Dear Marfa Community,
I know many of you and count you among some of my closest friends. Many of you attended my wedding celebration and we have worked together off and on for years. The more recent arrivals in Marfa are strangers to me but I suspect you were drawn to live and work there for the same reasons I was years ago. Although I haven’t seen you all in a long time, I keep tabs on the happenings of the town via The Big Bend Sentinel.
I was very disheartened to see a photo of so many of you standing –– green “Marfa For Ceasefire” stickers on your shirts –– calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Scrolling through recent articles, I see another showing a “Marfa for a Free Palestine” banner in the windows of the Locker Plant.
I, like most of you, would like to see an immediate end to the war and an immediate end to the suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza and elsewhere. The reality of the situation is complex and should not be parsed out in a few slogans and a council resolution. There was a ceasefire in Gaza on October 6. Hamas violated that ceasefire by brutally attacking their neighbors, murdering, raping, torturing and kidnapping civilians. This was not an action aimed in pursuit of a military objective or an act of liberation … the attack was a sadistic act of terrorism. October 7th was an attack that echoes those that Jews have faced throughout their existence as the people of Judea and as an exiled diaspora ever since.
We must put ourselves in the place of those Israeli victims. Marfa is by degrees a border town. The number of hostages and those murdered in the attack roughly equals the number of residents in Marfa. The Big Bend territory has been disputed land and was “claimed” from our neighbors to the south. Were our residents subject to daily rocket attacks, we would certainly build up our defenses. Were we to be invaded, our friends raped, tortured and eventually murdered, our children beheaded and burned in front of us, we would certainly respond and defend ourselves. If our family members were kidnapped we would fight for their return.
Taking up the cause of the Palestinian people feels noble and just. Doing so without a foundation in the history of the region and without firsthand experience in the conflict is irresponsible and a threat to Jews everywhere. There are real world consequences to actions such as a council resolution for a ceasefire. I am currently on the board of trustees and a co-chair of the security committee for a large synagogue in Albuquerque. I see firsthand how echoing propaganda and allowing the strategy used by Hamas to play on our sympathies translates into the need for armed security when my kids attend Hebrew school. How I need to find money for bulletproof films on the windows of the synagogue. How we need to meet with the joint terrorism task force and the FBI to assess threats to our local Jewish community.
If you feel for the innocent lives in Gaza, please protest Hamas. Please protest UNRWA and the perpetuation of Palestinian victimhood. Please call for the unconditional release of all hostages. Please call for dialogue. Please stand up for your Jewish friends and neighbors. A ceasefire resolution is not the answer.
In friendship,
Ben Meisner
—
This year we have a presidential election as we are all aware. One presidential candidate in particular has been telling his audiences that he will “Be a dictator for one day.” And, he ends his speeches with the statement that he will be a “Strongman.” On its face value, being a strong leader sounds like a good thing, one who would not bend with the wind.
The term STRONGMAN is explained in Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book, Strongmen, as a person who, as president, asserts executive power at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of government. History gives us many examples of Strongmen, such as Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Pinochet and Franco, who have destroyed democracies and become dictators.
In this election cycle it behooves each and every one of us, if we value the world we have grown up in, where we have the freedom to gather, the freedom to travel, the freedom to voice our opinion, the freedom to worship according to our own conscience, and education for all our children, then, we MUST vote to secure the continuation of this democracy we have inherited.
L. P. Martin
Fort Davis, TX
—
Boeing charged with a crime?
The Boeing Company has been accused of an alleged “crime” as the result of several aviation incidents lately, charging they were caused by design errors and problems in discussions with investigators. It was alleged that Boeing did not provide needed paperwork.
A disclaimer, yes I own some Boeing stock.
But I also know what I’m talking about. For about 25 years, I wrote for aviation magazines on three continents and found it necessary to know a lot about how aircraft are designed, built and operated.
Some recent incidents could be a design flaw in the aircraft. But, while the NTSB admitted some may have been maintenance issues instead, some were clearly maintenance issues and the designers should remain free of charges.
In the latest report, the name Boeing was near the top of the report though that incident could have happened to any aircraft ever built. At least 50 people were injured after “a LATAM Airlines Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner dipped so dramatically into a nosedive for a couple of seconds,” it said.
That sounds to me like a wind shear or some other atmospheric event having nothing whatsoever to do with who built the aircraft.
An earlier report was fire coming out of an engine on takeoff. To be sure, an engine fire is most likely caused by an incident which can threaten any airplane, such as a bird strike or other damaging material ingested during normal operations.
No one can blame Boeing for that. They are threats, just like the weather, and operators have no choice but to deal with it when it happens.
In any event, Boeing can’t be blamed for an engine fire because they don’t manufacture engines. That would be Pratt & Whitney, General Electric or Rolls Royce.
Losing a landing-gear wheel on takeoff and a door block blowing off almost certainly are maintenance issues. Some mechanic bolted them on during maintenance and made some mistake, likely long after the aircraft left the assembly line.
A landing gear collapse could be a design issue, but it just as likely could be a maintenance issue.
We’ll know after a thorough inspection of the aircraft.
To be sure the 2018 Lion Air crash in Indonesia and the Ethiopian Air crash near Addis Ababa the next year were design issues. They were the result of a computer software problem that Boeing put into their flight management systems when the planes were built.
Many of the latest incidents were much more likely to have been the result of a maintenance error. And many of them were on planes operated by United Airlines. Are they not suspect?
Jim Street
Alpine
