Dying for My Country

I thought I was over the Election. Boy, Howdy, was I wrong. Night after night I wake after some fitful minutes of sleep and try to piece apart disturbing dreams full of Freudian symbolism and imminent personal danger. My room, where I sleep alone to save my sweet wife from extended voyages through my bed, accompanied by loud political harangues or cries-out for reason to small crowds listening to my Rant and responding only with sullen stares. 'WELL?,' I call out and wake propped up on an elbow, peering into the darkness...'

When I'm awake I have no such fevered anxiety and remember two things my personal Hero Ken Kesey told the Merry Pranksters: 1) sometimes all you can do is turn your back and say *&%# it and 2) some problems you just have to bury.

America's infatuation with yet another foray into the Perpetual Motion Machine of oppressive socialism, doomed forever to failure, the Leftish version of the Ponzi Scheme, is one of these things we must let die of it's own frenetic Nonproduction. And eventually bury until another rising restless generation tries this same mistaken model again.

Welcome to the USA. Can we imagine a time when that other unrepentant socialist, FDR, was returned to the White House for four straight terms (of course, he stroked out early in the last go). Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy were heard to comment at a Democrat fete that dinner 'smells like boiled Republican.' The Hindu Wheel turns forever over and the vitriol we spew at our perceived political enemies sounds somehow as passe as G.K.Chesterton's very literate but so-timely-as-to-now-be-meaningless rebuttal to George Shaw's statements on Eugenics.

My Father, on the very cusp of Ninetyness, is so much more sedate at the outrageous Communist spewings of political flash-in-the-pan Nimrods which can have me barking like some desperate SS Book-Burner. 'Calm yourself', Luke,' says Obi-Wan, 'It will be Enough.'

And, as I say, during the day I am a pillar of Soft Speech and Considered Thought.

Can this be an effect of MS? Yes, I believe it can. An after-effect of sclerotic long-line white-matter lesions; makes sense to me. However, Years before I had obvious signs of the disease, I reacted strongly to perceived political affronts. I would have been a comfortable participant in the Parisian Student Riots of the 1840's...

Recent days have been hard on my Faith. In college I first read the acidic words that 'if the Jesuits could get you before you were five, they had you Forever.' I was got long before that. Recently I have been exposed to multiple intelligent speakers who are Agnostic if they worry about your Hurt Feelings or Athiest if they don't really give a Running at a Rolling, so to speak.

I faced a true Crisis of the Soul until I remembered Boethius, mentioned in my blog a few letters ago. Boethius, the enclosed area held within the Universe of the Venn Diagram. St Anthony, walking along the shore, encounters a child filling a small hole he has dug with seawater. 'You cant fill that hole with the Ocean,' Anthony tells the child. 'Nor can you hold the immensity of God in your mind,' says the urchin, who, I guess, disappears. The point is made. I can believe in a personal God and admire the findings of His Universe and enjoy the process of its' exploration and the unfolding of its' understanding as well. It all sits comfortably in my Venn diagrammatic Bubble. I don't have to imagine the Music of the Spheres or see cavemen riding dinosaurs to reconcile an all-too-human faith with a strict scientific education.The fact that Neil DeGrasse Tyson believes in nothing he can't see within his sphere of existence is no longer a problem. If God meddles with the reality of the Personal Venn Bubble, it may be a miracle. But nothing is required to be shown by God as proof. Believe it or don't. Anything of histrionics about this smells of a Seventh Grader living in the Piaget Age of Industry ranting against God's messing around in his personal space. I'm just always surprised at smart people refusing to consider this way of looking at things. Makes 'em look like too-serious kids...

Is the President a Communist? Maybe; his parents were. Does he like white people, really?.

The only answer is : Welcome to America. Whatever he thinks, deep down, is his own business. Be as political as all get-out. but play the Game according to the Rules. The destruction by hurricane and snow of the North East is not the just comeuppance doled out by an angry Almighty onto a possibly Evil and certainly Ignorant Yankee populace.

One last thing. See Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, by Carl Jung. Interesting treatment of chance occurrence and meaningful coincidences. Actually gave me the Heebie-Jeebies while reading it late at night.