APRIL 5, FRIDAY

GRATEFUL

Today I went from my rented room to Dorothee’s house next door at 8:45 a.m. for breakfast and spent the whole day there except for lunch at a local restaurant just down the street.

We were going to go to Mespelbrunn, a nearby castle, for an outing, but before we could go Nina, Dorothee’s daughter appeared for the day with her four sons, aged 12 to 2, while very much pregnant with her fifth child, a girl, Anna. So we spent the day in the house with the children running around and two huge dogs howling at times with jealousy when the other got more attention.

This allowed Margit and Dorothee, two little girls when I stayed with their family 65 years ago when I was in Germany with the Army, now 71 and 69, to give me a great gift.

What they gave me was their view of the state of Germany and the world from a right wing perspective, which counters my left wing perspective. They not only told me about their strong feelings about the Covid pandemic and vaccines being a hoax but their feeling that the world was being run by a liberal cabal with strong Zionist connections with the current German government being corrupt. They not only told me this with quiet conviction but also gave me their sources, a book that I bought on line in its English version, “Corona: False Alarm?”, as well as a Telegram channel from which they got most of their news, not trusting the mainline media.

For the first time I realized how a rational, thoughtful person could hold strong right wing views, views that to me, with my liberal views seemed to be conspiracy theories. While my liberal views seemed to them seemed to be based on false unexamined conspiracies. We talked quietly, never arguing, never trying to persuade the other that we were right. And in the process I learned that we had many strongly held beliefs in common. We both believed in the worth of individuals, we both believed in equality with everyone having the basics of life, we both believed in the goodness of the common person. What we disagreed on was the degree to which we could accept the current world order and the way it was explained to to us by the standard media and standard education. And we each had facts and people we trusted to back up our beliefs. A good example is the authors of the book on Corona, written by two eminent German doctors, a husband and wife team. I haven’t read the book yet, but I am sure that it will be both rational and make sense.

Whom do we trust? This may be more a question of our life experience and the things that enliven or immobilize us, our own inner response to the world, than whether we are right or not by some objective standard. All day I kept thinking about the strong belief in one god or another in the countries I have just visited—Sri Lanka, India, evangelical USA or Catholic parts of Germany—and how people can have such strong certainty about one religion or another. Each religion enlivens its believers, but no religion can be right and the others wrong. How do we decide what we will have faith in, probably deciding about how we feel about a world view than rationally deciding.

The same, I am guessing, with left wing and right wing convictions, each feels absolutely right to its believers. And this can lead to polarization and demeaning the opposite view. But in our case what happened was a great gift to me. What mattered to us is that at one point we were attached to each other in a good way and still, 65 years later with a lifetime of experience that took us in different directions, we can still talk quietly and enjoy each other’s presence and care about each other and accept each other as we are which seems to me to be the solution to many of our political tensions. Different things animate us, as is true with humans the world over, but in the end we are human beings who can accept and care about each other.

So my one day visit with Margit and Dorothee has been very valuable to me. It has taken me out of my liberal bubble for a little while and made me realize that good people can have very different views and still be good friends. And for that I am very grateful.