There are two issues that I never made any effort to focus on in influencing my children. Judaism and politics.
As it turns out one child is strongly pro commerce and loves Israel. The other two are pro Israel and one observes the Jewish holidays with her children. Unfortunately two are Democrats. One over the abortion issue and the other over environmentalism.
I ask myself why this happened. The answer is surprising. I could not see the future and the future turned out to be evil.
My children grew up from the late 1960’s to the late 1980’s. That was during the Cold War when two facts of American life were well established. The Democrat Party was only slightly anti-commerce, with its strong base in labor unions. Most of the Democrat establishment still supported American commercial and technical suzerainty because of the Cold War needs for both.
Jew hate was de minimis in America during that period. Especially after the hereditary elite disappeared in the early 1960's and after the Catholic Church changed its Jew hate teaching at the Second Vatican Council in 1966.
I couldn’t see what we have today.
- Jew hate has a stranglehold on the Democrat Party which had an openly Jew hating president in B.H.Obama and a large number of Congressional Democrats who walked out on a ‘life-saving request’ address by the Prime Minister of Israel.
- A time when Jew hate is rampant on nearly every American campus. A time when Jew hate is well entrenched and protected by the academic faculties and administrators across the land.
Had I seen this neo-Nazi turn in a significant part of America I would have made sure my children understood their Jewish and commercial heritage. I would have observed the Sabbath, enjoyed every religious holiday including fasting on Yom Kippur and taken them, many times, to see the greatest miracle in human history: Israel. I would have paid for and encouraged their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.
I certainly never foresaw that the end of the Cold War, with the failure of the USSR and Mao’s China, would lead to the American Left and the Democrat Party adopting the communist values that are anti-commerce and dedicated to the destruction of the American Enterprise.
I was already pro commerce when my children were young and learning. I was travelling the world to promote new businesses and better business practices. I never realized that the Democrat Party would become the party of anti-commerce. The Party that would turn the unrestricted Internet into a public utility, that would force banks to deny banking to thousands of thriving businesses (Operation Choke Point), deny favorable IRS rulings to hundreds of pro commerce and pro-Israel organizations and create local Democrat city governments to pass malicious laws that universally favored unions and punished individual initiative, private property and commerce.
While I was part of the group that created modern environmentalism, I never foresaw that the environmental movement would do everything in its power to become a universal religion that would promote Ludditism and hamper commercial development and building in every way that it could. Globally.
I regret not teaching my children what I knew and understood. I forgive myself. I could never have seen the rise of the horrible evil that now rampages across the earth.