Better to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness*

12/24/2017

Family Menorah

Best Wishes,2017

My wife received a Christmas email from Manjusha, a social worker in a poor corner of India, a friend since Marianne was doing volunteer work with children there. Manjusha added, “The life is really uncertain – maintaining internal peace is the only aim.”

Her message struck a chord with both of us. In the past year I have found myself reciting the Serenity Prayer to myself:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

It works just as well if addressed to a higher power, or to common wisdom. In a dark time, it helps.

*-- Quote often attributed to Confucius, or Eleanor Roosevelt, traced to sermon by William L. Watkinson, USA, in 1907.

+- Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr. Full version.

Beer Michael M.

12/24/2017 01:44:35 pm

Merry Christmas, happy New Year and good health George!!! Warm regards, Michael

Alan Rubin link

12/24/2017 06:01:42 pm

George, nice way to lead into a new and more hopeful new year.

bruce

12/24/2017 09:09:16 pm

george,

merry christmas george.

i hope you and your family have a good one and many more to come.

i'm sure you're relieved to be able to say merry christmas again. now if you could just do something about sharia law, eh.

i'm watching the wizard of oz and taping scrooge which is, unfortunately, the colourized version of the 1951 version of a christmas carol with alastair sim.

if there's ever been an actor made to play a role it's sim in that one.

cheers,

bruce

Mendel

12/26/2017 03:56:10 am

Happy Holidays, George et al. Our recent holiday of lights radiates a similar hope.

Shine on,
Mendel

Altenir Silva

12/26/2017 06:29:09 pm

Dear George,
What a great philosophy. I loved it. Thanks for sharing this pearl of wisdom.
Best. Altenir

Brian Savin

12/26/2017 08:16:17 pm

The only darkness is what is in our minds or spirits We are on this earth to do our part, and that is all about our deeds, not simply all our too easy opinions.

George Vecsey

12/26/2017 09:08:36 pm

Brian:
Really?
Hitler wasn't dark? Cancer? Famine?
One lights the candle but darkness exists.
Having a good week.Family. Listening to Dvorak and Puccini on WQXR right now rather than the yappers on the tube.
Taking a week off from all this stuff.
GV

Brian Savin

12/27/2017 07:46:06 pm

George, a break will be good for you. Your reply makes that obvious. To say we are in a collective cancer, famine or Hitler is out of bounds and nutty. Our world is in transition but pretty damn good given the history of this place during human existence.... Even with all the stupid politicalization of almost everything these days, the best is yet to come.
Best
Brian

Mike from Whitestone

12/28/2017 10:40:21 pm

Greetings GV, enjoy the respite from this stuff.........and agreed on the yappers, You know my deal hovers around the serenity prayer and more, you posting it reinforces its value.
Praying for the homeless in these frigid days, its sad. My high class problems nothing in that arena.
Grateful.
Healthy and Happy New Year to all.

........and 47 days until the Highlanders report to Tampa. Just sayin'

George Vecsey

12/29/2017 10:05:52 am

Mike, you got it. You stared into the darkness....and light a candle day by day, particularly with the work with young people.

Did I hear those Highlanders got a Maris to go along with the Mick?
Or am I 58 years behind that news?
Happy New Year...and I think it will be, in the Bronx but not in my home borough.

George from Jamaica (Queens)

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Better to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness*

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