Has defense of Israel become an unwelcome burden?,Hanging by a Thread,Has defense of Israel become an unwelcome burden?
A bout a month ago I heard a rumor that one of the major national health services would be opening up its own pharmacy in my neighborhood. My first reaction was to wonder about the impact on the local pharmacy that has served the neighborhood for three decades especially as it has always benefitted from certain special privileges from that particular health service.
The next day I ran into one of the local pharmacists in the grocery store checkout line and I asked her about the rumors. She confirmed them and told me she had already been given notice by the owner of the pharmacy.
The particular pharmacist is exemplary in every respect: knowledgeable about both conventional and alternative remedies pleasant and patient and fluent in Hebrew English and French. Her termination had absolutely nothing to do with any shortcoming on her part or the quality of the existing pharmacy. Rather her fate was determined by a decision made by the national health service to create a network of neighborhood pharmacies.
The circumstances of this particular pharmacist or the owners of the pharmacy which is now rumored to be closing do not I suppose rise to the level of high tragedy. In some form or another the same story takes place tens of thousands of times every day somewhere around the globe: A new environmental regulation forces a coal mine to shut down resulting in the loss of jobs of all coal miners in the region; manufacturing plants move abroad to take advantage of cheaper foreign labor; robots are developed to do jobs formerly done by human beings. Anger at such impersonal forces played a major role in Donald Trump’s surprise victory.
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