by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

When I was a young boy, I read Flowers for Algernon, a story whose title character was a laboratory mouse, named Algernon, who was made super-intelligent by some scientific procedure. The lab's mentally-deficient janitor, Charley, became quite fond of smart little Algernon, playing with him after hours. When the little critter died, Charley brought him flowers.

The scientists figuring, what the heck, decide to try the procedure on Charley. It works. Smart Charley and a lady scientist fall in love. Then, the effects start to fade, and Charley slowly, with great anguish, returns to his former, mentally-challenged self.

The book made a big impression on me. And, like many things from my youth, I only begin to understand why now that I am old.

The rabbis say that our souls were omniscient, until we were born, when an angel touched us just above our upper lip, making us forget, and leaving that little dimple there.

Now like Charley post-treatment, I wander through life, with the sense, sometimes vague, sometimes acute, that there is a larger picture, an explanation that I am missing, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Knowing is very important. Unfortunately, believing that we know provides us much the same hormonal comfort as the real thing. What is worse than a false sense of surety?

Simple explanations, or pseudo-explanations, have a double allure; we know and it's easy; there isn't that much to think about.

These college-educated kids, chanting "Gas the Jews" tens of thousands strong in the street, think that they have it figured out. Their Woke professors (and now Woke school teachers) teach them a simple oppressor/oppressed paradigm.

According to that, Post-modern doctrine, Enlightenment values: reason, humanism, mathematics, morality, are all only a white quest for power over others, white people seeking and maintaining dominance. Cooperation, just to pick an example, so evident as a force in the animal world, is denied as a fairytale, or worse, another obfuscation designed to gain power.

This overly-simplified binary of victim and victimizer, casts Hamas (an anti-women, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-freedom, anti-tolerance, theocratic, authoritarian Islamist extremist terrorist organization, despised by other Arabs and even the majority of Gazans) as the victim, and the Jews (who invented legal and social justice) and Israel (the only place in the Middle East where Queers for Palestine members would survive for more than half an hour) as the victimizer.

Hamas proudly wants to destroy, not only Israel and the Jews, but the West as a whole. I thought that the woke mob supporting Hamas did, too. But they are just useful idiots of the Woke intellectuals who really do want to overthrow the West.

(When communism became impossible to support due to its slaughter of 100s of millions, French intellectuals promoted their revolution against the values of Western society by other, post-modern, means; means we see today in the philosophy of Woke.)

The kids out there chanting "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free" don't know which river or sea, don't know Hamas' abysmal human rights record, don't know that "free" means, free of Jews. Many don't even know that there was a terrorist incursion on October 7.

I'm sorry to bother you with all this, but for me, and other Jews, this politics is very personal.

We Jews are scared for our lives. We know, in a deep, genetic sense, how these things go. Viscerally, instinctively, in our qqq kishkas (bowels) we understand how very badly they have gone for us, hundreds of times over thousands of years.

All around the world Jews are practically considering, "Where could I run?" There are discussions, right here in San Miguel, about the relative safety of Mexico for us, compared to Canada and the US: "I told my brother, 'Get the hell out of Montreal.'"

The Arabs are taught, from preschool on, to hate the Jews. You can hear the Imams in England preaching, "All bad things come from that accursed race." College kids are taught about the unique evil of the West, of white supremacy, to believe in some pre-colonial, indigenous Eden.

It's easy to see how others are wrong; more difficult to grasp my own mistakes.

I observe what comes my way, convinced that there is some grand narrative just beyond my reach, playing cat and mouse with me. These words are the flowers that I, simple Charley, place on Algernon's grave.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, the social network, the prettiest, most-efficient way to see San Miguel online. Our Wall shows it all. Join and add your point of view.

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