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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Audition, in the less common sense of one’s state of hearing, happens to be on my mind presently, though there are many more important topics in the news.

As it happens, I “was fitted” for hearing aids yesterday. Ignoring the use of the passive voice, the phrase does seem entirely backwards, since such things should be fitted to me. Still, the fact remains that today, April 6, 2022, I’m wearing hearing aids like old people do.

In a vain attempt to console my vanity, I wrote this bit of doggerel drivel in honor of my milestone:

As a rule, I try to share more high-minded thoughts here, and musings over my minor woes are certainly not that, so I’ll sign off with one more poem that touches on audition about someone profound who grew profoundly deaf but triumphed well enough to leave us his Ode to Joy.

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Two years ago tomorrow, I posted about COVID 19 being declared a pandemic, just four or five months (depending on whom you believe) following the first cases in China. Two years ago today, March 11, 2022, the World Health Organization declared COVID 19 a pandemic. Over six million people have died from the disease worldwide and more still daily. Deaths in this country are nearing one million, a disproportionate percentage brought on by misinformation, stubbornness and plain foolishness.

I wrote about the 1918 Flu Pandemic four years ago, mentioning the quote from George Santayana that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” On this day 104 years ago, that disease had begun to ravage an Army base in Kansas and was destined to spread around the world, mutate and circle again.

As the New York Times notes today, the world could have done better with COVID. Epidemiologists say that diseases like this tend to mutate toward being more contagious but less deadly over time. The Delta variant was apparently worse in both categories, but Omicron’s even greater ability to spread eventually overtook Delta and did prove less deadly.

As even the cautious have begun to venture out again, the medical world watches and worries about additional variants, predicting that the virus will begin to follow the regular pattern of influenza mutations we have grown used to living with and sometimes dying from.

Of course, Russian threats of escalating its invasion of Ukraine into nuclear war could render such predictions meaningless for all, with nothing more to be said and none to hear. We can and we must rise to be and become, in the words of Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature.”

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I habitually check one or another “day in history” website each morning, perhaps to provide some context for the seemingly random events of the day to come. More often than not, the entries are dominated by obscure battles that may have mattered at the time, but grow increasingly forgotten in the wake of later conflagrations, which also soon enough follow suit.

The news for now, of course, is of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an act that now seems brutally medieval, and by any measure should be in a time when we are more interdependent than ever and in a world which we have laid waste to and should be working together to save.

I our own country the voices of some seem to loudly call for tearing down all we’ve built, rather than let anyone prosper, when once they asked simply for a fair chance at some prosperity.

These thoughts converged into a short poem of sorts that I’ve posted below. It is not meant to be resigned, but instead to reflect on what we can yet and must together become.

What is the Point of a Poem

in a time of bloodshed
man against mankind
a zero-sum game
that is anything but a game
while the world burns
with greed and neglect
as if climbing over the dying
to be the last to perish
is somehow to win?

"If I am to die" they reason
if such a word could apply
"I will take all with me"
though surviving would
surely be the greater curse
being left to rue and mourn
alone with the memory
of what was once at least
an unsettled peace of a sort.

What then is the point
of anything if we are
to become but madness
and death and destruction
and what of a poem
in these end of days unless
perhaps at least and last
to pen one final epitaph for
all we once might have been?

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My second grade class and I watched the small black and white television in our classroom on the morning of February 20 of 1962 as John Glenn launched in his Friendship 7 capsule from what was then, and later became again, Cape Canaveral, Florida. We didn’t appreciate the enormous effort so many put into the moment, nor the risks he took to become the first American to orbit the earth. To us it came as a moment of success within the backdrop of the competitive space race with the Soviet Union that dominated the news each evening on the same small TVs we watched after dinner with our families.

Today we are so often disappointed by heroes’ faults and failings that we demythologize them before they fall and break our hearts once more. John Glenn was different. He was a fighter and test pilot in a time when jets were made of raw power and autopilots were science fiction. He wore a bow tie when in civies and married a shy girl who stuttered. He was made of perhaps the “Right Stuff,” as Tom Wolfe wrote, but he was and remained unique. John Glenn went on to become a US Senator for Ohio, serving with distinction not seen today. At 77, he flew into orbit again aboard the Space Shuttle to show that age need be no obstacle to, well, anything.

As we later learned, thanks to the film “Hidden Figures,” there was another, long unsung, hero that day that I learned about 54 years later after that second grade day. NASA called upon one who was seen, at the time, as least likely to be considered a rocket scientist, Katherine Johnson, a black woman in a time when both disqualified her from the NASA limelight, but one with both unparalleled mathematic skills and persistence of her own to match.

There were problems aboard Friendship 7, and NASA needed to cut the flight from seven orbits to three. As depicted in the film, the calculations needed for the capsule to reenter were too difficult to process using computers available in the time allowed. Johnson was called in to do the calculations manually and confirmed for Glenn and all that the planned reentry would work. Katherine Johnson too was different.

She went on to compute the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon and the path for the first lunar module to rendezvous with its command module. Imagine being called on to figure those out – on paper – for the first time. She retired in 1986 and later received the Congressional Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her career trajectory probably made it possible for a friend of mine, another woman, to train shuttle astronauts on the use of its robot arm. She was later called in to consult when the shuttle repaired the Hubble telescope.

Today we watch as the world is on the brink of war, while billionaire space cowboys take junkets in the sky. We need heroes for our times.

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Today, February 19, 2022, marks 80 years since the date FDR signed Executive order 9066, ordering the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. The Wikipedia entry above is chilling and painful to read, as it should be.

Nothing I could say would give back the time lost to those families during the 30 months that passed until the Supreme Court declared the internment unconstitutional. The wheels of justice, I suppose, spin even more slowly than time. George Takei, of Star Trek fame, was one of the children held in those camps. His story, also touched on in Wikipedia, says more than I could here of how terribly wrong this all was, so I’ll simply mark the date, lest we begin to forget.

The reminder of this loss to those also brought to mind the two years of time most of us have lost, to one degree or another, during this pandemic. The former, of course, was an intentional wrong and this period a mere tragedy, but one that has done more than putting so many lives on hold. It has taken two years of experiences, growth, and so much more from our lives – time we cannot get back.

Respect and grief is more than due to the numbers who have died from COVID, nearing six million according to Johns Hopkins and probably many more who died without being diagnosed. Still for all of us fortunate to have lived through it all, we have lost not just loved ones, but a part of ourselves, or at least lives we could have been living, which is worthy of considering.

I might have been working to mark things off my own bucket list, instead of marking time. Many even older than me have lost two years of their likely last few. Children have lost growth experiences usually afforded to the young, and with a moment’s reflection you can identify your own loss. None of us I suppose, like the Japanese-Americans above, will be able to simply pick up where we left off as if nothing happened. Their losses and ours were not their faults. The best we can do, I suppose, is to be kind and help each other carry on, which I ask and pray we will.

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