Month: April 2018

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Holocaust survivor marked physically, emotionally, but not his spirit

The tattoo on Michael Jacobs’ arm was a number: 118860.

The mark remained skin deep his entire life.  It served as a reminder to him, and for others, that he had spent his teen years in a Nazi concentration camp.  From 1939-45, the former Mendel Jakudowicz of Poland was forced to live life in one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz.

After the war, Jacobs found a home in Dallas.  A few decades ago, he started traveling the country, telling his story to congregations at churches and to anyone who would listen.  He called himself a Holocaust survivor.  He’d even traveled back to the Old Country and toured the death camp he somehow survived.  He wanted to remember every detail; every injustice; the loss of human dignity; the macabre sights and sounds; the ancient hateful prejudices unleashed ferociously among his neighbors, the German people.  He told me his story when I was a reporter in a small Texas town where he was booked to speak at the Methodist church.  Listening to his horrific ordeal, I envisioned gray scenes in the dead of winter: people with somber expressions frozen in black and white images, silent yet dignified.

A bright-eyed 15-year-old boy entering Camp Auschwitz, Jacobs first saw ovens.  Optimistically he thought his captors were going to teach him the trade of a baker.  He soon found the ovens were used to destroy human remains.  Nothing was joyous about life in Auschwitz where prisoners were sentenced to slavery or death.  Their crime was their religion.

As the Nazis were coming to power—incited by their beloved leader Adolph Hitler—Jacobs’ family was forced to leave their home and move into ghettos.  And from there, residents were collected and packed into trains heading to various concentration camps.  His family divided, Jacobs faced uncertainty in a concentration camp alone.  He was stripped of his clothes and issued a numbered wool uniform with black and white stripes and a matching cap.  The tattoo procedure was painful.

Jacobs was assigned to accompany a young Nazi soldier and told to follow his orders.  He obeyed, wanting nothing more than to survive the times.

Back in prison, Jacobs and other able-bodied males had to search Allied planes shot down by the Germans.  They were to break down the parts into salvageable piles of scrap metal.  The forced laborers had to be very good, as Jacobs said, “One wrong move and we went under the oven.”

Ironically Jacobs was learning a lucrative trade.  When he immigrated to America in 1951, settling in Dallas, he founded a scrap metal business which became prosperous.

During internment, Jacobs dealt with deep depression.  In whispered conversations, inmates would encourage each other.  “Why don’t you look up at the sky,” he recalled one man saying to him one night when he was feeling particularly down.  “See how the stars smile at us?”

As he lay on a filthy bunk in a cold, crowded dormitory, he would close his eyes.  He imagined himself as a bird: soaring above the screams, gunshots, and stench.  Meditation was a form of escape.  “At that time, I was free,” he told me.

After enduring hell on earth for several years, one day the prisoners awakened to find the camp’s cruel commanders gone.  The prisoners had heard the Allies soon were coming.  Jacobs took cautious steps to leave, unsure if this were another hoax and he would be shot.  Slowly he gained confidence and then ran away.  Tired and weak, he stopped at a house and was welcomed inside.  Still wearing his prison camp clothes, he didn’t recognize himself when he looked in the mirror.  He had aged decades.  He stood on a scale and weighed less than 100 pounds.

Eventually he would learn that 80 of his family members, including his parents and siblings, did not survive the war.  Jacobs was alone to learn the ways of the world.

He said what got him through the horror he endured was positive thinking.  He held no bitterness toward his captors.  Life, he could say as an old man, had been good.

The power of positive thinking is the human spirit.  Jacobs’ survival skill was his tolerance of those who hated him—and his understanding that the world had gone mad for a little while.

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“The Queen’s Rules” still should apply today

For what seemed to be the longest time, the only major fast-food chain in my Dallas suburb was Dairy Queen.  It had no competition, or so it seemed to me as a little kid in the 1960s and early ’70s—until McDonald’s and all the rest came to our town.  Dairy Queen was on the other side of town from where my family lived.  For a 6-year-old kid, it was a big treat to get to go out to eat every once in awhile, and Dairy Queen had ice cream!  The next few years spent dining at Dairy Queen, I collected many fond if not fuzzy memories of a bygone era.

When I was a young reader, I noticed a large poster on the Dairy Queen wall near a booth where we’d sit.  The poster was of the Dairy Queen girl, dressed in Dutch attire, holding a public decree that displayed “The Queen’s Rules.”  I learned several big words reading the rules at Dairy Queen.  One was ‘profanity.’  “Mom, what does proh-fan-eye-tee mean?”  And Mom explained, “That means no,” she stopped to continue softly, “cuss words.”  Seeing my confused innocence, Mom would have to give me some examples of bad words so I’d know what not to say inside Dairy Queen.  My parents didn’t cuss much; well, Mom had her two choice words so we’d know when she was extremely mad about something.  In those days, cuss words were never spoken on TV, which was all network, pre-cable and pre-DeNiro.

Another big word for me was ‘loitering,’ a real trouble word as I attempted pronunciation.  “Mom, what does lo-eye-teh-ring mean?”  And Mom would explain, “That means no one should be hanging around here without buying something to eat or drink.”  Oh, I see.  I learned at an early age that restaurants were no place to hang out without purchasing food or drinks.

Bell bottoms, bare feet and halter tops

As I grew a bit older, around 8, I clearly realized the generation gap between parents and teens.  Dairy Queen was a ‘happening’ on Friday and Saturday nights.  I liked to go at those times and people-watch, especially any hippies I might spot.  They were called freaks back then: usually bare footed with torn jeans or short-short cut off jeans, girls in halters (that meant no bra!).  The high school teens and young adults played the absolute coolest songs on the jukebox: “Green Eyed Lady,” “One,” “American Woman,” “Cross Eyed Mary,” “How Many More Times”—a real hard rock concert, man!  The older teens were so cool.  I couldn’t wait to join them in ten years.

But they also were rude and loud: guys horsing around, dating couples who couldn’t keep their hands off each other then kissing—wooooo.  Actually, I was kinda embarrassed to see that sort of thing.  I didn’t understand—hormones still a mystery of life.

“No dr-uh-gs or al-ko-hahl,” I continued reading from the Queen’s Rules to Mom.  I knew nothing about drugs.  But once in awhile among the teen crowd, a loopy guy would float about giddily.  Maybe he was on something.  Because smoking was allowed, teens openly smoked cigarettes inside the restaurant, some laughing loudly, carrying on with their crowd, having fun, eating, drinking and being merry.

“No loo-woo-d cohn-duk-t,” I read aloud.  “What’s lewd?”  Mom explained about appropriate dress and behavior, pointing out a teen couple who was on their way to a full make-out session.  My nose crinkled in disgust as I’d remark, “Ooooooo.”

The Queen rules

Even as a kid, I figured the Queen’s Rules were put in place because of the growing Woodstock counter culture: the loud rock music, the long hair, the penchant to go bare foot, the suspected drug use, and the psychedelic clothes, halters, short-shorts, and touchy-feely coupling.  It seemed all this was inappropriate inside Dairy Queen because it went against the Queen’s Rules.  I followed the rules, because I was 8 and Mom was sitting across from me in the booth.  The older teens rockin’ Dairy Queen were unaccompanied by their parents.  Having their old ladies around would have put a damper on their … freedom.  Yet through the years, I noticed the Queen’s Rules had been taken down at most Dairy Queens for some reason.

So when I heard about the Starbucks’ incident whereby two men asked to use the restroom without purchasing anything, I did not think the business unkind or unfair.  If anyone can sit at Starbucks, small yet cozy coffee shops, and not be obligated to purchase coffee or something to consume, that’s news to me.  The race factor may have contributed to a manager’s rush to call the cops within minutes of the men asking to use the facilities sans purchase.  But why didn’t one of the men buy a cup of coffee, tea, bottled water or soft drink?  Starbucks is not a public lounge, after all, but a business.  They exist to make money off everyone who enters.  How did we lose sight of that?  Is Starbucks to blame for its casual, laid-back atmosphere?

When traveling the highways and heeding nature’s call by stopping at a gas station or restaurant to use a restroom, the courteous thing to do is purchase something before we leave.  Doing otherwise would be rude of us.  Taking advantage of any business, no matter how world renowned and prosperous, is impolite.  Kudos to Starbucks for nipping what is perceived by the masses to be race discrimination among staff.  Shame on those who jumped on Starbucks to protest what may not have been a purely racist intention.

In the near future, Starbucks should take a cue from 1970s’ Dairy Queen.  Evidently, time has come today for restaurants to once again publicly post their own set of patron rules and expectations—so everyone knows and understands we ought not take advantage of a spot that’s open for business.

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What we post and see online is known by all

Who among us did not realize when posting stuff on Facebook that advertisers were watching our every word and pix?  Facebook, and the entire internet for that matter, is free for one reason: advertisers.  They monitor what we say and reveal as well as what internet sites we roam from Facebook and other social media.  That’s how we get all the news we can use from the internet for free.  The internet never promised us security and privacy.  It’s been routinely hacked.  Some users are trolled.  And the Russian bots and fake news proliferated, in accordance with our nation’s guaranteed right of free speech.

So why did the U.S. Congress make a federal case out of Facebook’s lax security?  Why did they feel the need for a public scorning, scolding, and intellectual crucifixion of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last week?  Our nation has a heap more problems than the privacy settings of Facebook accounts.

Was the Zuckerberg testimony some sort of search for evil, as Americans are known to seek when bad things happen to us?  Was this some sort of dog-and-pony show by our elected officials, democrats and republicans, still smarting over the Trump presidential win and subsequent leadership?  Why not grill that computer guy with the pink hair and body piercings who blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica and its connection if not command and directives by one Steve Bannon?

Now we are supposed to wait around until Facebook lets each of us know if we were one of the 80 million users whose accounts were sought to persuade a Trump victory?  Here’s the deal: Trump was going to win whether or not 80 million Americans were inspired by Facebook’s political ads, Russian bots and unknown demographic influences.  Hillary Clinton actually won the majority vote by two million, but she did not win the Electoral College because she lost Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Who even looks at the ads on Facebook anyway?  I’ve managed to turn a blind eye.  And while scrolling the Facebook feed, most of what I see is a resent internet poster on life being full of love and loss.  If anything would make me want to drop Facebook, that would be it.  Yet I remain a participant for the occasional real news from families and friends.  That’s maybe two percent of what I get from Facebook these days.  It used to be fun years ago.  Remember Throwback Thursday?  Keeping up with that was tedious and tiresome especially as I was swamped by work in the real world.  But it was a fad, and so is Facebook and maybe social media altogether.  We bore easily after a few years.

The In Crowd

The cool thing nowadays is to remove your Facebook account.  A few million have done just that (as if the Russian bots can’t find some other way to influence, tantalize and confuse us on the internet).  The internet has always been a deal with the devil.  Computers are just switches using 0s and 1s.  And that’s the problem in trying to maintain some kind of security such as online purchases with a credit card.  Simply put, it can’t be done.  We’ve seen time and again hacking of major accounts from banks to department stores, government departments to hospitals and colleges.  It’s a modern man-made mess.

Because of privacy concerns, I was late to Facebook.  I didn’t want everyone to know my business: where I went on vacation, when I went on vacation, my news and blues and latest hairdos.  But like practically every American, I figured ‘What the hell?’  Why not get on social media and mix it up?  Things went smoothly enough … until the 2016 election.  It was sad to see how comments for and against Trump, Hillary and Obama were taken by long-time friends and family.  I’d say relationships will never be the same and patched up.  Some would say I have a big mouth—but no more so than others on Facebook. Besides, I always supported free speech, even if Obama was called a n**&^% by my Facebook friends.

Free speech is what I’m all about.  I put up with comments I don’t like.  To keep peace among my kin, I turned to tweeting my all-out sassy quips against, well, you know who.

The idea of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook in a data breach scandal is just too overwhelming and scary for some folks.  They feel violated, their deeply-held political, religious and societal views being studied and used to swing an election, or so the tale goes, wagging the dog.  We need to grow up and face the technological age in which we live: Anything we say on the internet and social media can and will be used against us.

One final thought on the subject: There really is no way to delete what’s said online.  It’s out there now in cyberspace … to be found out by someone, somehow, someday, somewhere.

 

 

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From the death of a job comes a resurrected purpose

Having crossed the mid-century mark a few years ago, I’ve been surprising myself lately.  I quit a job, a career, slamming the door after fifteen years, saying never again.  I am sans insurance for health and life and without consistent income.  It’s very freeing yet a mix of optimism and hopelessness.  Not realizing at the time, I abruptly resigned to pursue another direction in life, perhaps a new career.  They say we go through several in a lifetime.  A new career would be my third.

After a month of wondering in the wilderness, I did find that third career.  The job was everything I could have wanted: programs coordinator for a start-up nonprofit advocating for journalism and journalists.  The mission fueled my soul.  I had been a newspaper reporter and dealt with the skeptical masses who don’t believe what they read in the papers.  Nowadays the powerful refuse to answer reporter questions—tossing aside serious matters of national interest as ‘fake news’—to the detriment of our country, our democracy, and our future.  Part of the new job was to follow top news events and find unbiased and biased reports of the same story.  Given the internet, that would not be hard to do.  We can practically separate straight shooters like The New York Times and The Washington Post from the intentionally right-leaning cable line-up of Fox News.

Ultimately the goal of the pro-journalism nonprofit was to educate the public, starting with school students, on the importance of distinguishing legitimate news from fake accounts and the social harm that comes from biased and slanted reporting.  The issue is relevant today as the Russians continue to infiltrate elections not only in the U.S. but in every democracy.  Chaos is the name of the game, and it’s created by making up stories or telling half truths posted online with some emotionally stirring imagery.  Today people don’t know what to think, what’s the truth, who to believe.  The old Soviets used to say about living in their communist country: “You see one thing, hear a second, and think a third.”  Misinformation and controlling language and news will tear a democratic nation apart.  So my new career path was like a national duty, my small part in saving our country from further decline when it comes to news.

The glass menagerie

The small staff included individuals with marketing, education and nonprofit backgrounds, mine in journalism.  We worked out of a posh office building in downtown Dallas.  Employee amenities were alluring: on-site health club, yoga and meditation classes, daily breakfast, fresh fruit and afternoon snacks, free sparkling water and soft drinks, weekly happy hour.  Each office suite was surrounded in glass, used to write on like a whiteboard.  We got busy planning our new nonprofit.  We built out the website, already online but needing additional pages and relevant images instead of stock photos.  The web designers worked out of New York.

A small group of us would monitor national and world news reports to place on the website’s news digest each week, distinguishing between nonpartisan accounts along with biased reports.  Each of us also would contribute a weekly article researching the mass media.  I wrote one about the very few online sources that monitor news coverage, such as PolitiFact, All Sides, ProCon.org, and Debate.org.  I titled my article “The Great Divide: How to Find the Other Side.”  Here’s the opening:

American democracy is all about opinions—allowing citizens to hear issues of the day and then decide if they are for or against, pro or con.  But in the internet age, finding political websites that are nonpartisan—neither liberal nor conservative—and present more than one side of the issues requires quite a bit of research and time.  Below is a list of non-biased websites that present more than one point of view.  They are nonprofits, though some accept advertising along with donations, and promote themselves as the go-to sites when researching all sides of controversial subjects.  Most have a blog for readers to post their agreements and disagreements.  Some sites seek readers’ suggestions on new and timely topics to explore as well as poll.  As our journalism nonprofit researches ways to educate and encourage the public to use multimedia in order to fully understand issues and viewpoints, these internet sites are a great place to start, as we also believe in reformatting media, in this case political news websites, so controversial issues are viewed side by side—creating equality and respect for a nation of many voices.

I loved the opportunity to work supporting journalism and journalists.  Another part of our job was to ‘harvest’ journalists nationwide by collecting their emails and work phone numbers.  In time we would e-mail everyone to promote our nonprofit and invite them to join for $50 annually.  In addition to these work duties, we also were to attend journalism camps and conferences, sponsored by other longstanding journalism nonprofits, to talk about our mission and build membership.  It seemed logical and harmless.  I was learning a lot about the inner working of nonprofits.

Our boss was like others, somewhat friendly yet aloof, poised above the workers as is the normal work relationship.  He stayed busy contacting national and international journalists and media professors to serve on the board of directors, writing their names on the glass wall.  We had written many aspects of our burgeoning nonprofit goals on the glass.  With a few more workers joining us soon, we moved into another set of suites without the ninth floor city view from our original office space.  All was going smoothly for two whole weeks.  I never expected the nonprofit to survive more than six months or a year but enjoyed being a part of the mission and goal: Making Americans news savvy again.  My motto contribution was “Separating news from views.”

Phlth, he was gone

We loved our jobs so much, and of course the wonderful work space, that when we didn’t receive our first paycheck, we kept right on working.  So dedicated were we to the cause of journalism and eradicating fake news, we believed our red-faced boss when he explained he did not realize he had to release funds from the nonprofit account to a human resource organization that provided us with health insurance, 401k, and direct deposit.  We would be paid the next day, he assured.  Smiling politely, understanding this was his first nonprofit venture, we kept doing the work—my last assignment being to email everyone in Congress to serve on the nonprofit’s political committee, this to ensure our website would remain nonpartisan.  The goal was to have an equal number of democrats and republicans on the committee, if they would grace us with their service.  I must have emailed a few dozen elected officials starting with the Texas House and Senate representing the Dallas area.

Each of us had been set up with a Cloud phone service and gmail accounts.  We were assured we’d be reimbursed for using our own cell phones for work.  The next morning I checked to see about pay and saw no deposit.  I pursued to email the boss, but all my work accounts had been dismantled.  So were those of my co-workers.  I arrived to work extra early only to be met by the solemn faces of my colleagues.  The night before, our boss had taken our work laptops, cleared his office, and left the key on his desk.  We were victims of an elaborate and professional scam.

Dutifully, we waited at the office a couple of hours, hoping we might have misunderstood something.  We were a team, and he was our leader.  We were bonded emotionally.  He had hand-picked each one of us after very intense interviews.  He knew us better than we knew ourselves.

I reported the incident to the police, remarking stupidly: “He played on our idealism.”  There are people who sincerely and truly believe that media in the digital age has become politically dangerous.  And we believed all that was needed was to build trust between the public and the media again—if it ever existed in the first place.

Instead, we very nice and kind employees were duped, missing the real fake news in which we were working: This guy had us believing we could help save media and democracy, such a high and mighty goal coming from a player.  A good con man is a philosopher, and he needs people who believe in his latest scheme.  Oh he made sure to surround himself in smoke and mirrors: swanky offices, overwhelming perks, his ever-present ‘therapy’ dog that we felt obligated to adore, posing for pictures by holding his chin in a scholarly manner.  New employees know better than to ask nosy questions of a boss.  Given my age and occasional sarcastic tone, perhaps I might have come across as catching on to his true motives.  Along with my laptop, he removed all my notes taken on the job—covering his tracks.  After he split, I searched the internet for quite awhile but found who he really was: an identify thief.

New nonprofits are created out of hot issues, like eradicating fake news, and therefore obtain grants and other funding, as he claimed to have acquired.  All along, I thought I could run this journalism nonprofit.  The timing is not exactly right for me, but I’m looking into it, doing whatever I can to turn bitter lemons into sparkling sweet lemonade.  Having survived the death of a job, I hold in my mind and heart the keys to resurrect this noble endeavor … in the name of journalism, for the sake of truth, to keep us a free people.