This Passover

This Passover is bittersweet. So many people I know are sick and not getting better. Friends we made as newbies to the Boston area who were also getting started; whose husbands were in post graduate programs or in a medical resident program. We lived in an apartment complex near Coolidge Corner in Brookline. It was a nest of young families with lots of preschool kids and stay at home Moms. Many were families that left South Africa because they could not reconcile their dislike of apartheid with core Jewish beliefs and because they were highly skilled in medicine were able to leave with their families for a new life in America. Now, 40 years later most of those same families have retired to warmer places, a new "first generation" of refugees. More highly educated than my own parents were but a "first" generation still not quite rooted in this country, still speaking with that gentile English accent that was amazingly unaffected by over 40 years living in the Boston area. Their children are all parents now and totally Americanized and I think about them and my parents and all the past generations of transplants that have become this America we love so much.

Pirates in the 21st Century

I was just thinking about the pirates off the coast of Somalia and how a CNN News anchor remarked about them "making easy money" on last nights broadcast. Really? There they are, four pirates holding an American Captain hostage, sitting in a small lifeboat surrounded by the United States Navy 300 miles off the coast of Somalia. They must be wondering how in the world they ever got themselves into this mess to begin with after boarding the freighter and finding its crew self-locked in their cabin with one of their own pirates captured by that same crew. It would look like a Harold Loyd comedy if it weren't so scary.

As the events unfold in the ocean, other pirates were being interviewed with questions like "what is the average time it takes to get your money from the owner of the ship?" The answer; "four months", which is not bad work considering that the average payoffs are somewhere between $900,000 and $3 Million. So now the country is more focused on pirates of the high seas than on the pirates on "Wall Street.