I think not.

• The last GM car I owned was an Oldsmobile Delta 88.  It was a 1980 diesel converted to gasoline junk car that I bought for $1,000.00 as a student in Long Island New York.  It was an old clunker, a gas guzzler and frankly a piece of junk.  The cars GM made in the following years were not as good.  Many people will be hurt if GM closes its gates.  Many people will be hurt if it doesn’t.  In all honesty, the correct business decision would be to let it struggle and win or lose based on its chances to deliver good cars to its potential customers and not based on the broken backs of the American tax payers.
• Same goes for Ford and Chrysler although I must admit, with the exception of a 1973 Ford Escort my father owned a millennium ago, I never had an experience with these car makers.
• Speaking of tax payers.  Does it make sense to you that all those who didn’t party in the last decade, those who shopped in line with their means, those who bought took reasonable houses, took reasonable mortgages and actually paid them, will be the ones to bail out the ones who did the exact opposite?  What’s the message here?  Shop till you drop, the government will save your butt?
• I know I’m being very naive here, but how will the government pay for those bailout programs?
  The stock market made sense when people actually invested in an idea, a new technology, and were willing to wait years, sometimes decades, for the companies to grow, to succeed, so they can enjoy the fruits of their investments.  Now a day trader gets up in the morning, has a coffee, buys a stock, and sells it before lunch.  The stock market used to be a place where ideas meet money.  Now it’s a meeting place where greed meets stupidity.
• President Obama proposed to people to invest carefully, and with patience.  Like people used to do when they bought IBM stock when a new child was born, to fund his or her college education.  A plausible alternative would be to stop the trading and close the stock market altogether.
• In any case, if I had money on me, I’d put it anywhere between government bonds and cash in the mattress.  Stock market?  Not a chance.
• The drive of executives to show “double digit growth every quarter” must be eradicated.
• Risk analysis as a profession should be outlawed.  At least the analysts must pay out of pocket the losses that their customers suffered when their “analysis” proved wrong.
• I haven’t written about China in a very long time.  I see China as the most unfortunate nation in modern time.  China did all the right things.  It provided a platform for all the greedy on the planet to manufacture everything at a fraction of the cost they were used to pay at home.  Of course, the greedy did not roll the savings onto their customers, but simply made more profit.  A lot more.  China re-introduced itself to the world as a welcoming country, educated, and exotic.  The climax was last year, with the fantastic Olympic Games of Beijing 2008.  China was expecting to reap the benefit of its outstanding investment.  But as it seems to me, the global economy shut itself down at the same time the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games took place.
• Another observation about China, India and a few other countries, “the manufacturing capitals of the world”.  No doubt, all those countries were building wealth.  Quickly and significantly.  A very thin layer of very rich people developed.  The hopes were that a large middle class will be evolving alongside that layer of filthy rich.  A strong middle class could sustain a recession.  A strong middle class could generate enough internal consumption to survive the global sluggish economy.  But there was not enough time.  A middle class isn’t there yet, and with their main customers, Europe and the US, shot, these economies are in deep trouble.  Don’t judge by the statements coming out of the governments.  Judge by the actions taken.  China is investing the “mountain of dollars” in infrastructure.  Tens of millions of unemployed is not something Beijing would love to see.  I would expect military build-up, and a lot more trains in Asia and South America.
• So the bottom line for the developing countries: your customers disappeared, they are about to reclaim their manufacturing capabilities, and you didn’t have enough time to build up a middle class.  Bleek.  I found this fascinating article about East Asia.  Read more.
• And don’t forget Russia.  Russia is nearing bankruptcy.  Ukraine, Island, Hungary and a few other countries are almost there already.  Ireland, one of the finest economies in the world in the last decade, is in deep trouble.
• How do we get out of this?  I don’t know.  But I do know one thing.  We’re not going back to where we were before.  Growth is good.  Growth is great.  But the growth must be legal, reasonable, conservative, sustainable.  It must reflect the growth in the population.  Maybe a little more than that, bit not a lot.  Otherwise, bubbles are created.  I would pass a global law.  Executives delivering cancerous growth will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The young ones are busy all the time.  Shiri with homework, books, TV shows and many many girlfriends.  Guy’s job is to work us.  He has us both under his thumb.  Making sure we have enough chores to satisfy his growing needs.  Preparing vegetable free meals – he is very particular about vegetables, in fact, if there are any on the table, he would simply leave the table, covering his nose with his little fingers.  He likes to color, watch TV, as long as the shows are different than the ones his sister is watching.  He falls asleep in front of the TV, to be carried to bed later.  In short, being the little kid that he is, he occupies us all the time.  Mist of the time, in a very charming and pleasant way.

But like maturing parents that we are, and given that we just returned to Israel after a few years, and given that Dorit’s parents live about an hour away, and that they love the kids, and the kids love them back, and that the grandparents live in a rural environment, with fresh air and lots of greenery, and after being prompted numerous times, by all sides involved, we finally decided.  The kids were going to spend the weekend by their grandparents at the kibbutz.

We packed pajamas, multiple outfits, tooth brushes and toothpaste, the favorite teddy bears, and off we went.  Not without worries.  We were worried that Shiri would call us in the middle of the night to be picked up, and that Guy would miss us so much that we would have to drop everything and go see them.  We drove to the Kibbutz in the evening, and stayed there until after 9:00 PM just to make sure that everything is cool before we left.  When it was time to go, the kids looked at us, threw us a kiss, and went back to their business.  We stood outside the door for a couple of minutes, just to make sure.  But there was no alarm.  We left.

We checked our cellular phones every five minutes, just to make sure we didn’t miss a call.  We didn’t.  We called a little after 10:00 PM to see if Guy was already sleeping.  He wasn’t.  Everything was pretty cool.

We, on the other hand, were falling asleep.  We met with our best friends at about 10:00 PM.  An hour and a half later we were already driving home.  Dorit slept all the way.  We went to sleep as soon as we got home.  During the night, we both went to check on the kids.  The first time, I was scared out of my skin: “where are the kids?”.  The second time, I realized that I was missing them.  The third time, I realized, they are growing independent, and that soon enough rather than hoping to get a child-free minute, I’d be begging them to forfeit their time with their friends fir boring time with the elderly couple – their parents.

When we finally met, they said hello, no excitement registered.  When we asked if we were missed, the were honest, as we taught them to be.  They said not that much.  To make a long story short.  Rather than enjoying a weekend without the children, we felt we were abandoned by the children.  Go figure…

Horses were still walking the streets, and milkmen were still delivering fresh bottles of milk to people’s doorsteps.  Children were playing downstairs.  And the games were different.

We were playing “Corners”, standing on both sides of the street, throwing a beaten down football, aiming at the edge of the sidewalk.  If you aimed well, the ball would bounce off the edge and get back to you.  That was worth one point.  If you got really lucky (and I swear it happened to me at least once), the ball would bounce again on your side, and if it crossed the middle of the street, well then, that would be worth two points.  The occasional car would respect the game and blow the horn to warn the children playing.  I remember clearly, that if Tali, who was later killed in the First Lebanon War played, there would be a large audience as well, cheering him and jeering his opponent.

We were playing “Stanga”.  A game which required accuracy in kicking a foot ball.  The goal was not to score by getting the ball into the goal, but to actually hit one of the beams that created the goal.  We played with little glass balls, the goal was simple, win as many as possible.  We also played with dried up apricot pits.  When my parents finally threw away the collection, years after my brother and I graduated with Masters degrees, it had a few thousand items.  I suspect, though, that my parents still buy apricots for the pits, and that they still collect it for the grandchildren.  I doubt that any of the grandchildren has any interest in playing with old dried apricot pits…

We rode bicycles around town, visiting friends, going to remote playgrounds and construction sites.  We were doing things that kids today aren’t interested in doing and are not allowed to either.  We had lots of friends.  True friends.  The kind of friends who would have given you their last sandwich, or give you a ride across town if you had a flat, and would lie to their parents as well as yours, only so you don’t get in trouble.  A bunch of us could show up for dinner at a friend’s house, and his or her mother wouldn’t flinch.  By the way, TV was introduced in Israel around 1967.  Obviously, people were reading more and talking more.  Dinner with the family was different back then.  It was an event.  A mandatory event.

We had a park not too far from where we lived.  It was called Jacob’s Park, named after one Jacob Sorasky, whose significance I once knew.  This park was very special.  It was walking distance from home, but it had all the elements to make it adventurous for kids of all ages.  It had a playground for toddlers, a meeting place for parents, a huge jungle-like garden with plenty of places for hide and seek.  It had a second floor, but I was never there, it was for the older children who were already kissing.  I was at least a decade away at the time.  We were still at the phase where boys play with boys.  The park had two small hills on top of each grew an old, really old, Sycamore trees.  One of them was a little hollow, providing a perfect place to hide.  Unfortunately, everyone knew this hiding place.  Later in life, while attending State University of New York at Stony Brook, I would actually live on Sycamore Circle.  But that would be a couple of decades away.  Funny, but I would have qualified for the second floor then, if only I would have been around.

Once, at dusk, we were playing with a striped red ball at the park.  Someone threw it real hard, and it disappeared into the thick bush.  We never found it that day, or the next.  In fact we never found it, even though we were looking for it every time we visited the park.

At the other side of the park there was a small water pool with a fountain.  Hundreds of dragonflies would use this pool for reproduction in the summer time.  Providing a great arena for training in catching dragonflies at rest.  Individuals, but also couples and triples.  We never thought at the time that interfering poor dragonflies while mating was rude…

And we had the gangs of course.  No, not even close to what you think.  It was completely innocent.  The gangs were kids who lived around each other in the same neighborhood, a few blocks at most apart from each other.  The kids from the next few blocks were outsiders, and were not welcome usually.  In order to relate of even understand the next story, you have to have some background.  It was the late sixties.  Most of the Jews living in Israel came from somewhere else, mainly Europe.  The people were not rich, some still suffered some anxieties related to the attempt made by the Germans to annihilate them.  My mother was most certainly one of them.  She still is.  Anyhow.  Games, were scarce.  Books were to be borrowed at libraries.  Bicycles were inherited from older relatives who grew out of them or found other things to do.  I got a tricycle from my mother’s cousin Hanna who lived not too far from us.  I used them, and so did the gang.  Every child in the neighborhood could come and borrow the tricycle and use it as he pleased.  As long as it was returned to its place behind my house.  One day the tricycle was gone.  The gang went looking, but we simply couldn’t find it.  One day, a kid came back from the next neighborhood and reported that he caught a glimpse of the tricycle.  The gang went to investigate.  We must have been two dozen children if not more.  Sure enough, we found the tricycle parked a few blocks away.  It was returned without a fight.  But you should have seen the parade bringing it back home.  It was like our neighborhood’s Independence Day…

There are countless other stories.  The book was taking place in my old neighborhood.  But it was also describing old games, and old feelings.  Friendship, brotherhood, camaraderie.  It was talking about an old time.  It was not a better or worse time, it was different.  We were different.  And there was at least one thing going for us all at the time.  We were young.

So why the tears?  For the years, for the lost friends, for the closed doors.  Mostly, I would say, the realization that while the alternative is much worse, we are, after all, getting older…