What If?

 

Saturday morning 11 November, in 2023 it's Veterans Day. In my earliest memory it was Armistice Day commemorating the 1918 cessation of World War One hostilities, with the settlement laid on Germany that is said to have set the stage for extreme hardship, bitter resentment, NSDAP takeover of Germany, and World War Two. 

In 1918, a hundred years before 2018 when Category 5 Hurricane Michael swept ashore here leaving widespread destruction that - - did most everything end up better than new after all, I mean, that's nature's purpose with a hurricane, maybe we work it out that way as well? IDK.

Of WW2, an incomprehensible level of deaths that denied future generations to countless unborn, while also opening life to those down the other road, including not me but my generations, three after me now that would not exist but for WW2. Would I go back and change all that if it were in my power? The question is irrelevant unto absurdity, but the ability and even obsession to ponder it is part of our human difference from other animals. We are only where we are because of the roads we have not taken.

Instead of room, bed and board at Pruitt Health, What would my daughter Malinda's life be like this morning If she had not smoked tobacco from about age 16 to 59, ultimately so damaging blood vessels in her brain? Even though the question is meaningless, it never leaves my mind. 

Sometimes I wonder if pondering the What Ifs is how/why people go insane?

This as I sit here at my Bay side window looking out at Davis Point with the other question that's never far from my surface, What If my grandmother had had her way that evening in January 1918 and Alfred had not sailed on the Annie & Jennie after all? I would not Be. From experiencing their lifetime sorrow, I know that Mom & Pop would have gone back and changed that night if they could have: What If? Pop and Alfred laughed at Mom's anxious concern that evening, and later Mom took a cup of hot chocolate upstairs to waken Alfred for the voyage that ended his life and opened a road for the beginning of life for me. If I were Pantokrator and could do so, would I back up Time just to correct that family's minor lapse in judgment? The question is blessedly irrelevant.

And, Time & Space being so interwoven, it's clear that Pantokrator cannot reverse Time anyway - -> back up speeding galaxies to a smaller Universe, to 1918 for love of one family? In Flanders fields the poppies grow, among the crosses row on row. We are created in a godly image reflected in the horrors that are taking place in Gaza as I sit here writing nonsensical abstraction? "What If?" is the Theodicy Question's step-sister. 

Closely related, my other subject. How to deal with the inhumanity of a hate movement that hides under hospitals, trusting that their enemy will be more humane? The human history of warfare is not on their side, nor is it on the side of terrified medics and patients. What If the Palestinians in Gaza had not voted Hamas into power? 

Meanwhile, emergency evacuations in Iceland as a volcano's tremors shake the land ominously.

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Here's our gospel reading for tomorrow. Somehow it fits everything about human life.

Matthew 25:1-13

Jesus said, “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 

But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 

And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 

Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

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What If the foolish ones had been ready? What if those who had extra oil had shared with those who had none? What if this is the parable of the wedding feast where all of the invited guests decline the host's invitation anyway? IDK.

T88&c