CLEANSING

 Seems I’m now the family patriarch. In a dream last night, someone asked me to form a short message of hope for the younger set in these troubled times. In the dream, I said, “What I offer is this: When I was born, one of the wickedest governments ever to sour the earth had turned my ancestral homeland into a cesspool of hate, murder, and carnage. In my lifetime, one lifetime, mind you, Germany transformed itself from a fanatical abscess on the body of humanity to a peaceful and prosperous country worthy of emulation. In our country, we now face primal deterioration. Our America is strong. We can learn from history and cleanse our nest. Let’s do so, and let’s not take an entire lifetime."

WAR

 As I’ve said, been studying the life of Herbert Hoover, a complicated person who was responsible for saving millions of lives around the world during its wars and disasters but bears the historical onus of neglecting his own people in our great crisis. In Kenneth Whyte’s massive biography, I ran across an interesting passage. It states how Hoover felt that WWI would forever change how societies dealt with each other.

“Total war [Hoover] realized engendered total hate.”

That’s an interesting observation. World wars tend to change the paradigm of history. Our politicians today spend the money that could be used to feed the hungry to buy bombs. In an oxymoronic dribble that only fools would cherish, they claim that war brings peace.

Does it? Or does our warlike compulsion resonate more like peeling away layers of an onion representing our society, revealing a more pungent evil with each stripping?

When one considers how so many so-called followers of the Galilean have abandoned his sermon of love and now embrace and worship our dictator’s rages of hate, we weep for Zion. It seems that in the history of Homo sapiens, we have learned much more about how to destroy than how to love.

In short, we have abandoned our better nature, layer by layer.

WARS

 If you hear or see me say something disparaging about our military, please know that I am not referring to the brave women and men who serve in the various uniforms of our armed services. Nor do I intend any criticism of the remaining conscientious officers who have chosen to serve in a noble career and to do it nobly.

If I grouse about the military, I refer to the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about. These are people, companies, and institutions who must have wars, or rumors of war, to finance their insatiable demand for riches and power. Satisfying it is not an option. It will not be satisfied, cannot be satisfied. Like Monty Python’s famous character, it will feast until riches spout from every orifice and then demand more. And we will feed it while the last child starves, the last veteran dies from wounds acquired while serving it, while the last neighborhood withers from the effects of drugs and wars, while the last institution of learning smolders in ashes, while our planet burns, and while the last family stumbles from a collapsing home into a barren world.

Herbert Hoover

 In August of 1914, the German army invaded Belgium on its way to attack France. Belgium was a prosperous county that traded for most of its foodstuffs. The German army stripped the country of what food and livestock it produced while murdering thousands of innocent civilians, a phenomenon known as “The Rape of Belgium.” The British navy closed the ports through which food arrived. A country of 7.5 million people faced starvation.

When no help came, Herbert Hoover, who was living in Europe, initiated a great effort called the Commission for Relief in Belgium.

Under Hoover’s leadership, the CRB became a logistical powerhouse. It coordinated international donations, chartered ships, and oversaw the distribution of food within Belgium through local committees. At its peak, the organization fed more than 10 million people daily, not only in Belgium but also in parts of northern France. Hoover emphasized efficiency, transparency, and strict neutrality, ensuring that aid reached civilians rather than military forces.

I’m studying the life of this complex man in what I call my “hair shirt hour.” I spend it learning about or reading things I should have done already but didn’t want to.

I’m curious and eager to see how this man could have been so compassionate at one point and so seemingly cruel at another. Wish me luck

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.