This week Otto Frank, Bobby Hull, and Stormy Daniels all made the front page. My challenge is to mix them into a blog that holds your interest and makes you think.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was January 27. In Ken Burns’ recent documentary on the actions of the United States during that terrible period in Europe, he opens the series with the story of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, and his frantic efforts to leave Germany before the soldiers came for him and his family. He tried every connection he could imagine to get into the United States. He would have paid every Deutsche Mark of his substantial fortune, but he was constantly refused entry by a country that turned a blind eye to the systematic killing of six million Jews in Germany and the other countries the Nazis invaded.
Bobby Hull, probably the greatest hockey player ever to play for the Chicago Blackhawks, died a couple days ago. Hull is the most celebrated player of my lifetime. He has a statue at the United Center, where the Blackhawks play.
He is being mourned in the sports press, but not by his daughter Michelle Hull. She is a lawyer who defends abused women and children, like she was by her father. Michelle lived through the drunken, hateful rampages of her father. She vowed to make her life’s work defending and aiding women and children against awful abusers like the “Great Bobby Hull.”
Hull was also a blatant racist and anti-Semite, and he made his views quite clear whenever he had the chance.
Stormy Daniels of porn fame is back in the news. The New York City District Attorney is beginning to present evidence to a grand jury regarding Donald Trump offering her hush money to keep quiet about their relationship in 2016 when he was running for President of the United States. Supposedly he passed the money through David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer.
Pecker was present in the building Monday where evidence was being presented to the Grand Jury, according to Fox News. The District Attorney also contacted two of Trump’s own employees about testifying, according to Fox.
How do these threads pull together in a blog about machining by Lloyd Graff?
I love this country. I feel blessed to live here and give thanks everyday for the privilege.
I also see its flaws. I live with the conflict. Sometimes it boils inside me.
Ken Burns loves America too. One of his first magnificent works was the history of baseball, which I dearly love. But America’s response to the Holocaust has haunted him as it has me. He wanted to tell the story as he saw it, beginning with America’s rejection of Otto Frank and millions of other Jews and others who begged to enter the country.
The tirades of our heroes like Bobby Hull are ugly, but common threads in our great country, which we saw so dramatically recently in the outrages of Kyrie Irving and his mentor Kanye West.
We saw them in 2017 at the Charlottesville rally where white supremacists shouted “the Jews will not replace us,” and the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
How does all of this tie into precision machining, an industry that is starving for workers?
The US is still the country that most of the people in the world would love to come to and work. They would add their energy and ideas. Even today with the country in dire need of legal immigrants, half of the startups are founded by newcomers.
Yet my country cannot stop its immigration mess. The “Build the Wall” shouts that Donald Trump used to get elected still reverberate and connect with the nationalist and anti-Semitic threads that kept Otto Frank and his family out of America and led to their deaths.
Imagine how much creativity and energy has been lost because of this “Build the Wall” trope. Yet we still hear it everyday.
I am sure Bobby Hull connected with it. I am one of the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I ignored his narcissism and womanizing because I thought he was a better option than Hillary clinton. And I still think that Trump was an effective president in many ways.
I am one of the conflicted Americans who loves their country, but I see enough to deplore the ugly germs that continue to infect it.
Question: How would you fix the “immigration problem?”
The post A Week to Remember first appeared on Today’s Machining World.