Life in the 21st Century.

A Personal Philosophy by Stephen C. Sanders, July 25, 2022

An Introduction:

Throughout my life I had always believed that I was part of world where amazing things would happen, where I would consider myself to be extremely lucky to be in the world when these amazing things would happen. I am not sure where this perspective came from. Maybe the perspective developed in part from; what was going on in the world, when I was a child in the mid 60’s and forward. Some of the things I know about myself was that it was important to me to be fearless. This I learned from a conversation I only overheard when I was a teenager.

As the story goes, I was able to escape from my crib early in the mourning and during one of this occasions my father had caught me watching cartoons in the early am hours, while everyone else was still asleep. My Dad asked me what I was doing. Of course I said, I was watching TV. To which he responded “Go back to bed right now”. I said no, and then he slapped me across the face. It was then that I said; “Nothing hurts to me”! My dad turned around and went back to sleep.

I’ve believed that people do not typically dig excessively into their past childhood experiences. Yet for some reason, so many things I hear and see on today’s news, reminds me of this global perspective that I have had as early as the late 1970’s. That perspective was that the world was controlled by large financial concerns and a very small segment of the population that was enormously wealthy. I found the topic worth thinking about, writing about and discussing with my friends and teachers.

My overall perspective being that: thinking, reading, watching and writing, would somehow lead to some sort of improvement or relief, from what was generally a very negative thing. Running parallel to these thoughts, I also believed that somehow, I might be able to obtain a position in the future would I might be able to actually do something for the betterment of society as a whole. While my raw idealism has in fact been ground down by society itself, my hopes for a better future for the world has not changed.

Such a perspective I had often believed throughout my youth was unique to me. I recall being actually personally extremely concerned about the fate of the world’s whales when entire species were being pushed to near extinction in the late 1970’s. I found that musicians ranging from Neil Young in his lyrics “Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970’s” were right on and to the point. Even acid rockers like Jimi Hendrix with more cryptic messages concealed within their songs, had similar ideas; such as in Spanish Castle Magic: “So castles made of sand, slips into the sea, eventually.” I realized that there were many enlightened souls expressing their views through writing, music and art as well as other mediums.

The perspective that I gained in my teenage years were reinforced and often also echoed in the voices of my early teachers from High School and subsequently throughout college. My own personal perspective and philosophy has also been shaped by the things I have heard from my family primarily through my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. My grandfather was in fact the engineer of the survival of his nuclear family at tragic time of our world history where simply being Jewish and living in Europe (in our family’s case in Poland)) was an actual death sentence. The perspective was unique and very rare in the my grandfather was very proud to have survived unscathed by escaping from the ghetto, and avoiding the concentration camps where death and inhumane misery was in abundance.

I am deliberately pausing here to share my work, before it goes on so long as to missed by my intended audience, due to overall length. The image above was something I actually sought out on the World Wide Web, and was easily found under an image google using the key words: “Tikkun Olam”. I recall publishing at least a very similar image in my own blogs, as my own daughter had created the image somewhere in an elementary school age child sometime around 2007 for a school project/poster, while she attended an orthodox jewish yeshivah. Now, not know exactly how or where to find my daughter’s actual image, I have borrowed a very similar looking one published as part of Chabad article about “Fixing The World: or Tikkun Olam, translated as “Fixing the World”. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/3700275/jewish/What-Is-Tikkun-Olam.htm

To speak more plainly, I developed this philosophy, only to learn later in my mid 40’s, that the philosophy was already a well established concept in Judaism. However, perhaps because partly because our extended families fear of being known as Jews, as a useful survival mechanism I was now really exposed or inculcated into the religion of my ancestors.

Part One- Stephen C. Sanders 1:30 pm July 25, 2022 (855 Words)