In a blog a few months ago I wrote about the extraordinary good fortune I had to be born and live in the most fortuitous time in human history.
I wrote about the extraordinary developments in medicine during my lifetime as well as the explosion of economic benefits during this time as well.
I have since realized that I have lived in even more extraordinary times not just because of the medicine but because of everything else that has impacted my life.
I left out of the medical phenomenon five issues that have impacted my life and family.Two of my children would have died at birth because of an Rh negative blood type, which is remedied by modern medicine. Another child would've died because of malignant skin cancer. A spouse faced early death from breast cancer. Neither cancer is fatal anymore. I also had a father and a close girlfriend who suffered from epilepsy and would not have survived except for our modern pharmacopoeia. One of my good friends survived polio. I have lived two extra years, to date, thanks to cardiac catheter lab surgery.
Aside from those highly personal issues, the most extraordinary personal benefit for me was living in the hippie era and participating in 15 years of sexual freedom. I also participated in the creation of Ted McIlvenna’s Institute for the Study of Human Sexuality. I shared in the fun that would not have been possible at any other time, nor since.
In my lifetime travel went from railroads to commercial prop planes to jet planes over international distances nonstop. Every year, for 40 years I have been able to go to Japan for a month or more and do so on a timescale that did not interrupt my life. My own contribution to travel was the creation of a single currency useful around the world (the modern credit card).
I got to see two of the ancient human fallacies destroyed by modern commerce. Germany and its allies were proponents of anti-rational human qualities, blood, soil and Jew hate. Nazism was effectively destroyed by commerce. America in the form of American productivity defeated Nazism.
Communism, another ancient belief in the use of government to create ideal worlds, was similarly destroyed by the extraordinary productivity and glamour of commerce. Of course both the the Nazi and the Communist values survive as remnants in Lefty and environmental politics.
There is one thing that I have seen in my lifetime that is extraordinary beyond anyone's wildest imagination. I saw my own people go from 2000 years of exile surviving unrelenting hatred by their neighbors to the greatest human abomination to ever happen. Then to the creation of Israel.
I went to Israel in 1959 and saw a new country being created. Ten years after it fought to be a nation Israel was unbelievably poor. We ate only Arab food, black bread and oranges. There were few trees and the country had virtually no infrastructure. It was truly a Third World barren landscape.
I have been back many times since then and Israel is now one of the most successful productive and lush green countries on the planet. No qualification to that statement.
We Jews have reemerged not only as a thriving people but we are in the middle of the darkest hole on the planet, Arabia, surrounded by the same ancient monsters that we left 2000 years ago. Today, in every moral and human enterprise Israel is the light of the world. I saw it happen.
I can (slightly) speak to others in hotels and retail stores, in a language that has been dead for 2000 years and is now alive and singing.
I live at the most fortuitous time in human history. I am grateful.