This morning, the sky was a brilliant blue, but now, living on the East Coast, once again, it was the kind of blue that was tinted with a chilly fringe of pastels made of, winter is coming, and fall will soon become a memory. When I was in LA, the blue featured by Mother Nature, culled its hue from the warmth of the desert, and the sheer necessity that some faraway winds blew hard enough to remove the layer of bad ozone! But This was the kind of day when life seemed bearable and the New England term of “wicked,” chilly out there was actually endearing and made me feel defiant. Snuggly warmth, a long-sleeved quilted shirt, a scarf, and my baseball cap (one I swore as a younger man would never wear because it seemed so foreign to me) and a long walk with Chance, our puppy, even at the age of eleven, and the contrast of a universe of sunny yellow and puffy white clouds and the environment filled with leaves brown, yellow, gold, evergreen and red. It was a morning that held no prisoners, and challenged me to contemplate, consider, and choose carefully my thoughts! My God I exclaimed to Chance (apparently in such a sudden tone, to have him stop in the middle of a great this is where I want to pee sniff and look at me,) the world around us is mad, and yet we all struggle to keep our sanity, those responsible for the madness seem as insane as the craziness they embrace, yet, to keep on keeping on is of dire consequence! My pronouncement having been uttered, (NO, more like PONTIFICATED,) I felt relieved, Chance, peed and pooped and we headed home!
I had ignored TV and Cable News, even pretended my phone could only allow me to play Words With Friends or Solitaire, today, I believed, I would NOT obsesses about that which I have little ability to control, but a lot of power to change, and instead, concentrate on breathing, inhaling and exhaling, freedom, equality, hope, and promise…but alas alack, reality bit my ass, and out of habit I turned on the TV and rediscovered that Trump and His Minions were still at war with this nation and its attempt at decency/morals/values/and law. And all that flowed through my head was that Moscow Mitch and all of the GOP and the ass lickers living in the Trump Swamp were “Just Following Orders!”
In a 1962 letter as a last-ditch effort for clemency, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann wrote that he and other low-level officers were “forced to serve as mere instruments,” shifting the responsibility for the deaths of millions of Jews to his superiors. The “just following orders” defense, made famous in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials featured heavily in Eichmann’s court hearings. But that same year Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist, conducted a series of famous experiments that tested whether “ordinary” folks would inflict harm on another person after following orders from an authoritative figure. Shockingly, the results suggested any human was capable of a heart of darkness. I decided that history, once again, is playing a prominent role in our present, and in a discouraging rage, cannot understand why we are permitting it. It is now about 3:16 PM, and the blue, yellow perky sky is dimming, and drowsy, and is need of sleep! I loved the day, and now am fearful of the nightmares which somehow have really never disappeared even when awake!
