Unsettled

I can’t keep it to myself anymore. Mendelssohn saw to that. My tears started as the violin began its heart-rending crescendo. As they do almost every day recently.

The government has shut down. No one agrees on anything, and no one seems to be able to debate anything anymore. In the old days, when I was a kid, both sides had their say, and people listened, respectfully quiet, and made up their minds as they spoke. Asked questions. Went home and thought, and researched, and debated with their friends and family. In a civil fashion.

Now people scream. They call each other names (don’t they learn that’s wrong in kindergarten anymore?). They lie openly, and shout those lies vehemently until people begin to believe them. They shoot each other.

Today, Heather Cox Richardson reminded us, here on Substack, that “the military’s mission (is) preventing wars through deterrence.” Preventing them, not engaging in them or encouraging them. Deterring them. This radical re-imagining of a ‘defense department’ was a direct result of the worldwide trauma of WWII. “Never again!” the world said.

Our Secretary of Defense doesn’t buy into that, apparently. Yesterday he said to all the leaders of our military force, assembled by fiat in Virginia, “You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don’t necessarily belong always in polite society.”

Hegseth’s view of our military is the antithesis of its mission — and the opposite of what a much higher power said a very long time ago: THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

There is very little room for interpretation in that short, simple command.

It’s a good thing my father is gone now. This would have killed him. He was a gentle soul, who loved his country and its freedoms that had given his immigrant family a new life. He’d fought for everything it stood for during WWII, on the other side of the globe, certain that might came from being morally right, not the other way around.

The year I lived in Europe, many decades ago, my new friends there had so many questions about how it was possible for people from all over the world to live together in peace, in one place. This seemed outrageously impossible, to those who lived in countries that did not welcome immigrants, did not allow debate, did not offer its citizens the rights that we enjoy here.

Or used to.

Now, people are being plucked off the street, even US citizens. Now there is no more debate, only shouting. Name-calling. Enriching those who don’t need it and impoverishing those who do.

Killing.

Despite the name ‘Religious right,’ nothing in the news the last few months… years?… bears any resemblance whatsoever to what Jesus taught, or to the ‘golden rule,’ or to anything morally right according to all the rules we accept as coming from a high moral ground (like God’s mouth, if you believe in the Ten Commandments, or the golden rule).

Back to Mendelssohn. Chopin. Beethoven. All of whom at one time or other lived as immigrants where they worked to produce the peace-inducing sounds that help me cope with this new world… and help me believe that we can find our way back to the world I remember. It wasn’t perfect, but we strove to make it better.

I hope we remember how to strive for that. Before it’s too late

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