One day last week, I shared some of my cabinet choices if I become the next president of the United States. While I didn’t get any criticism of my choices, I did hear from a number of people who thought that I was too old to be president and to lead the country through the year 2028 (and if I run for a second term, 2032, the year I turn 90). 

I must disagree with them. I looked up my most likely opponents on Wikipedia and guess what I saw. Dwight Eisenhower is already 133 years old, and Donald Trump almost the same age as Ike. And, I remind you voters that maturity is important – you need a president with sufficient perspective to understand the dangers that Mao Tse Tung poses to the free world. Okay, maybe I am a little off my game. I went back on Wikipedia and saw that Mao Tse Tung has been replaced by Mao Zedong. I will have to learn a little about him. I look forward to meeting him.

But seriously folks, if we could only look back to the good old days when Hitler and Stalin ruled 90% of Europe, and Mao and Stalin ruled 90% of Asia, and when only Japan had to worry about an atomic bomb falling on their heads.

So, our friend Donald has done two things, and none of his supporters seem to care. He has accused Nikki Haley’s husband of abandoning her as he is deployed overseas as a member of the North Carolina National Guard, and he has told the members of NATO that, if they don’t provide sufficient funds for their defense (as defined by Don Donald), that he hopes Russia comes in and makes them part of the new Russian empire. And Marco Rubio goes on CNN and praises Trump saying (a) that you say all sorts of things in a campaign, and (b) he doesn’t really mean what he says about NATO but it will encourage NATO countries to increase their contributions – after all, why should we defend them if they don’t up their contributions. By the way, as to his first point, when asked by Jake Tapper how he (Rubio) justifies things he said when he was running for president that he seems to completely deny now, he said (and I paraphrase only slightly), “I was running for president then. It was a campaign.” Let that sink in.

In the meantime, I saw a movie and read a book. The film, which we watched on Netflix last night, is “Rustin”, the story of a part of the life of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. As we turned the film on, I read the Netflix descriptive blurb and read that Rustin is an “unknown” “icon” of the movement. Is that even possible?

Rustin had a long career supporting civil rights, labor rights, pacifism, and even freedom for Soviet Jewry. He suffered, considering when he lived and was a visible person, as a gay man, and the film concentrates on his sexual orientation.

I highly recommend watching the film – not only for Colman Domingo’s stellar performance as Rustin, but really all of the performances.

The historical importance of the film shows Rustin, the primary force behind the March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, and how he organized the rally over a period of about seven weeks, dealing with a hesitant Martin Luther King, an opposing Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and an even more virulent opponent in Adam Clayton Powell. How he overcame all of this as well as a worried Kennedy administration, eventually (if that’s a term that can be used to describe a period of under 2 months) getting the support of not only all of the opposing groups, as well as the city government of New York (which allowed over 1000 off duty Black policeman to come to Washington to serve as unarmed crowd control aides) and many major labor unions. And how he did it in spite of continual threats to “out” him and to share false information (ever hear of false information being shared?) to threaten other well known Black leaders (including King) as being sexual partners of Rustin.

On the other hand, as I said, a good deal of the film showcased Rustin’s “hidden” homosexuality and his relationship with a young White man, Tom, and a young, married Black preacher, Elias. Not that there was anything wrong with this part of the film per se, except for the fact that neither of these people ever existed. They were made up characters, and I guess cover for the fact that the identities of Rustin’s sexual partners are largely unknown, the 1960s being the 1960s. And, by being so important to the story line of the film, they totally ruin the otherwise quite good historicity of the film.

As to the book, it’s a little read book by local author Herman Taube (he wrote over 20 books during his life), titled Surviving Despair, the true story of a Holocaust survivor who lost the first love of his life after both had escaped Poland into the Soviet Union and been separated by the Russians, lost his second love (his first wife) when she and their twin children were killed in a fire after the war in Lodz, and lost his second wife and third love, who died of illness in Florida. His story was not one of a survivor coming to the United States and becoming a billionaire. Rather it was a survivor who came to the United States and suffered from his memories his entire life, and who found meaning only after the death of his wife, when he moved to the Washington area and became an important translator for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

What he didn’t know is that the first of these three women, who was sent by the Soviets abruptly to a far flung collective farm, also survived. But one day – there she was, telling her story to an audience at the Holocaust Museum where he was volunteering. B’shert, perhaps, as they say.

The book itself does not contain the best prose, and there are so many similar Holocaust stories, but…….I really liked reading it.