Two Graduates From Harvard

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.*

The Longer Shorter Way**

Two Graduates of Harvard

Two Paths, Two Souls

I read an amazing interview on the Times of Israel *** site about a young Arab that became, in his words, "the luckiest man I know." While reading this, I immediately thought of another young man who might also think himself lucky. But first,

One man from the fields of the Galilee to Brandeis Univ., Johns Hopkins, then Harvard Business School.

Hussein Forsan, 34, explains how the opportunity for a full education scholarship presented: "After his mother called him with the news..."

'I was on the construction site. I was wearing jeans and dirty boots and a dirty T-shirt....I apologized for my appearance [to the scholarship committee]. I explained that I had come from work and only got home at weekends. I said that, ‘If you really want to know me, please allow me to speak Hebrew. I won’t be able to express myself in English. I promise you, if I get the scholarship, I’ll learn English in a few months.’ They looked at each other, and said okay, and I was off ."

The interviewer explains:

"Throughout our conversations, installments of his biography were often followed by a rapid switch into the subject Hussein wants to talk about much more — the need for Israel’s Jews and Arabs to shed the defensiveness and the paranoia, to spend more time in each other’s company, to build a country together."

“[Hussein] I am empathetic of the Jewish mentality of fear. The Holocaust, the Arab wars, and previous tragedies — I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But that history and cycle of paranoia dictates today’s attitudes. By building walls, by shielding yourself from others, you lose sight of them…. My dream and vision is to work on the business side of peace — to be an ambassador for Israel in the Arab countries, and for the Arab countries in Israel. One day.”

This is the long but short way, a lengthy path to bring understanding to two peoples, to build, to share, to improve the world.


The other man from Hawaii/Kenya/Indonesia to Columbia Univ. and then Harvard.

According to Wikipedia, Barry Soweto went to schools in Honolulu, Jakarta, Los Angeles, New York City, and Cambridge, where he graduated from Harvard in 1991. For three years he worked in Chicago as a community developer between Columbia and Harvard. After Harvard he returned to Chicago and got involved with Chicago politics, and where he taught constitutional law at the Univ of Chicago Law School. In 1997, he became an Illinois Senator. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. In 2008, Barack Obama ran for and was elected President of the United States of America, being the first African American to be elected President.

Short sweet success.

In an amazingly short period of four years, little Barry Soweto has become a divisive tornado raging through American society, with policies that are dismantling business, society, politics, and people's personal lives. To me, this was a very short path to achieve his goals to decimate the unique founding principles of a great nation, and with his like-minded personal cabinet of czars has forced his personal vision of socialism [some say Marxism; see also Top 7 Policies] onto the once great prosperous country of America, putting it into a long, long, road to recovery back to its founding principles in 1776.

These principles gave its people a "Declaration of Independence, a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, a body of laws to endow the people with 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,' meant to exemplify the 'inalienable rights' with which all human beings are endowed by their Creator and for the protection of which they institute governments."

This is the "short but long way." A short path of destruction and a long way to recovery.


______________________

* The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost.

** in life there is a "short but long way" and a "long but short way," Tanya, The Longer Shorter Way.

*** While the intent of the writer of this story seems to be "an indictment" aimed at the Government of Israel and its leaders, in my estimation it really portrays the failure of this man's own community leaders for not taking a different path, a path to improve the lives of its people, to eliminate hate, and to educate their young to 'reach for the stars' instead of the guns and bombs. No people in the world has rebuilt their lives and communal infrastructure successfully, so many times, after being persecuted and crushed in country after country for thousands of years more than the Jewish People. It can be done.