already firmly planted in my thinking by the time I was 15. Even though I haven’t used those words to explain what happens around me for decades, the concepts still rattle around in my head, unbidden, unwelcome, fundamentally misleading, but impossible to erase.

The consequences of centuries of assumptions about who is superior and who is inferior reach into every corner of our minds and lives. Just one example: there are several recent news stories about how adults, including doctors, take women’s and girls’ pain less seriously than male pain. This can lead to delayed or incorrect diagnoses. This subtle bias may have contributed to the ability of serial abusers like Dr. Larry Nassar to get away with assaulting girls for years after they first began to complain about him.

Right behavior is easy to define, but harder to practice. A right society does not yet exist and its details are not yet fully imagined. We don’t yet know all of the changes we will need to make in our attitudes and actions in order to create full social equality. The work will be difficult, but the goal will be glorious.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 19, 2019

Did the Holocaust Happen?

I am not a Holocaust denier. Of course, the Holocaust happened. It remains one of the most important events of the 20^th century, of modern history, perhaps of human history.

But if someone never heard of the Holocaust, doesn’t know that it happened, then history doesn’t matter. The event is wiped out of history, not by denial, but by ignorance.

Some of the most populous states passed laws between 1985 and 1995, covering nearly one-third of the US population, requiring the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools. In each case, the law specified that knowledge about the Holocaust ought to be connected to human rights issues. Prejudice and discrimination must be identified with genocide, leading to an emphasis on “the personal responsibility that each citizen bears to fight racism and hatred whenever and wherever it happens” (New Jersey) and “encouraging tolerance of diversity” (Florida). As the wording of these laws demonstrates, teaching about the Holocaust is a political act. Because encouraging diversity and fighting prejudice are politically controversial, Holocaust education is a partisan political act, and always has been.

Despite such laws, ignorance about the Holocaust is widespread in America, especially among young people. The millennial generation should have been exposed to Holocaust teaching in schools, especially in those states that require it. But they know little about the Holocaust. Two-thirds of millennials do not know what Auschwitz was; half cannot name one concentration camp; about 40% believe that fewer than 2 million Jews were murdered; 20% are not sure if they have ever heard of the Holocaust.

Ignorance about the Holocaust is a worldwide problem, even in Europe where it happened. In a recent poll, one-third of Europeans said they know little or nothing about the Holocaust.

There is overwhelming popular support for more teaching about the Holocaust. The same survey that showed the gaps in knowledge also found that 93% of Americans agreed that “All students should learn about the Holocaust while at school.”

Politicians are responding. Legislatures in Kentucky and Connecticut with unanimous votes recently passed laws to require teaching about the Holocaust in public schools. In 2017, the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect got commitments from legislators in 20 states to introduce bills to mandate Holocaust education, the beginning of its effort to get all 50 states to require Holocaust education.

But there are political problems for some in the implications of Holocaust history. The focus on human rights, the disastrous consequences of racial prejudice, the victimization of other minorities including gays, the hyper-nationalism of fascism and its deadly attacks on all leftists all can lead to a critical stance against typical conservative political positions, and in particular, against current policies of the Republican Party. Absorbing the moral significance of the Holocaust might well lead students to believe that monuments to Confederate white supremacy should be taken down, that denigration of immigrants is wrong, that loud claims that America is the greatest country ever sound like “Deutschland über alles”.

Holocaust deniers, avowed Nazis, self-proclaimed antisemites, and supporters of white supremacy appear occasionally on the fringes of the Republican Party, or even among Republican congressmen. Some Republican candidates in the recent midterm elections used antisemitic images against their Jewish opponents. David Duke, former KKK leader and former Republican legislator in Louisiana, said about Trump’s 2016 election, “This is one of the most exciting nights of my life.”

American conservatives sometimes use the Holocaust to spread inappropriate partisan messages. On Holocaust Remembrance Day two weeks ago, the Harris County (Texas) Republican Party posted a Facebook message with a yellow star-shaped badge and these words: “Leftism kills. In memory of the 6 million Jews lost to Nazi hatred in the name of National Socialism. We will never forget.” The Texas Republicans explained that they were connecting the name of the National Socialist Party with “leftism”, even though the extreme right-wing Nazis killed every socialist they could get their hands on.

The use of the Holocaust to argue against restrictions on gun ownership has a long history. Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the NRA, Ben Carson when he was a Republican candidate for President, and the senior Republican in the House have all claimed that Jews were killed because they had not armed themselves.

Some people on the left also have trouble with teaching the Holocaust. Because the Israeli government and many Jews across the world have used the Holocaust as a justification for the existence of Israel, supporters of the rights of Palestinians sometimes claim that there is too much emphasis on the Holocaust.

Sometimes leftists are criticized, because they can be linked with other people who would like to see less attention paid to the Holocaust. For example, the two women who just became the first Muslim women elected to Congress, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, are often accused by Republicans of being antisemitic, because of their criticisms of Israeli policy. Their comments do sometimes veer towards condemnations of Jews as a group, and Omar just had to apologize for some of her tweets. But their criticisms of Israel are echoed by many Jews. I find such conservative attacks misleading, but I am one of those Jews who is critical of Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Nevertheless there are some on the left who do not wish to push more Holocaust education, because more sympathy for Jews can lead to support for Israeli occupation policies and discrimination against Palestinians.

But the facts of the Holocaust are clear and they lead inexorably to important moral and political conclusions, which can be discomforting to ideologues of the right and left. Antisemitism has always been based on false ideologies, and it leads to discrimination and eventually murder, like all ethnic hatreds. Extreme nationalism is the twin of ethnic hatred, and leads to war. It is always important to juxtapose the authority of governments or leaders with basic moral precepts, to question authority.

Holocaust education is necessary. The Holocaust is one of the most significant events of our recent global past and was an important determinant of the contemporary European and Middle Eastern world. Its moral implications, lessons if you will, have universal significance. Learning about the Holocaust makes everyone uncomfortable. That is why we must keep teaching it.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin

February 12, 2019