PBJ

 

Not my best healthy choice selection, but Memorial Day breakfast: a foldover PBJ (peanut butter & strawberry jam) sandwich on sourdough bread, and a 12 ounce mug of cranberry/pom juice. 

Ready for midafternoon dinner, a large, thick ribeye steak for me and a sizable tenderloin filet mignon for Linda. And it was her idea, I was sure my ears were deceiving me when she said either Stake as in burned at the, or Steak as in grilled. We were in the seafood business growing up, but we ate a lot more beef than seafood because beef was Mama's preference. Beef does not seem to have been commonly on the dinner menu at Linda's house; so in our aging here, maybe a couple times a year. 

Granted, growing up, our steak was always sirloin, I wasn't even aware that there were other cuts, but Mama liked beef and so did we. Rare.

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Granted again, seldom or never is life black & white; and the pictures coming out of Gaza are gut-wrenching;

but in all the international weeping and gnashing of teeth about Israel's war on Hamas, little or nothing is recalled about the unspeakable 7 October atrocity that finally triggered all this. Pointedly among the world's self-righteous who are too young, innocent, oblivious, forgetful, or ignorant to remember our WW2 firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MyLai in Vietnam, Shock and Awe in Iraq: our national history of righteous purity in national defense seems to be assumed. There are rules and laws about warfare; but in war, the idea is not stalemate, truce, ceasefire, or proportional response; the idea in war is to destroy the enemy whose sworn objective is to destroy you. 

In war it is the innocents who suffer most and die; just so in Gaza. Hamas is still firing rockets at Israel, and the Hamas leader was quoted saying not just ten thousand Palestinian lives, but a hundred thousand Palestinian lives is not too costly in order to destroy Israel. Of course, the Hamas leader is cowering in relative safely somewhere while his people die. 

Hamas could surrender but they will not; and untold more Palestinians who hate Israel will yet die before this war is over. Let today's pro-Palestinian protesters watch the newsreels that we saw of German concentration camps as WW2 ended. Israel is not perfect, and their current government is hideous and shortsighted, but, history having long proved that nobody else will, Jews must look after themselves at all costs, or suffer holocaust after holocaust until they are gone. 

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Yesterday: Trinity Sunday. Church on Sunday is our habit, and we enjoyed visiting the nearby Episcopal parish for their Trinity Sunday worship service. Saw friends and acquaintances of ancient Times, and was even called Bubba. Returned home to 7H uncommonly and unexplainably tired, to drop for long afternoon nap. Maybe the super exhaustion was due to the change, IDK. But part of my intention for this Wilderness Time is/was to sample other neighborhood churches as a visitor for the day only. 

Sadly, the closest Lutheran church and Presbyterian church have recently shut down permanently, so I'll think on that plan. RC is close, but I may be too seriously stuck into an open altar for Holy Communion. UMC is close, maybe a visit. The other churches that are close hold literalist, inerrantist theologies that I cannot, so, recalling my visit to Jerry Falwell's Thomas Drive Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia thirty years ago, no need to induce a heart attack. Evidently, when it comes down to it, I do have my own certainties after all; I'm just not as aware of my certainties as I am of yours, nomesane?

RSF&PTL

T88&c