vernal

Pitch black dark and it's 34° outside, 34° and with wind from due north at 11 mph it feels like 26° according to my weather app for West 10th Street with a little dot precisely on 7H. So it ain't no way in aitch I'm going outside onto the porch for a bracing moment, then have to warm up against the shivers when I come back inside.

It's Old Man Winter getting in his last breath of bluster: Monday, March 20 at 4:24 pm is the vernal equinox, and we all know what that means:

this morning is the final hours of Winter and this afternoon the first day of Spring 2023. Who'd have thought it back in 1945 - -

back in 1945, President Roosevelt was in his fourth term with just over three weeks to live before he complained, "I have a terrific headache" and suddenly fell dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving us, it seemed that afternoon, leaderless in wartime; and

World War Two was being waged with blazing fury over Japan and in the skies above and on the ground into Germany, where concentration camps were being discovered to our stunned horror and the outrage of civilized people, and German cities were being reduced to rubble; and

as I stood out on the Cove School playground during recess, it would have been inconceivable to me, who'd have thought, that I would be alive on this day in 2023 - - for a nine-year-old boy in fourth grade, an unimaginable distance of space and Time into the future. Just for comparison,

in similar position this morning, a nine year old boy in fourth grade would be contemplating life on March 20, 2101. Who can imagine?

With seven books down and one book left to read in my Lent 2023 reading discipline, some things have been clarified in my mind and absolute certainties established. Lines in various of the books by English, American, and German authors. As to the civilian population fleeing their homes for shelter in air raid bunkers, "Under no circumstances would the bunker company tolerate Jews in their circle" so that any Jews not already murdered by the Germans by that Time would have been shut out to suffer the bombing in the open - - and what one author termed the "latent malevolency" of everyday ordinary citizens of the entire German population toward Jews - - and "As with the persecution of Jews throughout Nazi Europe, the implacable bureaucracy of death went beyond any kind of reason. In the space of just one generation, the citizens participating, and not unwillingly, in a program of methodical genocide."

The unspeakable, incomprehensible evil of the German civilization in their intended thousand-year Third Reich and its designs of enslaving the rest of the world, fully warranted throughout World War Two and fully warrants today in retrospect, the consequences: our Allied carpet bombing that created firestorms, wiping out populations as we reduced entire cities to smoldering ruins. The German mindset had to be obliterated in every possible way and with every possible means. The myth of the victimization of Germans is pure bulls__. The German Volk were perpetrators not victims, and by their Holocaust, and brutal Lebensraum expansionism, and determination to fight to the last and total destruction, brought the consequences down upon themselves. The books for my Lent 2023 discipline project have led me back to this final certainty.

I guess you had to be there.

sunset from 7H on Sunday, 19 March 2023

obviously, I will not be bound by my own resolutions