EVIL

 Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a silent drum but, hey … a malignant dictator has been ruling my beloved country since, as he promised, the day he took office. He has continually trashed and degraded every promise of hope and tradition we have built in this country of such promise. He is a nasty, vile, and degenerate person who rules the country for which I gave up four years of my life.

That bothers me.

There are six elected officials, elected to national office, in my state who have chosen to become politically “joined at the hips” with this creature, enabling each of his antics with their silence. A majority of our state officials frolic behind him shouting hosannas.

This bothers me.

But, people I once knew as kind, generous, patriotic, and righteous souls laud his every act because he has attacked, or promises to attack, people they don't like or ideas they don’t agree with. Many of those ideas come straight from the mouth of the Galilean. Cult members support each destructive move as long as their enemies are in the line of fire. Good people now praise evil and worship the evil one.

That's what really bothers me.

RECONCILLIATION

 There was a period from roughly 1877 to the early 1910s that historians call the “reunion era” or sometimes “the Great Reconciliation.” Historians sometimes use “sectional reconciliation” or “the reunion of North and South.”

It carries no title nor official observance, but the effects remain.

Politicians pursued it to end the bitter feelings between the loyal states and the insurrectionist states of our Civil War. A stronger country emerged, so they argued, with this reconciliation.

It featured:

The public acknowledgement of both United States and Confederate state soldiers with joint memorials and reunions.

The naming of federal military bases after soldiers who had waged war against the United States for four long years. One of the most notorious was Fort Bragg, named after an insurrectionist officer generally viewed as a competent administrator but an ineffective field commander. He ordered the killing or maiming of thousands of Americans.

Personally, my family benefited as the government provided identical tombstones for two great-grandfathers, one a U.S. soldier and one a Confederate. They still stand in a lonely cemetery less the fifty feet apart.

The families of close friends didn’t fare as well. The reconciliation put the final nails into the coffin of Reconstruction and enabled the horrible effects of the Jim Crow era.

Last week we celebrated the surrender of the Confederacy. May we all hope for final victory.

RICHES

 Sometimes I worry that a dictator now rules my America. A scary aspect of this is that the dictator has only one goal in mind.

BRIDGES

 After returning from overseas service in the U.S. Navy Security Forces, I served aboard the USS Hunley for the remainder of my service. One day as I lollygagged at the ship's fantail, a shipmate named Bussey ran up to tell me about a new song he had heard. “It ain’t like nothing you’ve ever heard before.”

A short time later, I did hear it and for over half a century, each new hearing reminded me of beloved shipmates. I remained in agreement with Bussey’s original impression.

Things change. I continue to make each day a good one overall, but lately some dark clouds have passed over. I always try to find a ray of light in the darkest of clouds.

I found me one.

As I have watched one family member fade from this earthly presence, I’ve reconnected with others to my great joy. I’ve stayed in daily contact with them to the extent that this song will now, as long as I have presence of mind, to make me think of beloved kinfolks as well as beloved shipmates. I pledge to be a bridge, not an island.

Music can do that sort of thing for us.

Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water (Audio)

DRUGS

 Long before I read “The Fort Brag Cabal” by Seth Harp I had determined, through my experience, study, and observation that drugs, illegally obtained and used, represent a top, if not the top, problem facing America. The book didn’t reinforce this. It only created a primal fear that my country has been elicit in teaming with international drug warlords. They help our government fight anti-capitalist regimes and our government allows them to amass fortunes by creating havoc in American neighborhoods.

Now it seems that havoc is even more pronounced in certain of our military units.

Thinking people with whom I discuss things tend to believe that the case of a majority of American voters choosing to elect a total charlatan, grifter, and demon as president of our country is a unique phenomenon.

My primal fear this morning suggests that maybe that isn’t true. I worry that the metaphor for the election of this monster is closer to the peeling of an onion. As each layer is removed, it reveals a rottenness that began when the first slave stumbled in chains from a prison ship to work lands obtained by murdering the original inhabitants.

I wish nothing more strongly this morning more than that I be proven wrong.

THE UNCIVIL WAR

Today marks the symbolic end, 161 years ago, of the Slaveowners’ Revolt that tore our country apart for four long years. It had cost the lives of some 750,000 soldiers on the two sides, roughly two percent of the population. That would equate to six million deaths today. It left cities in ruins and farms in ashes awaiting the return of the armless, the legless, and those suffering from “soldier’s heart” as they called it back then.

Though it officially ended slavery it did not end the vicious cruelty imposed upon those who arrived in our country in chains, a sin still visited upon their descendants.

Now we are engaged in a great, but differently fought, civil war to determine whether the imbedded promises of April 9, 1865 will prevail. How long, we wonder, must the battle for human decency last?

We can hope, but the monetary resources of a great international cabal face us as the murderous artillery faced American soldiers from Missionary Ridge and the cliffs of Omaha Beach. Their power flourishes within from the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. Even the purchase of a chicken sandwich or hobby tool bolsters their power. What we need more than ever is the will to prevail against monstrous odds.

We could use a man like Ulysses S. Grant again.

ENABLERS

 There have been evil people throughout history. There are evil people today. From the Nazi era, let us look at the case of Julius Streicher. From the “Holocaust Encyclopedia:”

“Trained as an elementary school teacher, Julius Streicher (1885–1946) was an early member of the Nazi Party. In 1923, he founded the virulently antisemitic and racist newspaper, Der Stürmer. Streicher was a leading organizer of Nazi Germany's first official nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933. Although Streicher had lost credibility in party circles by 1940, he continued to edit and distribute his antisemitic propaganda newspaper to hundreds of thousands of Germans.

For his influential role in inciting hatred and violence, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg indicted Streicher on count four, crimes against humanity. Streicher was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.”

Streicher was not a Hitler, nor was he a Himmler or a Reinhard Heydrich. He never ordered the murder of innocents, nor did he belong to a police unit that carried out the orders.

He was what we call today an enabler and a propagandist.

We find his type in the thousands today in America from Franklin Graham to Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson and the hardcore members of the so-called evangelical movement.

But what about the ones who simply listen and stay silent? Will those who finally clean up our mess force them to parade by the dead bodies like General Eisenhower did the neighbors of Dachau?