It was a time of great exulting and excitement. The country was up in arms,
the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the
drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched
firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding
and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags
flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue
gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and
sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion
as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to
patriot oratory which stirred the deepest depths of their hearts, and which
they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears
running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached
devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His
aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every
listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash
spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast doubt upon its
righteousness straight way got such a stern and angry warning that for their
personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more
in that way.
Sunday morning came - next day the battalions would leave for the front; the
church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with
martial dreams - visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the
rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the
enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! - then home from the
war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory!
With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the
neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the
field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of
noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament
was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that
shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes
and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:
"God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning
thy sword!"
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for
passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its
supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would
watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in
their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the
hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident,
invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them
and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory - An aged
stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle,
his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that
reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy
cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to
ghastliness. With all eyes following and wondering, he made his silent way;
without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there,
waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued
his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in
fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us victory, O Lord our God, Father
and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside - which the
startled minister did - and took his place. During some moments he surveyed
the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light;
then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words
smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no
attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will
grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained
to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto
many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it
is aware of - except he pause and think.
"God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken
thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both
have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and
the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing
upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a
neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your
crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon
some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant’s prayer - the uttered part of it. I am
commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - that part which
the pastor - and also you in your hearts - fervently prayed silently. And
ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these
words: ’Grant us victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of
the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were
not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many
unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but
follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the
unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to
battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from
the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God,
help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to
cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help
us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing
in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire;
help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing
grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to
wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and
thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter,
broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the
grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes,
blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their
steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of
their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the
Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that
are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."
[After a pause.] "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The
messenger of the Most High waits."
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no
sense in what he said.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore Sept 3, 2004
by Garrison Keillor
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the Party of Newt
Gingrich’s Evil Spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a Dull and Rigid
Man, whose Philosophy is a Jumble of badly sutured Body Parts trying to
Walk?
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was
the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles
who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and
supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were
good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the
paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the
antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote
Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the
Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in
Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly)
American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned-and
there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were
giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to
feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward
down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public
service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and
fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in
World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon
moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry
white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is
another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the
GOP. "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The
boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of
hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists,
fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons,
hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who
believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little
honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their
Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of
information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of
badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the
rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine
crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a
massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation
to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds
in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and
behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth
as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of
tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the
attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a
tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep
secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to
generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of
debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war
against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal
satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen
misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous
transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the
deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death
knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived
this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours.
The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political
strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered
warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition.
And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip
the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring
public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax
breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida
recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming
back to. It wasn’t the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our
history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And
patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man
who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting
off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor,
the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W.
Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick,
maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get
some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen
in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and
they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by
Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to
death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag
burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their
sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and
mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a
sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however
we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time
of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear
reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life
than winning.
The War Prayer Sept 1904
by Mark Twain
It was a time of great exulting and excitement. The country was up in arms,
the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the
drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched
firecrackers hissing and sputtering; on every hand and far down the receding
and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags
flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue
gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and
sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion
as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to
patriot oratory which stirred the deepest depths of their hearts, and which
they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears
running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached
devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His
aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every
listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash
spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast doubt upon its
righteousness straight way got such a stern and angry warning that for their
personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more
in that way.
Sunday morning came - next day the battalions would leave for the front; the
church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with
martial dreams - visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the
rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the
enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! - then home from the
war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory!
With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the
neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the
field of honor, there to win for the flag, or failing, die the noblest of
noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament
was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that
shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes
and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:
"God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest, Thunder thy clarion and lightning
thy sword!"
Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for
passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its
supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would
watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in
their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the
hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident,
invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them
and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory - An aged
stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle,
his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that
reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy
cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to
ghastliness. With all eyes following and wondering, he made his silent way;
without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there,
waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued
his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in
fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us victory, O Lord our God, Father
and Protector of our land and flag!"
The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside - which the
startled minister did - and took his place. During some moments he surveyed
the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light;
then in a deep voice he said:
"I come from the Throne - bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words
smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no
attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will
grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained
to you its import - that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto
many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it
is aware of - except he pause and think.
"God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken
thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two - one uttered, the other not. Both
have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and
the unspoken. Ponder this - keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing
upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a
neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your
crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon
some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.
"You have heard your servant’s prayer - the uttered part of it. I am
commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it - that part which
the pastor - and also you in your hearts - fervently prayed silently. And
ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these
words: ’Grant us victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of
the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were
not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many
unmentioned results which follow victory - must follow it, cannot help but
follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God the Father fell also the
unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!
"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to
battle - be Thou near them! With them - in spirit - we also go forth from
the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God,
help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to
cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help
us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing
in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire;
help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing
grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to
wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and
thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter,
broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the
grave and denied it - for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes,
blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their
steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of
their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the
Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that
are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."
[After a pause.] "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The
messenger of the Most High waits."
It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no
sense in what he said.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore Sept 3, 2004
by Garrison Keillor
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the Party of Newt
Gingrich’s Evil Spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a Dull and Rigid
Man, whose Philosophy is a Jumble of badly sutured Body Parts trying to
Walk?
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was
the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles
who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and
supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were
good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the
paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the
antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote
Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the
Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in
Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly)
American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned-and
there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were
giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to
feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward
down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public
service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and
fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in
World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon
moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry
white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is
another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the
GOP. "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The
boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of
hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists,
fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons,
hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who
believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little
honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their
Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of
information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of
badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the
rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine
crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a
massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation
to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds
in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and
behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth
as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of
tragedy-the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the
attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a
tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep
secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to
generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of
debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war
against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal
satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen
misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous
transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the
deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death
knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived
this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours.
The omens are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear-fear, the greatest political
strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered
warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition.
And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip
the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring
public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax
breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida
recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming
back to. It wasn’t the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our
history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And
patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man
who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting
off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor,
the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W.
Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick,
maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get
some serious nation-changing done in his second term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads.
They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen
in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and
they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by
Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln
spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to
death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag
burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their
sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and
mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a
sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however
we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time
of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear
reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life
than winning.