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.

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?

WOODEN SHOES

 Lately I have travelled a good bit in my state. I've seen things.

I've seen cities that were not blessed by the vagaries of history drowning in despair. I've seen blessed cities drowning in traffic congestion and their own refuse.

I've seen individuals suffering from debilitating illnesses abandoned by an uncaring government.

I've seen sign of an impending drought of maybe biblical proportions descending into some of the richest farmland on earth. I've seen interstate highways that will become parking lots in five years.

As water may become our most precious commodity within a few years, we are allocating it to large data centers, not to humans.

At our state level, the top priorities are the construction of a monstrous prison to house who knows whom yet and the destruction of the public school system.

At our national level, the top priority is world domination through military invasion. Yes, it has been tried before.

My ancestors had a saying: "Wooden shoes to wooden shoes in three generations."

Over my lifetime, the generations since the promise of post-WWII America have marched by like gray horses moving into a morning midst. It is becoming increasingly painful to watch.

UNDERSTANDING

 My limited study of evolution convinces me that Homo sapiens have a genetic urge to understand. Both religion and science grew from the earliest efforts to control, in the first case and learn in the second. How does this apply to the current state of America?

It doesn’t seem conclusive to me simply to say Donald Trump is crazy mean and getting worse. I’ve scraped my mind and can’t imagine an historic member of the United States House of Representative or Senate who would not speak out against the current shenanigans. Now there are 217 in the first case and 53 in the second. Their silence drowns out the cries of the hungry, sick, and misbegotten. Why?

Our ancients discovered early on that neither sympathetic (imitative) nor contagious magic resolved emergences due to the weather. Later, science helped by uncovering the causes and developing protections.

It makes more sense to understand that our current crisis evolves not from the mind of a madman but the orchestrations of an international cabal of oligarchs who seek a world more from the minds of Orwell and Huxley than those of Locke or Mill. Their operational strategy follows Capone more than Lincoln. They understand very well how to impose silence and guarantee obsequiousness.

Doesn’t that make more sense?

GETHSEMANE

 Last week I travelled through the forgotten part of our state, the Arkansas Delta. I passed through a community named, of all things, Gethsemane. Folks there pronounced it “Gessymane,” as in, “He’s from over ‘bout Gessymane.”

Years ago while travelling through I would see homes scattered around and even two grocery stores. One would see neighbors visiting, children playing, and machinery serving family farms. Over the years the stores disappeared, then the homes and people, and then the farm equipment as corporate farming reduced the work force and equipment required to feed the world. Eventually, all that was left was a road sign noting “Gethsemane.” On this trip through, the sign had disappeared.

The Garden of Gethsemane holds deep significance in the Christian religion as the place where Jesus Christ experienced profound emotional and spiritual struggle.

It is important in the Christian religion as it represents anguish, sorrow, resolve, human weakness, but spiritual resolve.

For Christians, Gethsemane serves as a powerful symbol of prayer, obedience, and perseverance in times of trial.

It dawned on me as I travelled that lonely stretch of highway, that my America has lost, sadly, the physical reality of Gessymane and now seems bent on abandoning the spiritual value of Gethsemane.

PRIORITIES

 I remember reading somewhere that, in late 1944 into early 1945, as Nazi Germany was collapsing:

The Allied bombing campaign had crippled Germany’s rail network.

German troops at the front were desperate for transport of fuel, weapons, and reinforcements.

Despite this, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and a central architect of the Holocaust, continued to prioritize deportations—especially in 1944 during the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Trains continued to deport Jews to concentration and extermination camps as a top priority.

I dunno. Just thought about this the other day on a trip into lower Arkansas, i.e. LA.

Passing by bald areas where farm communities once stood and concrete-pad strewn strips where downtowns once thrived, I thought about us.

Conditions now suggest that those areas may be facing a drought of Biblical proportions, threatening the only industry left to those communities.

Then I saw where our president said we couldn’t afford to address the health of our people anymore because we need the money to make bombs and kill people. Actually, it wasn’t money but debt-capacity, which he equates with money.

Leave saving humanity to the states, he said.

In our state, they want to direct resources to the destruction of public schools and construction of a monumental prison facility.

Is this what y’all voted for? Is this what y’all want?

Really?

VIRTUE

 This morning as Bessie Smith the Rescue Dog and I rambled, we listen to “Cannery Row,” by John Steinbeck. It was perhaps my thirtieth encounter, but she likes fiction, so we reconnected. Came across a phrase I had forgotten: “Misunderstood Virtues.”

Wow. Got me to thinking. As I have said before, I’ll never understand why they say I have a derangement syndrome because I don’t think, for among many reasons, that the grifter that dishonored the military service of John McCain should even be imagined as the president of my beloved country.
Here’s the thing. I don’t honor what Lt. Col. McCain was doing when they shot him down. He was following orders. They were evil orders but that’s what his country asked him to do and he had taken that oath. For the next six years, however, he served with as much dignity and patriotism as one could ask. He was the very picture of a virtuous individual.
It’s the same with Jane Fonda. I don’t respect what she did, but she did it for a defensible reason. I hold no lingering hatred. After all, hers wasn’t the greatest sin associated with that miserable war. Trust me.
Virtues, in my opinion, are complex. That’s why we should read, and why we should think about what we read.
Today we might remember that 161 years ago, the United States Army was within a few days of ending the institution of slavery, with all its sickening manifestations, in our country. There were those among both the victorious and the vanquished who felt they were operating within the most glorious of virtues.

Retribution

Sometimes I wonder if, in some bizarre case of cosmic retribution, America isn't getting what she deserves.

In my lifetime, I’ve seen us allow the tragic effects of the Jim Crow bigotry to exert catastrophe after catastrophe upon the lives of decent Americans.

I’ve seen (been victimized myself) us invade a country that had done us no discernable harm and wage a seemingly never-ending war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. For nothing.

I’ve seen us wage wars for profit that have de-stabilized large segments of the planet.

I’ve seen us make great strides in destroying the planet that succors us. Signs suggest that the next few months threaten a drought that might make water more precious than diamonds.

And now we choose to be ruled by international oligarchs using a mindset similar to what ruled the American South in 1861. They want to take over and rule us our country that once held such promise.

And they are doing a damned good job of it.

Coincidences?

Maybe. Or maybe there is a great spirit in the sky observing and controlling our destinies. If so, I’m guessing she’s pretty put out with us.

1968

 A friend and I had lunch last week and the conversation turned to the year1968 when we served simultaneously, but hundreds of miles apart, during the same war. We were there for the year, I near Da Nang and he south of Saigon.

During May of that year some 2,415 of our brothers died.
2,415: That’s the most of any month during that sad war.
There were that many empty chairs at holiday gatherings next year from only one month’s insanity.
The year 1968 overall was the deadliest year for U.S. forces in Vietnam (16,899 deaths).
That’s just Americans. That’s just deaths. That’s 16,899 men who would never hold a child of theirs in their arms thereafter.
That’s just the year we were there.
We beat the odds, my friend and I. Sort of.
Do me a favor. If you find yourself getting sexually aroused when Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump talk about how hot-damned tough America is, find yourself a quiet spot, sit, take out a mirror, look at yourself, and say, “I am a complete asshole,” at least 2,415 times.
Because, trust me. You are.

RESIST FACISM

 MORNING THOUGHTS

One almost has to admire their cunning. Since Newt Gingrich showed them how, they have convinced enough Americans, including the young, that it is It is acceptable to:

Dishonor the dead,

Dishonor the veteran,

Dishonor the physically challenged,

Dishonor the female,

Dishonor persons of color, and

Disrespect the words of the Galilean on the Mount.

Can we even imagine an America fueled by youth indoctrinated so? It’s taken only 80 years to go from the band of brothers to the band of brigands.