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Riding on My Bike
NMB, Florida January 20, 2002 A.H. Schectman
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Published Now and
Then. Opinions Pro or Con Are Welcome.
THE THINGS YOU CAN LEARN ON A BIKE
I follow the principle that one should not waste time. If you can do two
things at once, while you have the mind, ability and energy for it then you
will have not wasted time. That being said I will explain what I mean.
If you sit in doctor's offices and wait for hours and have not brought
something to read with you, you will be forced to read years' old remnants
of tattered magazines belonging to golf and yachting nuts. If you go to
government offices and wait for service you must bring a book along or
attend to some business on a palm pilot or electronic notebook.
I ride my bike early in the morning before the sun comes up. When I drove
the highways to get to work I could park a book in front of me on the
steering wheel and get in a couple of chapters. This does not work on the
bike. I take courses instead.
The mailman just brought me four courses on audiotapes that I bought from
the Teaching Company. It is a not so bad way to get information from
professors who make a living from studying a subject and organizing it to
teach to you. I listen to them while on my bike and this morning heard two
lectures on the rise of Hitler and Nazism. This is something anyone can do
if you have sitzfleish. That means, if you have the tuches for it - if you
can sit and listen to somebody talk for an hour or so. I ride my bike for
approximately an hour and it was too dark at 6:00 this a.m. to read. So I
listened to a professor tell about the matrix of political, social and
religious action in the last half of the 19th Century from which the
terrible scourge of National Socialism arose in the first half of the 20th.
I must caution the reader and listener to the findings of scholars on this
topic. They now point out that Otto Von Bismarck who unified the German
states to form a powerful central European capitalist and industrial nation
prefigured Hitler by attacking the political power of the Catholic Church.
This, once again, is a commentary of the power of religion in national
affairs. As a great Protestant clergyman said: "First they came for the
Communists, then the Jews. ." Religion is powerful stuff.
Carol's Evaluation: 10 out of 10.
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