406 and Counting

Four-Oh-Six

Linda’s mother loved to travel, and after Linda’s father died in December 1970 she managed to do so to her heart’s content. During the Cold War, she traveled widely including in Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain, returning home shuddering at the grim uniformed guards with tommy guns throughout every city block and on every rooftop.

Death or Life. It’s a caution to judge others when one is equally liable for judgment on various counts of life. One can’t judge the Arias jury who were dismissed after inability to decide unanimously on execution or life imprisonment. Another jury won’t likely find it any easier; I know this because even a dozen members of my Sunday School class can’t agree on anything. If Arias prosecutors take the death penalty off the table, the case could be settled from a couple of life sentence possibilities, billable hours could be closed out, and millions of taxpayer dollars could be spent elsewhere over the next thirty years that Arias might sit on death row. Pathetically whining for her life, Arias is now a systemic pawn in which the lawyers are the ones who are going to make all the money off of it, and we are going to pay, and that not only in dollars but also in sense.

The emerging terrorist threat has surfaced in London: horror on the street in full public view. In the emergent world we don’t need armies and drones, but millions more armed uniformed police officers saturating streets and public places, surveillance cameras monitoring and recording every movement of everything that walks and breathes or waves in the wind, every person over twelve carrying a firearm and every child who isn’t bar mitzvah escorted by armed guard, rounding up the usual suspects, concentration camps, barbed wire, a chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and a GTMO in every county. Anyone willing to live in United Dystopia might read Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon and someone needs to write Four-Oh-Six so we can see where we are in history. 

It’s a cool morning of the Memorial Day Holiday Weekend. Pink sky over TAFB across St. Andrews Bay, flat blue sea, sunrise shimmering the tall pine trees to gold. It’s the right time and day and age to be seventy-seven and not counting.

In the severe winter of 406 AD the Rhine River froze over allowing the barbarians to walk across unchallengeable, sealing the fate of the Roman Empire, which fell in 476. 

The metaphor is set, and those who don’t learn from history are not simply bound but doomed ... .

Nevertheless,

and

T still in +Time