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Weekend Butler: Survival 101: This edition is all about good people.
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Published: Nov 18, 2021
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Weekend
SURVIVAL 101: THIS EDITION IS ALL ABOUT GOOD PEDOPLE
A new book by historian Niall Ferguson argues that if anti-slavery northerners had been less condescending towards slave-owning southerners, the Civil War might have been averted. Matt Gaetz says he might offer Kyle Rittenhouse a job as a congressional intern. Liz Cheney has been expelled from the Wyoming Republican Party for standing up for democracy but Paul Gosar hasn’t been condemned by his party for posting a video in which he assassinates a fellow member of Congress. (After he’s censured, he reposts the video.) Bill Maher is interviewed by Chris Cuomo, ducks a question about his Covid views, and Cuomo doesn’t follow up. And Joe Manchin is still President. And that’s just the tip of the news that could bum you out.
I say it again and again: If you must watch TV, avoid all cable “news.” Watch only “Law & Order” reruns — the good guys often win there. And read! And watch movies that remind you that there’s a sky! And get tight with good people. This edition is all about good people.
THIS WILL MAKE YOUR WEEK: HOW GEORGE CLOONEY FOUND THE TERRIFIC 8-YEAR-OLD KID FOR “THE TENDER BAR”
First came TikTok. And then Clooney watched Jimmy Kimmel. Click here.
WEEKEND READING: AND THERE WAS LIGHT: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JACQUES LUSSEYRAN, BLIND HERO OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE
For Jacques, early childhood was heaven. He ran. He played. God was “just there.” As he says, “Behind my parents there was someone, and my father and mother were simply the people responsible for passing along the gift.”
At 7, he had an accident in school. The shaft of his glasses stabbed his right eye and tore away the tissue. The left eye had sympathetic damage. The happy-go-lucky Paris schoolboy woke up, his eyes bandaged.
He was totally blind.
And he was completely happy.
Despair, he realized, was simply a matter of “looking the wrong way.” In fact, he could see — “radiance [was] emanating from a place I saw nothing about.” He could see light, after all. It only faded when he was afraid.
Jacques was a patriot. At 17, he decided to organize his friends into a resistance unit. Wisely, they appointed him head of recruiting — his hearing made him a great judge of character. Later he and his friends started an underground newspaper; it would become France-Soir, the most important daily newspaper in Paris
His luck ran out in 1943, when a man who Jacques had grudgingly admitted to their group betrayed them all. After spending 180 days in a cell in France, he was transferred to Buchenwald. Two thousand other Frenchmen were sent with him. Fifteen months later, when the Nazis were defeated, only thirty of them were still alive.
I was nothing but skin and bones, but I had recovered. The fact was I was so happy, that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome, was at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope… It was the truth. I still had 11 months ahead of me in the camp. But today I have not a single evil memory of those 333 days of extreme wretchedness. I was carried by a hand. I was covered by a wing. One doesn’t call such living emotions by their names. I hardly needed to look out for myself…I was free now to help the others; not always, not much, but in my own way I could help. I could try to show other people how to go about holding on to life. I could turn toward them the flow of light and joy which had grown so abundant in me.”
“Joy doesn’t not come from outside, for whatever happens to us, it is within,” he concludes. “Light does not come to us from without. Light is in us, even if we have no eyes.” [To read my review and buy the book, click here.]
THE WEEKEND POEM
from Kabir, Ecstatic Poems
When the bride is one
with her lover,
who cares about
the wedding party?
THE BUSHMEN IN THE KALAHARI DESERT TALK ABOUT THE TWO “HUNGERS”
from Laurens van der Post:
“There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning…
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you’re happy or unhappy. You are content — you are not alone in your Spirit — you belong.”
IN CROWN HEIGHTS, THERE WAS A JEW, YANKEL, WHO OWNED A BAKERY. HE SURVIVED THE CAMPS.
He once said, “You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz. Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar. The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm. Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew – from my hometown I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe and looked terrible. So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on. All night long; I kept the man warm this way. I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the other Jews in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence. Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night – they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me… The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…”
Let me tell you the secret of Judaism. When you warm other people’s hearts, you remain warm yourself. When you seek to support, encourage and inspire others; then you discover support, encouragement and inspiration in your own life as well. That, my friends, is “Judaism 101”.
WEEKEND MOVIE: THE #1 FEELGOOD MOVIE FOR SMART PEOPLE
It’s “Local Hero,” of course. To read about it, watch a video, and rent the stream, click here.
“PHYSICAL ACTIVITY IS A CORNERSTONE FOR MODERN CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE PREVENTION.”
New research led by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University and published in the European Heart Journal looked at cardiorespiratory fitness, or the capacity of the heart and lungs to supply oxygen to the body’s muscles during physical activity, in 2,070 participants from the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running multigenerational study designed to identify factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease. Participants underwent tests of physiologic parameters during exercise and wore physical activity trackers for a week at one point, then again nearly eight years later.
In this analysis, investigators found that people who increased their steps per day, participated in a greater amount of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, or reduced their sedentary time between the two exams showed improvements in distinct aspects of cardiorespiratory fitness throughout exercise sessions, from warm-up to peak exercise to recovery. These findings were largely consistent regardless of participants’ baseline activity level, age, sex, weight, and risk of heart disease.
For each minute of increase in average moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, more than 3 minutes of intermediate cadence walking or 14.6 fewer minutes of sedentary time would be required for the equivalent changes in fitness. Increasing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity by 17 minutes per day, taking an additional 4,312 steps per day (approximately 54 minutes at 80 steps per minute), or reducing 249 minutes of sedentary time per day between the two exams corresponded to a 5 percent higher peak VO2, or peak oxygen uptake.
“The most surprising finding of our study was that individuals with higher-than-average steps per day or moderate-to-vigorous physical activity had higher-than-average fitness levels regardless of how much time they spent sedentary. This would indicate that much of the negative effect that being sedentary has on fitness may be offset by also having higher levels of activity and exercise,” says the study’s first author, Matthew Nayor, the Aram Chobanian Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Sections of Cardiovascular Medicine and Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology at Boston University Medical Center.
“Physical activity is a cornerstone for modern cardiovascular disease prevention,” says study co-senior author Ravi Shah, director of Clinical and Translational Research in Cardiology at Vanderbilt.
