Yea, even as we speak, the young men of the United States are waging war against two fierce Islamic Nations and we mat be moving into a third, unsurvivable war against a nation that does not forget or forgive. An Iranian Friend whose parents have worked for the American Military and was on the last plane out of Iran, making way for Khomeni to take the reigns of power. The context was personal, and I learned not to offend him. He would bend over backwards not to offend me.
At a certain point there might be no way back from the precipice, we worked hard to stay far back.
Many in all nations have been trapped in a war they had no part in initiating. Our Present did not pay much
attention to his classes in his DOD school, his Ivy League University, catch up classes at Washington University, where one of his TA's told me that he did not see, hear or absorb anything she tried to teach him. He was estranged from his age group, cranked up much of the time. He was not particularly intelligent.
We believed we could survive such a President. Millions of
casualties later, we go on as if war were now normal. There has been no normalcy since 911. DOD planning was in place to fight 1 and a half wars using the 182nd Airborne, the Ready
reserves. In the days of debate in the Senate, when argument escalated into violence, our women Senators rise against the rest I heard Hillary's voice rise above the rest--"Could we just get it down to three wars, PLEASE. She had read the DOD
game plan--the part that said we could not win a war if overextended. We would lose in any war where we were overextended.
Clinton was well ahead in the polls and I was not yet worried.
My friend early predicted a Bush win. Many, many of us had a
particular distaste for him, he had been disliked most of his
life. He was unconcerned about this because, as my friend mentioned DADDY WOULD BUY HIM ANYTHING HE WANTED. IF He WANTED TO BE PRESIDENT, DADDY WOULD BUY HIM THE PRESIDENCY.
I have just noticed an oddity in Wikipedia, I thought I'd blog a bit about a war in my past, a massacre near our town, a place to share my cogitations with people working in Mormon, Genocide, and Holocaust studies.
The account of the Massacre at Mountain Meadows in
Wiki now (first posted in July of 2007, is the official Army version, written 1910, when my Grandfather was a very bright seven, in a periodical of the era. It contains truth and rumor and is egregious for what it omits. Instead of analyzing the invasion of Utah by a third of the Federal Army, mostly rabidly anti-Mormon, the majority bushwackers.
I have been planning to add what my Grandfather and Great Grandfather passed to me that may not be generally
known.
Juanita Brooks is the unrivaled master of the subject.
Her place in the community gained her the confidence of old Sons of the Pioneers who did not want to take their morbid secrets to their graves nearing, as they were, their point of departure.
I know this: when very ill life flashes before you slowly, you regret things unsaid and undone. I remembered a class I audited at BYU called the Mormon Novel, team taught there by Gene England and my Grandmother's Aunt Marie's Grandson
Clifton Jolly--the youngest of my Great, Great Grandparents', Danish orphans who lived with her brothers and worked the land.
I had some pictures of Aunt Marie my Grandmother sent me which my Mother made no attempt to preserve. They were abandoned in her sale of the house, with the lace curtains I used to wind my fingers around when a toddler, with the 2,800 dollars worth
of Cedar Wood furniture he built me, a cabinet topped with florid madrone, Cedar paneling. It pointed magnetic North, and on the Quarter and cross quarter days of the year the sun and moon shone directly into the windows. I could see the broad night sky heavy with stars, I sat outside on summer nights and
watched and thought of my old people. A Hilindscotts voice
spoke in my spiritual ear--lego, lass, lego. I heard the same voice a number of times, as I watched the sunrise at breed,
or sat beneath the sky's dome.
Soma and his Uncle Yuseph sat beneath a summer sky and talked.
Soma yawned and said "I go to bed now," and went into the house, into his bedroom, onto his toddler bed and went to sleep.
Last February I nearly died from massive abdominal abseseses throughout my abdominal cavity. Something has been bothering me since then, and with my other writing, I have decided that I need to write an addendum to the Army's version of the massacre, information taken from my Grandparents' oral accounts.
Mine is a view of the individual's responsibility toward human events, the remembrance of human history, a history of genocide and war--past, present and future. A responsibility the past whose gift has been the will to work on my serial novel or autobiography everyday and into the night.
The Third book deal with my father's participation in WWII Japan attempt to colonize "The East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere," through a systemic genocide that rivals Hitler's Third Reich.
I do not mean to minimize the Shoah or its sacred place in Jewish Religious Life. I do believe that WWII China more resembles the Shoah than those Jews who hold it Sacred have dared admit. Do all men and women have a dark side that waits for its spark to nestle into the tinder? The combination of events and emotion, to converse--throwing them into Chaos, confusion, madness.
The Massacre at Mountain Meadows was an attempt to thwart a repeated Genocide--one that did not occur because of the resolve of its intended victims. Not entirely wrong or entirely right, it used Indigenous tactics that had transformed warfare in the American Revolution--the burning
of supply trains, the driving off of horses and stock, 'till snowfall, and a Winter on short rations at Fort Bridger with the maniacal Squaw Killer Harney.
