The Cuban Missile Crisis began on this day, October 14, sixty years ago today. I was eight years old and remember our class practicing hiding under our desks but hardly grasped then the severity of the threat at the time. In the decades sense, the thirteen days that followed have been chronicled in books and films enough to perhaps dull the sense of how close the world came to destruction in those days, certainly closer than we have known since.

During law school years later, I sat in on a lecture by Kennedy’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, on the events of the Crisis. His tone was, like his demeanor, calm and understated, but his message was clear: nuclear weapons must never be used again, and reason and diplomacy must prevail.

Putin’s failing invasion of Ukraine has again raised the specter of nuclear weapons with his threats to use tactical nuclear warheads there. One might wonder, of course, but I recall George Bush saying he’d looked into Putin’s eyes and seen he has no soul. The better hope might well be that the Russian military might balk at an order of such magnitude.

I sometimes wonder if there remains anything that might unite Americans again. Surely the memory of those thirteen days and today’s threat is great enough to bring us together at this moment. While I hope and pray so, my memory of those days long ago has prompted me to stock up on iodine pills, just in case.

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On September 27 of 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published. It had already generated a great deal of discussion, after serialization in the New Yorker, and ultimately was credited with the banning of DDT and with helping to spawn the modern environmental movement.

Carson’s first book, The Sea Around Us, addressed her scientific specialty, marine biology, but it was Silent Spring that helped change the world. Carson’s lyrical prose was worthy of the New Yorker, and Silent Spring remains one of the most readable and important science books, alongside Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Silent Spring was radical for its time, causing intense chemical industry criticism, but in retrospect it was moderate in its recommendations, though that was an era when even tobacco was only beginning to be seen for the deadly danger that it was and remains. Carson was suffering from cancer as she finalized the book and died less than two years later. Her memory and legacy remains bright sixty years later.

My daughter and I recently published a book of ekphracstic poems, one of which echoes the memory of Rachel Carson. The book, like the picture above, was inspired by pictures sent to me by my daughter from Chile, which I responded to with poems. The following poem accompanies this photograph:

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On September 6, 1500, the last remaining ship from Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation voyage returned to Spain, five hundred years ago today. Magellan had died in an ill-conceived battle in the Philippines en route, leaving his second in command, Juan Sebastian Elcano, to lead the last 18 of the crew to complete the voyage. Magellan’s name endures, despite his personal failure to return, but Elcano is largely forgotten, except in places like Wikipedia.

The vagaries of history somehow made a hero of Columbus for far too long, who perhaps never quite realized he had failed to reach the Spice Islands or at least never acknowledged the fact. Magellan knew better, but was himself deeply flawed, according to the now generally accepted account of Antonio Pigafetta, a crewman otherwise loyal to him.

Today the world is circled in hours by countless satellites and solo sailors follow Magellan’s path with the aid of GPS satellites, but we remain unable to overcome our human failings to accept and protect each other. Days ago, the last of a Brazilian indigenous tribe died, left uncontacted to avoid tainting what was left of his culture.

We are now edging toward a manned mission to Mars to “discover” a truly new world, which we, perhaps vainly, hope we will not ruin. Still, one thing that remains common to mankind is hope to become better. In that effort, plans are being made to construct a safe means of protecting this world from contamination Mars explorers may bring back.

With wars still being fought here on earth over land we should be preserving, we need hope and the courage to be wise as much or more than ever.

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Jerry Allison died this week on August 22, 2022. His name may not be familiar to many at this date, but he was the drummer for Buddy Holly and continued as the leader of the Crickets after Holly died in 1959. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

His career is of interest to some, but his marriage to Peggy Sue Gerron is what I remember him for. Buddy Holly, the story goes, was writing a song that included his niece’s name, Cindy Lou. Allison and his girlfriend had recently broken up and, wanting her back, suggested that the song’s title and subject be changed to Peggy Sue. As they say, the rest is history.

I wrote about Peggy Sue when she died in 2018. The two divorced and both happily remarried, though their names remain tied to those who remember that long ago.

The Crickets held a farewell concert in 2016 at the Surf Ballroom in Cedar Lake, Iowa, where he had played with Holly toe evening Holly died in a plane crash upon leaving the city.

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Marilyn Monroe, or Norma Jean Mortenson as she was once known, was found dead of a drug overdose on this day, August 5, sixty years ago today. Her life and death were well documented, but few, it seems, knew her well. With the passage of so much time, few who knew her at all remain to mark this anniversary, though many will stop to note the occasion.

I was eight years old at the time, but remember hearing the story on the evening news that day, which did, as Elton John wrote, say that she was found in the nude. Since that time, she has become an American cultural icon with perhaps as many impersonators as Elvis Presley. Her face, like his, has appeared on countless stamps around the world. Her image over a subway grate, tantalizingly risqué for the time, has been replicated again and again. Kim Kardashian even recently wore herself the dress Monroe wore to sing to Jack Kennedy.

Though conspiracy theorists claimed otherwise, her death was ruled a suicide, and her last months were sadly troubled enough to warrant such a conclusion. It is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been though be a real person expected by the public to belong to them and to be larger than life. Stronger people than her have tried and failed at living such a dual life.

Joe DiMaggio, once her husband, saw to her funeral, a loving act, and her remains lie next to his now. Elton John described her as a “candle in the wind.” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lines: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely light!” may also ring true. And then Ovid’s tale of Icarus’ flying too close to the sun may be apt. Few knew her well enough to know.

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When the world rose on June 18 of 1972, few if any realized that the arc of history had changed overnight. During the course of the night, burglars working for the Nixon reelection campaign were arrested at the Watergate in D.C. The story has been told in books like “All the President’s Men“, by Woodward and Bernstein, in film, including one of the same name, and, of course, in the Washington Post.

There is little I can add to 50 years of discussion about Watergate and its aftermath, except perhaps one personal anecdote and an observation. In October of 1972 the dorm residents above me at the University of Georgia, who were Young Republicans, hung a banner outside their window proclaiming Nixon’s campaign slogan, “Nixon’s the One.” My roommate and I naively but presciently added a handmade addition below it, “…to blame.”

Ties to the Nixon campaign had started to come to light, but our purpose was more humor than a political statement. Still, my McGovern Shriver bumper sticker remains proudly displayed in my home office.

What I’ve reminded myself of again and again during the time since then was that it took over two years from the break-in before Nixon announced his resignation on August 8 of 1974. The arc of justice, like its wheels, can be painfully slow.

It has “only” been less than a year and a half since January 6, 2021, a moment in historical terms, but the January 6 House Committee’s hearings are documenting what most knew that day, that Donald Trump bears responsibility for the events of that day. Whether he meant the attack to occur, was reckless or, as Bill Barr mused, was “detached from reality,” can be debated, but it seems that the arcs or history and justice may in time align here as they eventually did with Watergate.

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In a sign there may be hope for mankind, Canada and Denmark signed a treaty on June 14, 2022 settling a long-running dispute over control of Hans Island, which lies 11.2 miles between Canada and Greenland, controlled by Denmark. Over recent years, each country would occasionally send representatives to plant a flag and leave a gift representing their land, Canadian whiskey or schnapps respectively.

The island, a one square mile rock, was agreed to be divided along a north-south rift in its structure, an act perhaps a representative contrast to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There may yet be hope for mankind when descendants of Danish Vikings, now most famous for pastries, opt to settle territorial disputes peacefully. And when the apocalypse comes, we can only hope that a few Canadians, with their preternatural kindness, survive to repopulate the earth in peace.

Of course, it should be noted that if Hans Island belongs to anyone, the Inuit would have the right to claim it as their own, though they might be as likely to posit that they belong to the land, a lesson we should all consider.

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On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut took one of the iconic photos of the Vietnam War. This one merely depicts one to the damage to vegetation and property that Napalm could do. Out of respect, I’ve left the “Napalm Girl” photo merely for you to recall from memory. For me it is seared there almost as permanently as it has been in the life of Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

Ms. Phan Thi survived the burns from being covered in the chemical and now lives in Ontario, where her foundation for children survivors of war is based. Her Op Ed in the New York Times, marking the passing of 50 years since her photo was taken, talks about her life and how she has both endured and grown over the passage of time. I commend it to any and all who may still have the capacity to care and learn from someone who has endured, survived and ultimately given grace to others.

The photo not shown here was taken by Mr. Ut, who helped save Ms. Phan Thi. Mark Edward Harris, a fellow photographer who was also there wrote of experience in Vanity Fair in 2015.

I have little doubt that worse acts are being perpetrated in Ukraine every day now, which makes one wonder about the human capacity for evil. Amid all that darkness, hope still renders light from the likes of a few.

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In 1729, Jonathan Swift published a tongue-in-cheek essay entitled A Modest Proposal, which suggested that the poor sell their children as food for the wealthy. It was beyond bad taste even for the times and should remain so to this day. And yet the defensive reactions of gun advocates since the Uvalde experience this week leaves many to wonder if something like his suggestion might be countenanced by some today. I hope not, but hear me out.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, whom most all of us will disagree with at least occasionally, wrote the truth today when she described the mass killing as child sacrifice. Certainly the killer was not state sanctioned, far from it, but his right to bear assault rifle arms is being defended as sacred, at least until he opened fire on a school, though the killer’s social media postings betrayed his intentions for too long prior. Regardless though, the fact is that guns are the leading cause of death for children now, and these tragedies happen all too regularly.

Values matter and children should matter more than guns. The right to drive a car is regulated far more than the right to a gun. Cars, of course, didn’t exist in the time of the Founding Fathers, but then neither did assault rifles. Gun technology then hadn’t advanced far beyond the flintlock. Surely reason, good sense and the value of a child’s life were inherent in our Constitution.

Slavery divided our country for much of its early existence, as apparently do many current values today. The most symbolic of those presently may be the issue of guns. There are stretches of the county in which owning a gun makes sense, in terms of self-defense from rattlesnakes and other hazards, and I get and, to a degree, respect that, though regulation of anything deadly just makes sense. For must of us in more populated areas, guns are more a danger than a help. Most law enforcement people, when asked to be honest, will probably tell you that.

So here is my modest proposal, which I too offer tongue-in-cheek. I propose that we divide the United States into three new countries: West America, North America, and Middle America. The names are negotiable, but the territories would be something like the map above. Each state will choose where it belongs, and those along the northern border could negotiate to join Canada. The three countries would be bound by treaties for trade and the common defense, and each would have its own new constitution. Guns and abortion prohibitions would likely be enshrined in the Middle America constitution, even though the two values don’t fit well together. Children and a world in which they are safe would be listed in Article One of the West and North Constitutions.

The list of differences would go on and be long, but then we are already too divided to maintain a meaningfully working government. Perhaps today it is better to say that “Divided we stand.” I suppose in times of grief any attempt at humor falls flat, but I offer my own modest proposal in lieu of other’s empty “thoughts and prayers.”

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The New York Times reported this morning that, by its count, one million Americans have now died of Covid 19. Of course, the number is likely higher due to underreporting. Johns Hopkins has tallied 6,262,000 deaths worldwide and counting. Numbers like that are hard to comprehend. Stalin was quoted as saying, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic.” Only the truth is that these are a million tragedies, and none of us are immune from such losses, whether they be family, friends, or merely the loss of opportunities in the two years of lives put on hold. The Week posted a thoughtful and sad perspective on the loss from a historical reference.

Perhaps the saddest number of all is that 300,000 to 400,000 Americans have died after choosing not to be vaccinated. There are no words to explain or to understand the sadness of such needless loss, and yet the emptiness is there and real.

As one ages, one often takes to reading obituaries, a form of news that grows more relevant than the day’s headlines. Perhaps reading COVID obituaries is an appropriate remembrance for today. NBC reported on a number, early in the pandemic. The Washington Post noted some as well this week, while also marking one million lost lives. Perhaps we should each select one life lost and offer a prayer or at least a remembrance, hoping to summon the will to carry on a bit closer to each other.

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