Danielle Levy

I’m so touched by the suicide of Mark Madoff, the son of Bernard Madoff in prison for a $50 billion scheme. He and his brother Andrew were the people who alerted the authorities after their father privately confessed. My father when he had Alzheimer’s invested in what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme and after his death the Receiver appointed by the court to recover the money came after me since I had figured out it was a strange investment and redeemed it as soon as I could meaning I was able to prevent the loss of funds. I know what it’s like to be wrongly accused, to have motives ascribed to you that are not yours, to have to defend yourself and essentially have to prove a negative whether or not you have the documentation. I succeeded because I found a lawyer who understood my situation and was willing to fight for me. But of course lawyers cost money and in my case ate up what the investment made. In Mark Madoff’s case, the legal actions against him, according to the NYT report, included his children and were far more serious than those against me. Further, he had, he believed, become unemployable. Not only must he have had many feelings about having had to turn in his father, as part of trying to prove to the authorities he had no part in the fraud, he also had to cut off having any contacts with them. Our mettle, spiritual or otherwise is often decided by how we handle injustice. Regardless of what wrong he did or what law he may have broken,injustice does appear to be involved here somewhere. Is that why he decided to forfeit his own life?

I came across a list of some of the countries where unemployment is higher than 20%. It’s 33.8% in Macedonia, 28.6% in Armenia, 27.3% in Algeria, 25.7% in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, 23.4% in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 22.9% in South Africa, 22% in Namibia and 20.5% in Columbia. True most of us wouldn’t choose in live in most of those countries, but people in those countries are no different than we are—human beings with the same desire for stability, security and a future. Such figures and what they mean may not mean much to the some 10% among us who are unemployed, but hopefully they will help the other 90% of us view our lives, our economy and our conditions through clearer eyes.

In a recent talk to a conference on better using mobile health technology, Ted Turner, the founder of CNN among other achievements, said that the increasing interconnectedness of the world makes war increasingly undesirable. He pointed out that the media now makes it more difficult for nations to conduct military campaigns. He then cites the example of the Israeli campaign against Hezbollah. “It looked too ugly on television,” he commented. “War is so destructive and so ugly,” he said, “we can’t afford war.”
We tend to talk about peace and much less about what would bring it about, the end of war. It is something that may sound idealistic but when it is thought about through Ted Turner’s eyes, in terms of its destruction, its images, its costs, its danger, its increasing ugliness, it makes us think that not only is he making a point we can’t ignore, he is also making one for something that has to be doable.