Page 201 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Old age and the future

that our candidates for office, from the lowest to the White House,
must pose for the sensationalist newspapers with their mouths wide
open, laughing, exposing old decayed teeth—but laugh they must, to
appeal for votes to the mass of people.
Children are brought up to suppress their feelings. I could see that
at my wife’s funeral, when the grandchildren never shed a tear for
their grandmother who lived just for them. They say that a rich man
is heartless; why? It is not the money that he loves so much, it is the
pleasure he gets out of it. He cannot stand the sight of pain and
sorrow: it destroys his joy and pleasure. He develops a numbness to
sorrowful things and hates those that are in sorrow. The country has
become over-rich. Most of the people of today have more or less
enough of the necessities of life as well as some accumulated surplus
to buy a lot of pleasures. Naturally they become numb to feelings
about things that would disturb their joy and pleasures. As the
individual is, so is the whole society. A great catastrophe does not
touch the people any more, as it used to years ago. The money that
fills the people’s pockets to buy pleasures and the wars that
consumed so many lives have hardened the feelings and brought
degeneration.
This is not new what I am now writing; it was said thousands of
years ago by several Hebrew prophets, admonishing their people for
the hardening of their hearts against the sorrows and sufferings of all
the people around them. I have not the words and vocabulary to
express it as well as they did, but it feels good to remember those
sayings, and to hope that in expressing them in my own poor way,
maybe some of my descendants, in happening to read them someday,
will be helped and guided to a good path in life. That gives me
happiness now, to think of them and their future.

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