Survivors at All Ages

 Survivors at All Ages

 The older you get the more dead people you know. Or knew.

The price of experience.

A sad truism, this rate of the knowledge of the dead, especially those that you knew personally. Recently reconfirmed to me by Philip Roth, a famous writer of fiction. He turned 80 a few years ago and announced that he had given up writing (two years before he had given up the craft at 78, then announced it publicly). He reads now instead of writing, as an octogenarian, these past five years or so. Thanks for joining the rest of us!

He lamented that he missed seeing the publications of past comrades, now in his elderly years.

Poor guy. Join the rest of us, in our own melancholy ways, while many of us a bit younger.

Those of us not famous ones, we suffer the same as the known and renowned. We live on and know loss of loved ones, and others that should be still around.

We all miss our comrades. And we see it, feel it, more as we age.

Thus it was ever so.

There are those that I have known that have passed on, much too early. Many of them had unique talents and insights, ways to see things and contribute that are no longer available. The years of their demises?

2001. 2003. 2014. 2016.

All of us were products of the 20th century, the century that produced awful sidebars that took away countless young lives in the forms of world wars, cold wars, hot wars, or simply disease and starvation. Millions die young, there is no doubt.

You might call us the Vietnam generation.

The very young and the very old, and everyone in between, we all pass on.

But were we productive while we lived? What did we leave?

Two of those above left progeny, a son and a daughter. Two did not pass on their genes, apparently.

They all left legacies, as sons, uncles, brothers, friends, associates.

Memories now. In the present, as we contemplate.

Jeremy, Bobby, Brent, and Rob.

They died by different ways, some unknown by most. We know that one was by prescribed drugs.

Jeremy did drugs since middle school, I believe heavier in high school. Those things I am confidant that I do know. But I don't know if his death was drug-related.

Bobby had some dreams and aspirations for the Hollywood scene. He died in Los Angeles right before I moved there.

Those were the early two thousands.

More recently, Brent and Rob died. They were alone in Northern Virginia. They had their sets of friends from what I know, but they must have been lonely. Friendly faces and relationships were available to them, this I do know for certain.

I feel like a survivor when I think about these smart, friendly, create gentlemen: I wake up, and like Philip Roth in in his recent interview with the New York Times, I am grateful to be alive. He is 85. I am now in my late 40s. Much longer, in terms of days lived, than the ones I describe.

To wake up every day, still alive.

We are survivors at all ages, which means we have outlasted many cohorts and past acquaintances.

We were not sent on the ill-fated mission that blew up a soldier at the point of his squad in Afghanistan (2017).

We were not involved in that bad car snafu that took the lives of unexpected victims.

We did not contract the disease (take your pick) that disabled and then sucked the life from us as children, adolescents, or adults.

We were blessed and lucky, all the way.

I suppose when people talk about survivor's guilt it is associated with tragic accidents or events that kill some and  leave others spared, thinking of the fact that they survived those brushes with the Hereafter.

Over time we are all looking at our continued existence as such. We think of the contrast of being alive while these others sleep.

I definitely think of the lost talent of those four. The impact that they may have sustained had they lived. More spouses, children, co-workers, works, projects, ideas...

I wish that I in some capacity could make or compensate for the losses of them, but in the end I write these sad prosaic passages reflecting about them and me.

Like Pablo Neruda who wrote powerful verses as a youth, I could write the saddest verses this night. This morning while still alive.

But also like Neruda, I survived and I remember.

Bobby 1971-2001.
Jeremy 1972-2003.
Brent   1974-2014.
Rob     1989-2016

Keep dreaming of the future and the past.

Alternate History Y

Alternate History Y

Lee Harvey Oswald got sick the night before the Friday he was going to shoot the US president in Dallas. And somewhat randomly, but influenced by poorer vision and breathing, he missed the fatal shot on John F. Kennedy. The bullet still put Jack in the hospital, then he was released from the close supervisory care four weeks later; Lyndon Baines Johnson never became president.

Southeast Asia was getting messy with Communists; President Kennedy knew that the country had lost a lot of good soldiers and marines in Korea a few years before, so he never escalated the war. The secret government advisors stayed around the Democratic government of South Vietnam, but Kennedy knew the Vietnamese people did not really respect the Christian leadership of Saigon; the president could tell that this country was not ideologically or culturally like the Korean peninsula.

These people wanted freedom, albeit through Communism. Much like the Chinese.

So, South Vietnam fell, and the Soviet-Chinese enterprise started to fill into Laos and Cambodia, even Burma. Thailand held strong due to built-up troops from Britain and France; the US and many world UN countries deposited their troops there. Including India.

However, the Communist insurrections burgeoning in Malaysia and Indonesia became a messy quagmire; the United States and especially Australia and France became alarmed to the closeness of these civil wars and the Communist regimes there.

The Muslim nature of the Communist regimes of Malaysia and Indonesia struck many true Leninists or Trotskyites as counter-intuitive. How good devout Muslims believe in godless government?

They found a suitable way, and incorporated the Communist Manifesto into the Friday sermons in the mosques. More Sunni than Shia accepted, but that was enough. Not to mention the Alowites in Syria, or the Shia of Azerbaijan, already behind the Iron Curtain.

This ideological economic movement greatly affected the Muslim Middle-East, and huge swathes of Africa. East and West Pakistan had new arguments to wage against India and the West.

Meanwhile Latin America, fueled by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, became a hotbed of insurrections and democratic movements. Chinese advisors were found from Mexico through Central America all the way down to Patagonia.

Europe was freaking out. The Soviets had taken Hungary in the 1950s, preparing to move on Prague and Czechoslovakia. The USSR kept up its western and southern advances.

Yugoslavia was looking for their own lebensraum, Bosnian Muslim specialists spreading the new Islamic Communism throughout the endless countries of Africa and Asia.

China had its operatives in Cuba and El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Argentina and Chile...

The West was in trouble. The Cold War fighting that might have only been fought by proxy in so-called Banana Republics across the globe now necessitated United States troops.

Israel was licking its wounds, trying to figure out the new Islamic Communists of the Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Syrians, Egyptians, Turks...

Kennedy lost to Nixon eventually, and things got really messy. Hundreds of thousands of US troops were deployed into the newest World War, awaiting nuclear Armageddon.

This alternate history was a nightmare scenario.

___________________________

Back to our known history: we all acknowledge that the tragic loss of John F. Kennedy was a blow to the United States.

We also acknowledge that the Vietnam Conflict, yes, the War in Vietnam was awful and gut-wrenching.

Many young men did not return; many more lives were forever altered. Vietnam suffered unspeakable losses. No war is pretty, but this fight was ugly all around.

However, I would submit that we cannot re-write history, and more importantly, we do not know what a sniper's bullet may or may not have changed in the course of human history.

And, Jack Kennedy, in this alternate narrative, avoided the tragedy of French Indochina at first. The malaise and terrible history that we today know as Vietnam did not happen in this alternate history.

He avoided all that human trauma and drama.

At first.

But we do not know how many other victims those brave US fighters and others saved from 1960 to 1975.

We cannot know.

History is full of the unknown and unknowable.

MLK Remembered, 2018

 MLK Remembered, 2018

 We US citizens get a federal holiday because of this man, cut down in his prime. We get a day in the chillier cold winter month of the new year, during frosty days of North America, to rest from our regular labors. Because his causes and messages were about something bigger than regular labors. His meaning, very multi-faceted, was about special labors, special struggles, special missions.

He was the symbol of many things, to many people, and he foresaw his own mortal time on the planet as something as a gift of God, because as limited as he knew his life might be, it had unlimited potential and brightness. Like all of us. He was born dark, as modern humans deem people of a darker hue, but he was a child of light. He held a carpenter's son from two millenia past as his example and leader, and he also held a poor barefoot Indian renunciate as his role model. He held up the US Constitution and all its blessed amendments as a bulwark of his causes and his righteous justification for everything he uttered and asserted.

It is about his messages and causes, of course. Not just him, as one individual. He was bigger than what he was, flesh and bones.

Reverend King. A man of the cloth, a man of conviction, a powerful leader who led with truth and authority. Righteousness. Vindication. Struggle. Justice. Hailing from generations of the downtrodden. He was like Moses. He lifted his people up, he liberated those with his beliefs and faith. He was doing this, as a Christian authority, but also symbolizing the universal humanitarian cause, even for those that thought that they hated or disdained them, or him, as a lesser being, as a poor outcast. He was bigger than who he was. He was larger than the wealthiest magnate, in human terms.

Backed up by millions, not just African-Americans, known to many as Negros back then, in his times. But also backed up, supported, cherished, by many other Americans, of all colors, supported by Christians and peace loving Hindus and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists worldwide, even cheered by Communists, who officially call to no higher power; even they had to admire his verve and tenacity as a man for the people. Fighting, till the end, for the goodness and fairness of people everywhere.

What other man ever advocated for the good of the people as much? Jesus of Nazareth?

Yes, the same Jesus that Martin Luther King, Junior, preached from the rooftops, the choir halls, the podiums and open fields, the vast congregations listening to the preacher of the Master?

Yes, this was Martin. He was a dreamer, he was given these visions and dreams by God. And so he gratefully, graciously, magnificently shared his dreams. Dreams of the past, present, and future.

We know his dreams. His dreams are our dreams. His promises are God's promises.

And he was cut down by a coward's bullet.

Like Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipator. Like an earlier American leader, Joseph Smith, also a Junior.

Some men cannot live too long, but their respective candles are not extinguished by bullets made of iron and copper, brass, or lead.

No, the candles upon which their fires are lighted comes from a hidden source, to many a source unknown, to many a forgotten being or presence, to too many a Person ridiculed and made "light of". Made light of. Ironic, that term. Mocking God is not a light thing. It is indeed, very heavy, a very weighty matter.

And Martin bore that cross, bestowed to him by God Himself, and bore it through the streets of Selma, across infamous bridges, into jail cells, to the steps of the martyr President Lincoln's Monument himself.

And, we think we know the history. But do we?

Do we know the Bible? Do we know what Moses did? Do we truly know what all the prophets and their families, wives, children, slaved and sacrificed for thousands of years to establish? God's elect? Do we know our human and divine history and heritage?

To those who "make light", i.e. mock and ridicule the causes of God's children, God's chosen: beware.

God will not be mocked. History will not erase the memory and life and causes of this good reverend, this preacher, or the God that he advocated, or the Good Reverend, in upper case, that he in essence, died for.

God bless Martin, Doctor King, and his legacy this year and forward; God bless his people, which is really all of us.

We are his people: black, white, whatever shade you may be.

We are God's people, we do belong to Him who created us.

I think that most humanists and historians understand the social, civil, and political implications of what Reverend King advocated until his last day. That is good, but that certainly is not all.

Hence, may I humbly but confidently submit, Martin's dream was much more than earning what you work for, voting how your conscience dictates, riding transportation equally, general civil rites, and desegregation.

His dream was heavenly, it was celestial, it was divine. It was truly transcendent.

His dream was with a capital D. The Dream of the Reverend is is the dream of every God-fearing man and woman, of every God devoted individual. The Dream of this King is written in our books, our holiest books.

Do not forget that Dream.

Martin Luther King, we thank you for that.

You represented Him well.

And we, fellow children of one Supreme Father, are left to move towards that Eternal Home.

Thanks for being the religious Preacher that God meant for you to be. Fearless, bold, courageous.

We all wish to be as equal as you. That is what what you wanted, that is what the Constitutional fathers wanted, that is what America and God's elect are about.

We will reach the Promised Land, on the shoulders of all those that came before.

Men and women of God our Heavenly Father have shown us the way.

Oprah Will Be President, Since early 2018

See other blog. Oh, and she'll pick a real politician to be her running mate.

Oprah Will Be President, Since early 2018--I Feel It

 I think a lot of others felt it, too.

I happened to Watch the 2018 Golden Globes awards last night. It was after a long, cold weekend.

I had not watched a film and television award show in many years.

Many years ago I was thinking about working in  that industry.

Always liked the thought of writing.

Here I am this many years later, after those years of no world wide net to blog in...

Writing. You (well, me), are reading what I write.

But Ross Perot begets Mitt Romney begets Donald Trump, begets Oprah Winfrey.

She'll be the one, as long as she's alive. She can do it, better than anyone else.

Most of America believes in her; she's decent.

We have broken the mold.

America is on course.