My father used to tell me how, when he was a boy in the 1930’s, he came upon a cobbler plying his craft in Moscow. The man was an Azeri, quietly industrious like many of his race and, just as important, perennially sober.
In any decent society, patterns of deference are the foundation of the social order: the young defer to the old, females defer to males, parents defer to children. Any senior member who allows his juniors or inferiors to treat him with contempt or indifference is undermining the order and potentially rearing a sociopath who will prey upon his fellows.
Most of us, when we were children, tried to explain away some deviation from parental norms on the grounds that “All the other kids are sporting a ducktail and wearing leather jackets or smoking dope and listening to Hendrix.”
You should be thankful President Trump is in the White House as nuclear powers India and Pakistan go at it in another war over the disputed province and a terrorist attack India blames on Pakistan.
After this tedious exposition, we shall get down to such questions as whether or not people who use cell phones in restaurants should suffer summary and immediate executions,
The year 1931 was when Stalin’s “collectivization” reached an apogee. In 1928 the policy was yet in embryo, with most peasant farms still in private hands…
