Good Night and Good Luck (To All of Us)

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."(Vaclav Havel)

As of tomorrow, Obama will no longer be President of the United States. 

During most of Eli's life (and my time in New York) he has been the person representing us. I became one "US" during his tenure and I will always hold dear his letter welcoming me as a citizen of this country. (I shudder at the thought of Trump signing such letters...and any immigrant receiving it.) He wasn't perfect and didn't live up to his own promise but I think people put too much faith in the President. It is inevitable to feel let down when you truly believe in someone. Trump's fans will feel that too, sooner rather than later, it seems.

I am not the true believer type so I will simply miss his decency, intelligence and reflectiveness. He is a literary man with lots of interests and he tried his best. A couple of days ago,  a Hungarian friend criticized him intensely for his foreign policies and inability to really change the system. He even went as far as to say we should give Trump a chance to change. (Himself or things? Unclear.) For a moment I felt that maybe he was right, I could be wrong and it could all turn out for the better. (Or it might not matter because things are awful anyway and global warming doesn't care? Unclear.)

Who the President is may not matter for the arc of history, but it matters for our daily lives. Obama says "History doesn't move in a straight line, we zig and we zag," but people die during the zags. Watching the procession of corrupt and/or ignorant billionaires and Republican lackeys Trump put forward so far, there is no hope they will be any better than the Democratic technocrats waltzing though the revolving door an back during the Obama era. They will most certainly be worse for most of us.

What to do? I will have to march on Saturday to express my amorphous dissatisfaction and anxiety. Then I have to figure out what to hope for the Havelian sense and how to act in its name.

My (Real) Birthday

"The speed with which the Hungarian authorities cast out Jews from society, then robbed, segregated and deported them was unprecedented in the entire history of the Holocaust."

I will turn 42 tomorrow. 42 seems like a high number. I don't feel 42. I don't (I hope) look 42. I don't really want to be 42. But I must accept it so I am trying it on. Silently mouthing it to myself in the mirror as I look for gray hairs. (There are still none.) I'll still be vague about my age, as needed, but it is a fact I need to live with and perhaps embrace over the next year.

(David was 42 when we had Eli 10 years ago. When he looks at pictures of himself from those days he bemoans his youth, strength and dark hair. He misses himself at 42. That makes me feel better.)

My grandfather, Ferenc Koszeg Sr, died at 42. In that context, 42 seems like a low number.

He had the same crappy birthday I have. January 2. Unfortunately (?) for him, the year of his birth was 1900. He died of typhus or some other horrible disease; cold, abandoned and alone in a labor camp on the Russian front. He was one of the "25,000-42,000 unarmed Jewish men ordered to battlefields [who] lost their lives between 1941 and 1944 at the hands of brutal guards, due to inhuman conditions and/or military action." He was taken away to the camp where the Jews were suffering "from horrendous living and internment conditions similar to those in the concentrations camps of the SS" in 1942. At age 42.

I often thought about him on my birthday as a child. I always wondered if he had hated this January 2 business as well. The #DayNobodyWantsToCelebrateAnymore.

My father, who barely remembered him, had a picture of him hanging in his bedroom. It was of a serious-looking bald man with eyes like my brother's. He seemed old and mysterious. I knew from my grandmother that he had been a successful and well-to-do dentist, a man of great renown around Budapest as the favorite dentist of "classy ladies and gentlemen" and that she loved him so deeply that she forgave his indiscretions and occasional coldness. I later learned that he was a charming, well-educated man who spoke several languages, loved travel, good food and beautiful women as much as he hated being Jewish and all that it entailed in Hungary in the 1930s.

I also knew that he wasn't supposed to have died and left a 3-year-old child with no father, a young woman with no husband. But, until today, with 42 looming over me, I never quite fully appreciated how young he was when he was torn away from his life and everything that he knew. I never fully felt the awfulness of it all.

So on this day, I want to honor him and learn to appreciate my 42 years and my freedom and privilege to keep on living as I choose.