07.01.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 16:58 by RjZ
Car sales are down in the United States. I don’t think we should be surprised. If you’re only a few years into payments on your SUV it’s unlikely that, with the extra pinch of gas prices, you have enough extra money just lying around to simply get rid of the car you’ve got and get another one. You could go a little deeper in debt, but then credit’s a little tighter these days.
Suppose you’ve got the money and you’re really more interested in saving the environment. The question is, should you trade in that guzzler for a hybrid? Hybrids burn much less gas and produce fewer green house gases (GHGs), right?
Imagine you’ve got another 10 years at 12,000 miles per year on your car. I’m guessing that’d be around 200,000 miles, give or take, which, with some care, I think most cars from the last few decades will pull off. Say you’re getting 21 miles per gallon. A hybrid will get around 46. So that’s 25 miles per gallon for 120,000 miles or a savings of 4,800 gallons of gas! Not bad, at $4, that’s $19,200 over the next ten years. This is great news, from a cost standpoint. The five year cost of ownership of a Prius is only around double that, so, with today’s prices, it’s not such a bad deal!
The question I am asking though, is should you trade in your still working car for the environment’s sake? A gallon of gas creates about 20 lbs of CO2, so buying that Prius will save the environment at least 96,000 lbs of CO2. Except, how much CO2 and other GHGs are produced in the manufacture of a hybrid? Alas, I couldn’t find this data quickly on the web, but I’ll hazard a guess. A Prius weighs almost 4000 lbs. It’s a pretty fair assumption that producing all those machined parts, mining and smelting all the metal for the body, engine, battery, suspension etc., four tires, foam and carpet filled interior, and not least, transporting all the various pieces half way around the world, probably works out to quite a bit more than another 90,000 lbs of CO2. Without doing the math, I wouldn’t be surprised at 900,000 lbs of GHGs. Anyone have a real reference here? A couple of papers on the web were available at charge.
If it’s time to buy a new car, consider a hybrid, I am sure it’ll help. Just don’t buy something you really don’t need just to spare the environment. Reduce first, as the saying goes: reduce, reuse, recycle. I’ll be driving my 130,000 mile car for a few more years, even if there are cleaner cars out there.
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06.29.08
Posted in Society at 10:58 by RjZ
Out of date, now, this was lost in my drafts section. Remember when the now ignored Baker-Hamilton report came out suggesting what we should do in Iraq? I’ve got to hand it to the Bush administration. They got out of that rather well–they simply ignored it. I guess being a lame duck president means that you can just ignore suggestions, public opinion, really anything. It worked for them because the report came and went and no one seems to matter. So while this is a bit silly now, perhaps it serves as a reminder of alternatives, already presented for the quagmire in Iraq. Agree with Rubin or Baker-Hamilton or not, it’s worth considering other ideas.
During NPR’s Talk of the Nation Michael Rubin who is the “resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Former Pentagon policy official and former political adviser to the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad” explained why he refused to participate when asked for his expert advice during the Iraq Study Group’s research. He claimed he felt he was the “token Neo-Con”.
I find it unlikely that there is a shortage of neo-con views in the current administration, but I am not sure we’re missing much, based on his logic. During his discussion he felt that speaking to Syria and Iran, as suggested by the study, was like rewarding and arsonist. He made this comparison while explaining that since Baker and Hamilton were seeking a consensus they would end up like a person confronted with a hornet’s nest. There are just two things one can do in that situation. Either run away, or knock it down and destroy it. Rubin claims that the Baker-Hamilton conclusion would be to sit underneath the hornet’s nest and tap it gently.
It’s a great analogy. I imagine, either Mr. Rubin is so single minded and unable to see alternatives or he’s really smarter than that and he’s misleading us by pretending that consensus is the same as compromise. A compromise, of course, is what his analogy leads us to. Consensus, unlike compromise, doesn’t mean that we meet in the middle of two opposing solutions, rather, that through discussion and debate, we reach a conclusion that we can all accept, even if some of us don’t actually agree.
Mr. Rubin is offering us the dilemma of false choice–just as President Bush did at the beginning of this war when he said nations were either “with us or against us,” ignoring the concept, for example, of neutrality. Mr. Rubin is hoping his listeners won’t notice the logical fallacy with which he makes his argument. Perhaps they teach this at Neo-Con school, because it seems to be a common argument practice among prominent neo-cons. While it might be effective in stirring up the base supporters, it isn’t getting us anywhere.
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06.11.08
Posted in Society at 16:49 by RjZ
I’m pretty sure it’s genetic. Or maybe it was my father’s chain smoking while I was young, but I have never been particularly athletic. To prove it, this year I am giving a try at finding out just how much of a wimp I really am. I’m running and biking regularly and keeping track of it all to see if there is any improvement. It’s good for me to be fit either way; it will protect my squished spinal disk and strengthen the probably weak heart I inherited from my father. Six-pack abs would be a bonus. An extremely unlikely bonus, sure, but a bonus.
I hear lots of talk about conditioning and training. How much is too much, rest days, progress plateaus and on and on. For my part, I am glad I have been keeping track of all this activity. I wouldn’t be able to notice any improvement at all if it weren’t for the last decimal point change in some insignificant statistic. But there it is in bits and bytes, damnit! Improvement!
After the 100 mile ride a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of an often overlooked improvement in performance that comes, not from from training, but from overcoming the fear of the unknown. I first noticed it back when I was a lot less wise (read: more idiotic) about hiking. I remember setting out too late on a day trip in the German Alps. It’s gorgeous country and I enjoyed the strength of young legs propelling me from one view to another. Eventually I grew tired and decided it might be time to return. Waiting until you’re tired to turn around seems logical, doesn’t it? A few hours later I was slogging down the mountain trail is fast as I could in the half light of the moon through the trees, doing everything I could not to trip over rocks in the dark and to forget how thirsty I was.
I passed landmarks that I remembered from the ascent and now they were only grim reminders of how much further I still had to go. My ‘strong’ legs were failing me, I could barely see the trail and I was shivering, thirsty, and hungry but there really wasn’t much choice except to keep going. Eventually I returned to my car and started to realize what an idiot I had been.
Except I didn’t learn quite the right lesson the first time. I distinctly remember that I repeated this lunacy a time or two before I gained the experience necessary to plan my trip and bring enough food, water and proper clothes. I did learn something from that first mistake though: that, when faced with the choice of freezing in the night, it turns out I could go much further than I thought!
Since then I’ve found that frequently what limits in physical (and perhaps many other) endeavors isn’t conditioning, but rather just knowing what’s possible. When I finished the century ride and uploaded the data into the computer it was clear that I never really pushed myself that hard. My heart rate was rarely all that high, and yet during the ride, I was wondered at each rest stop whether I was even going to have enough energy to finish! Next time I start a long hike or an endurance ride, I’ll be more prepared for it simply through my experience that, tiring as it may seem at the time, there’s nothing to worry about. I’ve done it before; I ought to be able to do it again.
I’ll know more after a few more months, but so far, the statistics don’t lie, I’m no elite athlete and even some honest to goodness training (no really, I can prove it…I am not that lazy) won’t make me one. But it’s not for nothing. Next time I’m riding 100 miles, or hiking a bit too far, I don’t have to be afraid to keep pushing. Just knowing I am not going to die trying can be pretty inspiring.
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06.03.08
Posted in Society at 16:39 by RjZ
I like motorcycles. After all, I learned how to ride a motorcycle before I learned how to ride a bicycle. I had a cooler-than-I-knew Indian (I was five and Indian wasn’t as cool yet, plus it was a really little one.) and a cooler-than-anyone-bothered-to-notice MV Augusta. (Mine was modeled after a real full-size bike and had a one into four exhaust pipe!) I had bikes at such a tender age because my brother raced and my father turned every hobby into a business so he even had a bike accessory shop.
We had real-live one percenters hanging around the shop all the time. They looked the part, alright, but they were still some of the gentlest, most trust worthy guys around. Still, there’s one question I wish I had the foresight to ask then (did I mention I was five?)
What’s with the pipes? Have you heard these? If some (note: not all) of these bikes roll up beside you, you can barely breath from the sonic impact shaking your chest. Still I ask if you’ve heard them because one of the explanations for this noise pollution is that “loud pipes save lives” and that’s just rubbish. I hear bikes all the time, but not when I am in my car, windows rolled up, iPod blasting.
The pipes are the only real complaint I can make about the bikers. Even the hundreds and hundreds that passed me while on some group ride. They passed me while I was on a still gentler form of two wheel transportation—my super-fast road bicycle. I wound up riding to a mutual destination…where they were gathered literally by the thousands…all dressed in jeans and leather jackets, and Harley t-shirts or some similar variation. I couldn’t help but think how silly and clichéd they looked. “Leather is safe, man” people tell me, but how does that explain that halter tops for the women and the lack of helmets for just about everyone. Really, I don’t think they’re a safety conscience lot.
But the fact is, while it’s more likely these folks we’re lawyers and doctors during the week and one percenters only on the weekend, it’s not like I didn’t look equally ridiculous in lycra bike shorts and stiff soled shoes. The very next week I went on an organized bicycle ride and there were some 7000 participants, all dressed just as similar to each other, all riding around some big loop and generally annoying to those who didn’t know there was a ride organized that day.
Except, all 7000 of us together wouldn’t like make as much noise as ten of these bikes. All that blaring, cracking pipe noise is plainly illegal. Laws vary from state to state, county to county, even city to city, but in virtually every one I could find, the 80dB level, that is so easily exceeded by these straight pipes, is against the law.
Except, the law is quite clearly not enforced, and that’s not OK. No doubt, we should have as few laws as possible; I have no desire for a state that outlines every facet of my life. What few laws we have however, must be strictly enforced. To fail in enforcement makes a mockery of our legal system and encourages people to flout them at will. Is it because the police ride bikes on the weekends as well? Are people afraid of the doctors and lawyers who pretend to be outlaws on the weekends? What’s up?
I can’t say why I felt some mix of humor and pity at all these middle aged men and women in their matching store bought costumes and pretend outlaw attitude. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to realize how hypocritical that feeling was,while I’m in my silly biking gear (the tenuous hold I have on my ego urges me to point out that the embarassing cycling clothes actually have a technical purpose, like comfort and efficiency while bicycling your super-fast road bike, but I digress) Meanwhile, I doubt a real one percenter would be caught dead on one of their rides. The ones I remember from my childhood may have had a checkered past, but they were much more considerate!
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06.02.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 13:39 by RjZ
General Motors has spent piles of money on it’s questionable advertising campaign “Live Green, Go Yellow” to promote the use of renewable bio-fuels. When I ‘go yellow’ it’s usually a hint that I am not drinking enough water, but whatever. My real question is does using bio-fuel help reduce carbon?
Coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are really just stored solar energy. Hydrocarbon bonds built up in plants with the help of the sun and photosynthesis are dried and compressed into coal, or eaten by dinosaurs first, then compressed into oil. We dig it up and burn it, breaking down those hydrocarbons into CO2 and water, for energy. We get so much energy to fuel our economy and way of life simply because so many years of solar energy is stored in that compressed fossil fuel.
Bio-fuels, meanwhile, are considered renewable because while growing they were busy absorbing CO2 and when we burn them, it’s simply released again—net zero CO2, or so the marketing hype goes. It comes down to this: as long as we don’t burn these bio-fuels any faster than it takes to grow them, we’ll have a completely renewable, and carbon neutral source of energy. An energy source that, by the way, is essentially just solar power stored in hydrocarbons by the plants.
It’s ridiculous to imagine that we can suddenly get by with the solar energy stored in plants (or even algae) when we’ve been burning through our compressed, energy dense fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow! Actually, it takes quite a bit of fossil fuel to grow a plant these days, whether it’s a tree or switch grass as President Bush recommended, there are fertilizers, tractor fuel, and diesel fuel to carry it to the point of use (whether that’s your home or a centralized power plant.)
I’d be unfair if I said there were no advantages to renewables. There is, for example, energy independence and reduced CO2. Using ethanol to supplant oil gives the United States (or any other nation) more political independence to negotiate with countries whose behavior they may not agree with but from whom we’re currently buying critical energy. Using renewables certainly does reduce the amount of CO2 released from all that coal and oil (it was all previously stored, as opposed to being stored slowly over the last season it took to grow the crop—it’s just too bad it will only last a few minutes to extract the energy stored there). Plants are also remarkably efficient at turning solar energy into hydrocarbons, so long as they’re allowed their sweet time to do it.
Unless we can figure out a way to use energy as slowly as the plants did, we’d better keep looking for a real solution, and I’ll leave the going yellow to the bathroom.
Update: It’s worse than I thought. This article sites three folks from three different disciplines; an economist, scientist and environmentalist. They’re not so up on the bio-fuel idea either. I agree with the idea that locally, if it’s sustainable; for example if you’re burning all your bio-waste that would just go into a landfill (which by the way is a form of carbon sequestration!) there might be some point to burning bio-fuels. Aside from that, I am scared of people cutting down forests just to plant switch grass.
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05.14.08
Posted in Society at 16:42 by RjZ
What’s the best way to run a business? Is running a business about pleasing customers or making money? I think every business person worth their 401K retirement plan would not be able to ignore making money. You can’t please customers for long if you’re broke. Many would say that pleasing customers is the only way to make money, and from a marketing perspective, I’d agree. You’ve got to fulfill some need or want so that people will trade their money in for your product or service. If you’ve successfully met that need or want, well, you’ve got a satisfied customer. Except the question becomes a little stickier when the business we’re talking about is a publicly traded company.
Publicly traded companies have two kinds of customers. Consumers, who trade that money to have their needs or wants satisfied, and investors, stock owners, who make money (a need or a want) only when the company’s stock grows. I think this is what’s happening with Yahoo vs. Microsoft. Yahoo chief, Jerry Yang has rejected bids from Microsoft, claiming his company is worth more than the tendered offer. We won’t know if that’s true until the Yahoo’s stock climbs above $31 per share. It’s around $27 at time of writing.
Meanwhile, investors are going nuts. They see an opportunity for each $27 share to gain four bucks over night and, let’s face it, Microsoft and Yahoo make a pretty reasonable pair. Microsoft (still) owns the desktop market, they rule the server and business world, but they’ve failed time again expanding their business into the internet. Yahoo, on the other hand is second only to Google in search and still has the biggest market share of banner ads. Their web 2.0 application such as Yahoo Mail are excellent (much better than Gmail if you ask me). Microsoft has some pretty impressive innovations on tap (who knows if they’ll ever come to fruition) one using flickr (a Yahoo property) photos in some amazing ways. Synergies are good in business. They can mean one plus one amounts to three. Worth noting here, though, flickr, mail, and yahoo search users aren’t really Yahoo’s customers; they don’t pay the bills. Advertisers are Yahoo’s customers.
So, yeah, I get it. Except I don’t (directly) own any Yahoo or Microsoft stock and from where I sit, I feel for Mr. Yang. How is Microsoft’s culture going to blend with Yahoo’s? What value will the consumer see as a result of this merger? Even the flickr innovation I mentioned above likely works nearly as well with two separate companies (flickr’s APIs are available.) Microsoft hasn’t done much for me lately. New versions of office seem little improved from the older ones (understatement) and companies are resisting Vista like it was the black plague.
I’m not sure the merger does much of anything for pleasing customers. Which brings us back to the opening question. Easy for me to say, no shares and all, but while we read about investor revolt as Mr. Yang and his board walk away from some easy money, it seems worth asking again: what’s the best way to run a business? Isn’t it customers who ultimately pay the bills, even in publicly traded companies.
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04.17.08
Posted in Society at 7:20 by RjZ
So, um, Clinton and McCain are calling Obama elitist “Will ‘elitist’ label stick to Obama?” - CNN.com. It brings up two points I thought I could write about here. First, I should mention I still haven’t decided whom I’m likely to vote for. After all, the Libertarian party convention hasn’t happened yet, so I don’t know who that candidate is, but I can tell you one person I am not likely to vote for: Hilary Clinton.
Alright, so the primary reason I have is ridiculous and unfounded, and I am a little embarrassed about it, but somehow this seems so reasonable. Let’s face it, we’ve had a Bush or Clinton in office for over twenty years and that’s just wrong. One of the greatest American presidents, George Washington, can be recognized not for something he did, but something he didn’t do. When asked to stay in office for a third term he didn’t accept the almost assured coronation; he said no and returned to his farm. The peaceful transfer of power from one ruler to another was a rare event indeed in those days, and it set the stage for modern democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Having a steady stream of Washington insiders is certainly the way things have been done in the last several decades, but a ruling family (or two) strikes me as just un-American. Competent or not, we wouldn’t even be talking about Hilary if her last name weren’t Clinton.
Now that’s out of the way, it’s ridiculous that Clinton and McCain are calling Obama elitist given their loooooong standing positions of power. Are we supposed to believe that they’ve somehow remained just plain folk after their years in the senate or after all those presidential dinners which Hilary claims gives her experience to run a country. (If I sleep with a surgeon for long enough, does that mean I can perform brain surgery? Because that seems like more fun than medical school!)
According to Oxford Dictionary, an elitist “believes that a system or society should be ruled or dominated by an elite.” That sounds unpleasant, of course, but why wouldn’t we want an elitist president? For some strange reason Americans seem to want a leader who is just like them. Don’t we really want the best our society has to offer? This is the de facto leader of the free world! I want the smartest person we can find! I want charisma, composure, guts, strength, endurance, and intelligence. I want an over-achiever who doesn’t have time to wash the car let alone watch ‘American Idol’. I don’t have to like our next leader, because, even if invited, I don’t think that I have enough room for all the secret service over, when my dinner invitation is accepted.
Haven’t we had enough of a down-home good ol’ boy? Haven’t we seen that emotional, uninformed, decisions brought us to a war we did not sufficiently prepare for? Haven’t we seen decay of our position in the world due to unprincipled decisions such as presuming torture is OK if the stakes are high enough?
Obama, McCain, Hilary, are all elitists. Hopefully the libertarian, green and all the rest of the candidates will be too. Why would we want to vote for anything less?
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04.01.08
Posted in Society at 15:55 by RjZ
Sometimes church signs puzzle me. “Death is the door to Heaven, Come inside to get the key.” It’s not that I don’t understand the point of the sign, I just think it’s terrible marketing. Those who pass by the sign on the their way to church smile to themselves, comfortable in the knowledge that they’re securing their personal key to a pleasant afterlife by passing through those doors. Everyone else just wonders if the church is full of murderers who’ll offer you, not so surreptitiously, some poisonous Kool-Aid upon your first visit. The message is lost on those for whom it was really intended.
A friend told me about seeing “April 1st, National Atheist’s Day” on a license plate frame. You can buy one for yourself. It’s a joke, I told her. April Fools Day; atheists are fools…get it? Actually, it turns out, the joke is a bit more sophisticated. As the bumper sticker website tells us, Psalm 14:1 says “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Well, actually, that’s not all of what Psalm 14:1 has to say. The complete quote is “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good” These atheists are worse than fools, they’re corrupt and have done no good. (Don’t tell these folks.)
That’s fair enough for God to pass such a judgment, but what about Christians? The Bible also tells us in Matthew 5:22
“But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,[contempt]’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”
Apparently, those snickering bumper sticker owners are going to burn in the fires of hell. Not sure how they may have missed that part.
Matthew may be on to something though. We might not want to be so quick to start name calling. Aren’t we all fools after all? Richard Dawkins explains that we’re all atheists of one religion or another. We all deny the God/s of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Pastafarianism, or Christianity. Every religious person favors his views over the views of some equally committed person and is thus a fool denying there is a God.
Still, that’s not what seems to scare the religious so much about atheists. All religious people may be atheists in the religion of others, but at least they all share faith. Atheists, meanwhile, have the impudence to live outside faith itself. Perhaps indignation is what drives Christians to risk their eternal soul by confidently mocking those who, worse than daring not to believe the same as they, don’t believe at all.
Possibly, it was an atheist, who was driving that car around in the first place, telling everyone that April 1st is the day that he and all atheists pull the biggest prank of all. I couldn’t find any bumper stickers like that, though, which seems like a good; I’m with Matthew on this one, it all sounds a bit hateful to me.
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03.28.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 13:53 by RjZ
Have you heard about Earth Hour? Started by the World Wildlife Fund (a charity I actually donate to; and by ‘actually’ here I want to emphasize that I don’t donate to many charities), the idea is that this Saturday, 29th of March, people, businesses, organizations, and governments will turn off the lights from 8:00 to 9:00 in the evening.
I get the leadership and solidarity this is intended to show. Everyone who turns out the lights and joins the WWF will be telling governments and policy makers at businesses and civic organizations that we care about the effects of our energy consumption and we acknowledge we can do something about it.
It’s too bad most people won’t get that.
Many, and for all I know the designers of this action, might be fooled into believing that this has some other purpose. Say, showing how much power can be saved if we all just turned off the lights, for example. A horrible plan. Power plant operators are already concerned that extremist environmentalists want us to crawl back in caves and live by candle light. Even if Earth Hour action could show savings (it won’t!), they’re doing more to justify the fears of people who actually keep our lights on then they are to become agents for change.
Utility owners and policy makers are exactly the ones WWF are trying to convince, but unless extremist environmentalists, who apparently really do think we should return to a pre-industrial agrarian state, are willing to live that way; that is, go off the grid, give up their cars, computers, airplane rides, and all other advancements, like, say, healthcare, they come off as a bit disingenuous.
In fact, it’s terribly easy for the rest of us to turn the light switch off for an hour. During that time of honorable sacrifice we know we can just turn it right back on; we’re not giving up on anything. Meanwhlie, India, China, and the rest of the developing world are getting fed up with the attitude in the West. They want a chance to grow, with the same access to cheap energy, and by cheap, we often mean polluting, that we got to use and all we can do is tell people to turn of their lights.
Sadly, the hour of savings will hardly amount to more than a few megawatts and that people might think otherwise shows a lack of understanding of one of the world’s most incredible industrial inventions—the grid. Let’s have a look. What will happen when everyone turns off the lights at the same time? Unfortunately all the solar plants will already be idle as it’ll be night time. Wind is most steady at dawn and dusk (but this is dependent on many factors) and will not likely have a significant effect (as if we got any significant power from wind and solar today anyway….) Base-load power like nuclear and coal will keep burning away during this lack of demand. That, folks, is how the grid works. You can’t just turn off the overwhelming majority of power in a few minutes. Extra power just flows into the grid and if it’s not used then it will end up heating up transformers and being wasted anyway. There are no giant batteries to store up the extra power. The majority of power doesn’t cycle with demand; fortunately the grid is large enough to simply soak up the extra energy of most short-term changes in demand.
If enough people actually turn off their lights to have a significant demand effect, the power providers will have to respond in some way. Their first choice will be to turn off peaking power sources like oil and gas. Except, most of these will already be off because this isn’t peak demand time anyway, but there could be some actual savings there. Much of the hoped for energy savings will be lost due to inefficiencies of ramping them off and then back up again when demand returns, but these peak power sources are at least intended to respond to changes in demand so it’s not too big a deal.
If WWF gets a huge turn-out and demand really drops, then maybe a coal plant will actually go off-line. That would be really bad news. For that hour of CO2 saved during the coal plant outage, it will take it hours to even days to turn back on. During which all those peaking power sources will be running to take up the slack, drinking foreign oil the whole time.
In the 70s, the peak power season used to be December. Today the peak is during summer. What’s the difference? Air-conditioning units. Before AC on every home, power providers could actually measure the spike in power demand from all the Christmas lights. Now, in spite of the extra lights (have you seen the Joneses keeping up with the Smiths on who can put up the most lights? I sure have) Christmas barely registers above the noise for demand. Come summer, though, and all those AC units raise demand to pay for new power plants. The point is, turning off the lights for an hour won’t even rise above the noise.
At least we’ll have the solidarity. And maybe a romantic candle light dinner or two.
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03.12.08
Posted in Society, Travel at 13:11 by RjZ
“Oriental,” I answered, when my Israeli hosts asked what I wanted for dinner that night. Oriental is what Israelis call middle eastern food and it’s a delicious array of mezzes or salads of eggplant, cucumber, tomatoes, onions, chick peas and on and on. We left their office south of Tel Aviv and drove a good 15 miles south along the coast to a small village not far from one of my colleague’s home. He knew the area and often went to a bakery near our destination restaurant.
We parked on the street and walked towards the restaurant past another bakery, still open, and selling warm challah and pitas, but, mysteriously, no bagels. (I assume there are bagels in Israel, there are enough New York jews there for sure, but I never saw one.) It was dusk of a warm evening. The village wasn’t nearly as tidy as Tel Aviv and several people were just hanging about chatting and smoking and taking in the evening. Some children we’re still playing in an alley off of the street.
The atmosphere in the restaurant had more in common with an American diner than a fine bistro. We sat in a booth at a metal and formica table near the windows, from which I could still make out the darkening ocean over the roofs of houses across the way. The restaurant was nearly empty. Some men wearing the traditional Palestinian black and white Shumaggs, like Yassir Arafat used to wear, were smoking a hookah in the far corner and shortly after we were seated a western dressed husband and hijab wearing wife sat at a table not far from ours and quieted their rambunctious young daughter and younger son.
And so, here we were, sitting in a restaurant in the Gaza strip, a few years before it would be in control of the Palestinian authority and no longer an annexed part of Israel. My two colleagues are both rather liberal Israelis. They were far more interested in keeping their electro-optics business running than Palestinian/Israeli politics. But, as I’ve written before, outside of religion and politics, there really isn’t much to talk about in Israel. We were finishing our meal and ordering some baklava when some from the hookah party came by to offer us a few puffs of the perfumy smoke. (We all politely declined.)
“You see…?” my colleague asked, “they don’t care if we’re Jews or Arabs. Real people just go about their business.” My colleagues don’t wear yarmulkas or the dark orthodox Jewish robes and hats, but no one who’s been to Israel would mistake them for anything other than Israelis. The thin, short-sleeve dress shirts and worn chinos all worn with a rather disheveled air are the hallmark of most Israeli businessmen. Still, no one gave us a second glance. The bakery sold Challah along side the pita; families ate dinner together; Arab men offered us the chance to join them enjoying the hookah; and the server spoke to us in Hebrew and English.
Even if the media is exaggerating the real devastation and despair in the Gaza strip today, it’s clear to me that things have gotten worse since that charming evening in a cheap, but delicious restaurant along quiet village streets. While there is real and justified animosity between people living in this region it’s equally important to remember that just a few years ago, people were smoking and breaking bread together. Too bad the pragmatism of my Israeli associate didn’t work out. Sure made sense at the time!
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