Facebook site

Hello! The Cloud Qyakers Facebook page vanished last week, and I still don't know why, but we are still meeting SUNDAYS at 6 pm Mountain Time (7 Central, 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific) in the following way. Open up zoom (zoom.us), go to Meet/Join, type in. 878 2216 4666, when prompted give this code 382410. I will announce it every week on a new FB group I hope. I have no idea why the site disappeared, they never told me. When I asked, the AI bot said he couldn't find it. When I wanted to appeal, he sent me to the same site I'd found HIM on, "real person" was not a choice. I'm sure there's a reason...Hope you join us! We are a small but diverse community and would love to meet you. As way opens...

Violence on a national scale

Livingston, Eve. (2026, June). Scotland was the 'murder capital of Europe'. Then it started treating violence like a disease<. BBC.

What would a Quaker nation look like? Or even a large Quaker community, or a Quaker state, as they used to call Pennsylvania, which once may have qualified. First, the state has to look at violence as its biggest concern. Rather than using violence to establish order itself, it should make responding to domestic violence and all violence effectively its highest priority.

Enough said. This article will speak for itself. If Scotland can do it, we can do it.

To me the peace testimony is intensely personal. It's not about refusing to fight in the war, or refusing to drop bombs on little children, although that springs from it and seems obvious once the harder work inside us is done. We renounce violence in all its forms. This starts with the violence in our hearts, the desire to hurt or kill those who have wronged us. It natural to feel this kind of anger, the need to get someone back.

In rural Illinois it's common for young people to say something like "I'm gonna kick his a--" - they say it mostly to their friends and mostly about people who they have perceived as having wronged them. Growing up in this environment, with media as a guide, vengeance and violence are normal everyday expressions of powerlessness, trying to make sense of the world around them. Kids at 17-21 are under enormous pressure - to get a job, to make it, to get a mate, to provide for their friends. Loyalty to their friends is very important.

The problem is, putting those words out there make it much more likely to happen. Let's say one kid has said that about another, and this already happened to a friend of our son's. The other knows this, of course, sees him, and says, come and get me. He even walks up to him. The fight is inevitable. The violence becomes real. Someone gets hurt. Often, one or both get killed or thrown in prison.

The question of "who started it" can by answered by the violence in the heart. If you put the word out, and said you were going to kick his a--, then you pretty much have to try when you see him. You started it. Intent to hurt comes first. Telling everyone you will do it makes it inevitable; now you can't back down. Somebody's going to get hurt or die.

All this talk about bulking up is just hooey. Yes you get strong enough so that when you fight, you have a chance. Yes you arm yourself so that if he's armed, you're armed too. But that's all fronting and will not win you anything. When it's over, you'll be in prison if you're lucky, dead if you're not. You'll have to kill people in prison too just to keep them off you at night. After you've killed a few you wonder where did it start - it started with the violence in your heart. It started the minute you said "I'm gonna kick his a--" - you want to not go down that road, start there. And don't go down that road.

We had an incident recently. Fortunately everyone lived, no police involved. I ended up committed to better Quaker education for my son and his friends. They're saying, oh we were parked nearby, we weren't trying to cause any trouble. No, you put out a hit, you said you were going do violence. You by virtue of bringing that threat with you were bringing violence over to our house and yes it was realized. You are lucky to be free and alive. If you keep using violence you will create more violence.

My son really needs the better Quaker education, though he was not the one who was involved in the fracas. He like others find talking big and talking violent is their only tool against things and people that they feel have wronged them. His idea of Quakerism is that I am trying to prevent him from doing what he has every right to do, making threats and verbally being abusive enough so that people are "respecting" him. The problem is that a death threat is very important, noticed by the law, punishable, a very tangible piece of evidence establishing intent. Violent threats are intent. They put violence into the world.

If religion can't help us with this, what good is it?

Another ILYM missed

Every year I resolve to make it to ILYM. Every year I fail.

It's not far - maybe two hours. It's out in the country between Peoria and the road to Chicago. There's no direct route - you either go toward Chicago, then veer off, or you go down to Peoria, then come back up. It would be easily less than two if you could just go straight there. But bridges are out, etc. - it's a little wild up there north of Peoria.

The route isn't the problem. The problem is that I can't get away. My younger kids have much less idea of what Quakerism is than my older ones did - I haven't had time to educate them. ILYM would help. We really need a wider community.

So, I'm kicking myself. How can I see this coming better, make time, and actually do it? I say I will but summer flies by. Again.

Friend Anthony

If I actually pull this project off it will be amazing, incredible. Amazing that is, that I pulled it off, maybe not an amazing project. It's a book called "Friend Anthony." I haven't started writing it yet but do know the basic outline.

It's about what happens when an early-18th-century English farmer decides to put the Bible into his own language, simplify it, make it clear what exactly it says. That guy would be Anthony Purver who wrote Purver's Bible or also known as the Quaker Bible though that last one is somewhat of a misnomer. It's a misnomer because Quakers never actually adopted it, or used it widely, or considered that this Bible is what makes us Quakers, as opposed to ordinary KJV-type people. No, the Quakers are as bad as most denominations: most of us are not as familiar with the Bible as we should be. But, discerning the difference between two different versions? Now you've eliminated 99% of all Christians, and even greater percent of Quakers, who these days may not be as attached to the Bible itself as they used to be.

In Anthony's time, they were very attached; people in general were attached. They had the King James Version, but already some people were saying that it was antiquated, ornate, that language had moved on from that 17th century version into this new 18th century more modern kind of language. Anthony wanted to update it. He figured that if it was more straightforward and understandable, people would relate better to it.
br> We can understand that impuulse and thus know why so many more modern versions of it have appeared. Back in the early 1700s Anthony's was the only one, and would be the only one for the entire century. Very few people had time to study ancient languages or do any work on the origins of the Bible like they have done since that time. And even Anthony had to make time to do it and it took him a whole lifetime.

So now you're talking 1750 or 60, we're coming into a new era, and he's almost done with this entire. mountain of work. His friend John Fothergill takes Anthony under his wing and prints a thousand of them, sends some to the colonies where we can find them even today, scattered. Fothergill for example was good friends with John Bartram, Quaker farmer from PHiladelphia, and Bartram and Anthony Pulver had a loot in common. Their lives are parallel in seeking the truth and understanding the world they lived in. But Purver woulld just have a huge Bible to show for all his work - pages and pages of notes for every page he wrote of Bible. People weren't impressed. It didn't sell like hotcakes, though it was current.

Part of the story is that biblical scholars are very cruel to him. He didn't do what he said he would do; his wording was clumsy. He seemed preoccupied with this one biblical guy, who was just kind of a flake, but he seemed to need to argue with this guy in his notes. Scholars picked apart some of his transations. But here's the thing: do we know more ancient Greek or ancient Hebrew than Anthony did? My guess is that the modern scholars don't quite have either mastered any better than Anthony. Who after all has time for a language nobody speaks? My guess is that these arguments over ancient languages are going to get pretty arcane before long, and that Anthony, who at least learned the languages as they were, might have been in a better position to know something then, than they are now.

This book will partly be about the messiness of translation, because that's something I've dealt with all my life. You get your hands dirty, reading something and figuring out what somoeone meant, you'll see where I get the word "dirty." To think we're talking about the literal truth here, well, the reader will figure out where I stand.

One time way out on this lonely country road where I lived in the remote mountains of New Mexico, some country preacher came and found me and asked me if I took the Bible as the literal word of God. I was impressed by far this guy had actually gone to find me and talk to me, so I wanted to be nice to him. But what are the chances a guy like that has actually read the whole thing? Anthony, at least, has read it. So I'll start with what Anthony says.

Songs of the Spirit

Way back in the pandemic I was in a mountain compound out in southern New Mexico, and I made this attempt to give away Quaker songbooks that were sitting around in my shed. I had about a dozen of them, and don't remember where I'd got them; somebody gave them to me thinking I was a Quaker musician and should know somebody who could use them. Nobody answered my blog post. Oh well, I thought, not much of a market for Quaker songbooks.

We had to move to Illinois and, not wanting to carry a dozen of them, I took them over the Tularosa Basin and White Sands to the Las Cruces Meeting and left them on their doorstep. It never rains there so I figured they'd be ok until meeting, when somebody would take them in and do something with them. I kept one or two for myself but, because they had been in a set, they weren't really with my other books and I'm not sure what happened to it/them. Two may have turned to one over the years also, because I remember saving two, but only remember seeing one, the last time I saw anything.

Finally a woman wrote me the other day wanting one. I have thirteen kids the last six being adopted or fostered, but none of them are busy singing Quaker songs and I don't especially have a program for them anymore. But the more I think about it, the more that's what I want to do. Somebody with a seven-year-old who wants to sing, should be able to find one of these, and I should be able to point them to one, even if it is only a photocopiable copy or a pdf I can send them. I am being more led to provide Quaker materials; this would be a good place to start.

All my books are dusty and make me ashamed, even looking through them. Kids don't read much these days. We should take what they do want to read and make more of it, and make it accessible. Is there a primer for kids of Quaker families that explains what it is to be a Quaker? If not I should make one. Make and distribute.

I wrote the woman and told her of my state of disorganization. I couldn't find the one(s) I had. I told her about the Las Cruces Meeting and she said that the meeting in Albuquerque actually had some. Whoa! Guess where they probably came from. Without digging, I'll just say I know I'm in the right crowd, when useful things like songbooks end up in the right place.

Hopefully I can carry out this inspiration to do what I resolve to do, quick before it's too late. And find my copy(ies) of Songs of the Spirit.

Purver cont'd

I'm a little disheartened today, because I did a little research on Anthony Purver (see post below), and as a result feel a little less likely to embark on a huge project that I don't have time for.

First thing: in spite of the fact that I'd written a play about him, I'd remembered his name as Jacob, and just now had to go back and change that. Why did that happen? How? I'm not sure. But that's just me getting old, I assume.

Second thing: you don't have to go very far into the world of Bible interpretation before you run into intense bickering about translations from ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek, or what words really meant in those languages. He's accused of being untutored, unscholarly, etc. but of course he was just a farmer who decided to tackle these things himself: that's what I liked about him. Boy did they lay into him.

I would clearly have an attitude, if I were to take on this book. I hate banal arguments about the meanings of words, partly because they're so hard to resolve. How do you say definitively what someone meant?

There's some interesting stuff in there, though. Purver said, "Hebrew doesn't have a word for Heaven - which makes you wonder. Things like that, I'd like to get to the bottom of.

Let's start by getting his name right. Friend Anthony.

Someone needs to tell this story

So I got a leading today, in the morning, and it stuck with me all day, right through the Quaker meeting where I actually brought it up. I don't quite know what to do with it, but there it is. Sometimes you just get a message, and you have to at least consider it.

The message was, in essence, tell the story of Anthony Purver, early 1700's English Quaker farmer, because his story needs to be told. I even got a title: Friend Anthony. This would be the title of the book.

I've already written a play (here) which tells a little of his story. Most of my plays by the way are on this very blog, but somewhat hidden as this one is, though I didn't hide it deliberately. In essence, I've made the outline. He lived in the early 1700s; he decided to study the Bible and rewrite it into "modern" language; in the process he had to learn ancient Latin, ancient Greek, Aramaic, and several other languages; it took him four or five decades to actually do it (it was a life project); a wealthy friend underwrote its publication and a limited number were made; it was not a best-seller but copies were distributed throughout the world including a few in North America (by now it was about 1780); Quakers worldwide didn't really adopt it or do anything about it, but others referred to it as a Quaker Bible because he was Quaker; it went into obscurity except in the world of Biblical Studies where his observations and translations are at least read and considered. He was a very careful scholar, being a farmer and being very observant, but also frugal; I haven't read much of it but in general, there are about two pages of notes for every page of Bible so it's an enormous book or set of books.

Today it is sold for like $60 a copy by one of those companies that just reprint old things and, probably, they manage to sell one every once in a while; I'll find out and refer you to it here. I considered printing it myself much more cheaply, on Amazon, and still might do it; even that would be a monstrous task of putting voluminous information formatted into an Amazon template. What I need, basically, is one I can read.

So I've done some of the general work already: an outline of his life, his story as we know it; what came of it, etc. I still need a grasp on which languages he had to learn and why. One guy in my meeting seemed to know this: the difference between Classical Greek and Ancient Greek, or the language it actually went through in order to get where we know it today. Some basic education here would really help.

But there's nothing secret about his life or what happened. It's a story about a farmer who just decided he would learn the truth himself, even if he had to do it the hard way.

I'll keep you posted.

No Kings 3-28

My reading into the early Quakers, Nayler and Fox and their separate movements, showed me that much of it was about social justice. In those days church and state were bundled together, and getting out in the street for religious reasons was their equivalent of a No Kings protest.

Galesburg had its own No Kings protest (see below), but the War is a Racket sign deserves its own story.

Smedley Butler grew up Quaker in the early years of the 20th century, and went off to join the Marines in the Phillipines where he became very well decoorated as a hero (this went against his Quaker upbringing). Sent back to serve in Cuba and Central America, he became disillusioned, not so much with the army but with the US government for using the army to support the corporations. His book War is a Racket dealt with this issue. Hey - American kids are dying here - and it's all because you're trying to make more money?

Today millions are being made in the back-and-forth as they say the war will end, the war will drag on, etc. Somebody would rather keep this little game going and watch the millions get raked in. But people are dying.

I want to write about two encounters I had recently in Galesburg. I am still reflecting on them.

In the first, a very old guy approached me and basically said, it's heaven or hell. A minute after you die. Then he gave me a pamphlet which was appropriately named, "One Minute After You Die," which it's possible he wrote himself. It was actually a pretty well-made pamphlet, and clever the way it folded up into itself, to the point that I thought I might like to copy his method of folding a piece of paper so cleverly.

But there was something disturbing about the interaction, too. I almost felt like he was leaning on a threat to get me to believe. Fear works for so many other things, why not use fear to get these guys like me to just fold up and believe. The thing is, I believe we have both heaven and hell here on earth. I am on his side, really, in seeking the kingdom of the Lord and wanting what's good in the world. But I didn't want to engage in a discussion of heaven and hell, rather I was just hoping to accept his blessing and good will as a general offering and read the pamphlet later.

I'm not actually big on discussing the fine points of theology with guys like that, as it's clear that many hours out working on people has made him only more sure that the switch gets pulled one minute after you die. Well, he's also probably looking at death a little sooner than I am, though not much sooner, so grant him the need to put forward what he believes or is certain what will happen. I admit, I'm not so certain.

The second guy was giving away Bibles in the Walmart parking lot. I drove up to him, opened my window, and asked him "How's business?" He admitted it was kind of slow. But I loved this guy right away. He too was old, probably older than me. He had signs all over his car, but his car was very much like mine too, dark blue, very compact, maybe an old Honda Fit. Without question, he just handed one over. It's paperback, thick, and all it says is KJV Bible on the front. Mass produced, no doubt, yet this church had decided that was a good way to spend their money, getting bibles out to a guy like me. On the inside cover, a little sticker that gave his church's name and information about how to get to their service.

I actually wanted to do what he was doing, in fact I may go back, and ask him if I can have a shift doing that same thing. Standing there giving away bibles seems to be a very gratifying thing even if no one actually reads them. But some people do, I'm sure, and some like me just like bringing home a big fat holy book just to fill up my space.

For a while I entertained fantasies of giving away Purver's Quaker Bible. There are lots of problems associated with this idea. Purver is an eighteenth century English Quaker farmer who thought he'd get to the bottom of what the Bible really said, by studying himself the ancient languages and the translations of them. He wrote copious notes on every verse so that his Bible is almost twice as big as the one I was just given, which itself is plenty big. His notes covered mostly how difficult it was to translate something from ancient Aramaic into modern English, "modern" being what they were using in about 1750. It didn't go over so well even with Quakers, so it's a little bit of a misnomer to call it "Quaker Bible" although that's what this one printer called it shamelessly.

So what would this plan look like? Print my own, obviously. Stand out there and be ready to discuss differences between versions, and know the differences. Get versed in Christian theology. Already more than I can imagine. I would have fun, but I'll never be "versed;" it just isn't me.

I'd enjoy learning, though.

Ten Quaker Closet Plays

Tide of Employment - what Hoover promised us - one of Ten Quaker Closet Plays - he was Quaker, but couldn't imagine using the government to help with starvation. KINDLE SPECIAL TH-SAT Jan. 29-31 #quakers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7K3R6B5

Another truck accident

I ran across this earlier in the day. By the way, I'm sick and there's weather here, and I have to get out driving in it, though not on the interstate, did that earlier.

I am now having trouble documenting what I read about this truck accident, and what I said about it. One guy, on this site, said, in essence, Why West Branch? Why are all these accidents happening on this stretch of road? So I related to him what I've said earlier on this site; I worked at Scattergood; there was a cemetery there; somebody told me that they'd actually moved I-80 because of the cemetery; that that put a curve and a hill in the road; and that that curve could be the only one on I-80 in the whole state of Iowa.

I don't want to give Scattergood a bad name, but I figure if accidents keep happening there, getting at the reason would be good and the truckers will surely spread the word out amongst themselves, watch out for that curve just east of West Branch. But here's the truth: I have no solid evidence that they're even connected. The "mass casualty event" of around Dec. 12, which put 20 people in hospital but didn't kill anyone, was somewhere east of West Branch and I'm still not sure where; there were accidents on both sides of the road. In some six-mile stretch between West Branch and Springdale, though that distance is only about twelve, and there are only so many places it could be. For the truck fire it says "mile marker 257" but I swear the fire departments are probably the only ones who know where the heck that could be.

Somewhat disturbing is the implication by that commenter that these two were not the only ones, that perhaps there's been a string of them with "West Branch" attached to their report. If so all the more reason to get the word out: there's a hill here, and a curve in the road, watch out, slow down!"+

A commenter below me was somewhat inarticulate but said that it was simple: the wind hit the road differently on that stretch of the road, for most of the road you go straight into the wind, but in that little stretch it hits you at an angle and that really matters when it's raining and freezing at the same time.

Put two and two together and you can see why accidents keep happening. The fact is that when the road is straight for 100 miles you get lulled into thinking it's always straight or that the weather you are experiencing is not worth slowing down for. Slowing down is the one surefire antidote and perhaps they need speed limit signs getting everyone to slow down a bit at that hill. Or perhaps the hill is not even part of the picture. But whatever it is, the road is getting very croweded out there, and there have been a few casualties besides the ones I'm showing you.

Here's the link:

Ten Quaker Closet Plays

Mass Casualty Event

This post is ultimately about the "mass casualty event" in Iowa on Saturday night, and may not be the lightest thing you read.

In 1982 I accepted a job at Scattergood School, three miles east of West Branch, and loved it immediately. There was a small meeting house near the road, and a cemetery across the road from it; down the hill we could hear trucks shifting gears as they came around a curve. "Both Nixon and Hemingway had ancestors in this graveyard," someone told me. "That's why they had to make the interstate go around it. It could be the only curve in the interstate in the whole state."

During meetings, there would sometimes be a wood fire in the stove at the old meeting house, which, like most Quaker meeting houses, was austere. No pictures of Jesus, no decoration, just wooden pews, off-white walls, a nice fire, and the sound of trucks coming up around that curve. I think I said the obvious: we need a wall out here to deflect the sound. I wasn't the first to come up with that idea and they did put one in sometime between 1982 and now. But I actually liked the sound of trucks. I had been on the road for many years, camping by roadsides, and it kind of calmed me having traffic there in the silence while I waited and drew faith from my experience.

High school kids were in general difficult and still are, and it was a lively place. I was a cook and a dorm sponsor and helped on the farm. I cooked sometimes what they produced from ground pork and produce from their gardens. I was a lousy cop in the dorms. I helped build a pig barn. I was there alone one winter when it was 20 below. I became a Quaker in that meeting house.

The other night, I went to Iowa to have a cochlear implant surgery at the UI Hospitals in Iowa City. It was Monday, but we saw evidence of the "mass causualty event" in the ditches and shoulders on way through from Tipton to West Branch. I had read about it on the news. Because I was a passenger in the car, I was able to see Scattergood School on the right as we drove through: the prairie, though you can't see the ice-skating pond; the solar gym, whose pipes froze that winter; the soccer fields. but this was while we were seeing trucks and cars in the ditches along the side of the road.

Coming back, though, we had to stop for gas in West Branch, which we got at a Casey's; I'm not sure they had a Casey's in 1982. But when we got back on the interstate eastbound, it was slowed down. It may have been only a ten or fifteen minute delay and fortunately the roads themselves were in good condition. But now we came upon mangled trucks right up on the shoulder, trucks that had gone off the road and still had their blinkers on, more mangled cars, and we were right up close. Traffic crawled, not because of rubbernecking so much as because trucks with blinkers were right there partly on the shoulders; we had to drive between them.

It was called a "mass casualty event" because 40 people were injured, 20 cared for in the hospital which had to choose which to do first. More than 50 cars and trucks were involved over a six-mile stretch just east of West Branch - which is right where Scattergood is. If I'm not mistaken, people at Scattergood could have looked down and seen some of these accidents as they happened.

It's a very crowded road these days - some people take back roads from Iowa City to Davenport just to avoid it - but the back roads aren't easy, and wouldn't have been easy for us either even though we could have cut south in Iowa City. But because it's crowded, and fast, it's dangerous, and it's not the only part of. 80 that ices over quickly, before they can get salt on it, on a cold and snowy night. You can go from doing 70 on a normal road to doing 70 on ice very quickly and then things start happening, and it was a miracle nobody. died although they did have to remove one person from a car. Apparently it was while they were working on a crash in the westbound lane that things started crashing in the eastbound, and things ended up backed up for seven hours, as far back as Coralville to the west, and quite a ways to the east also.

Although seven hours on a cold (~0) day is no small change, it once took me seventeen hours to get across the state of Missouri in an ice storm, so I can imagine what people felt like. It's no fun and you're lucky if you have the gas and the time that you can basically just waste. People will have stories to tell. Scattergood people don't use that interstate, as the road with the meeting house on it doesn't have an exit ramp, and they can't even get on the interstate until West Branch itself. Their stories will be about what they saw and heard down beyond the wall that protects them from it.

It deeply upsets my sense of peace that I've gotten and maintained around my Quakerism. Some people write in and complain about irresponsible truckers, or people going too fast, or whatever or whoever they can blame. Blaming is pointless, though, even blaming the Quakers for protecting their graveyard and making them put a curve in 80. Blame the weather pattern that brings snow and ice right on that little curve only, throwing cars. and trucks into the ditch and into each other. Or blame the ancestors for dying and resting on that hill. I'm not blaming. I'm hearing the gears though, and wondering about the grade, about the exact geography, about what actually happened. The mangled trucks and cars by the road, two days later, with blinkers on or whatever, I'll keep that image too. It's like Scattergood has had that uneasy alliance with the interstate from the start, and it's not any less uneasy now. It's actually very scary, like losing your hearing altogether, which is also happening to me.

In some ways, it was like coming home. But so is deafness, in a way. That's another story, equally scary. At least I'm here to tell the tale.

World Quaker Day

I call it "Ambivalence about Self-Promotion" Day.
But I'm worse than most.
It was yesterday, Oct. 5

Tonight the topic of Lucretia Mott came up, and it stirred memories in me which I'll explain. For some reason, she really stirs people up.

There are several reasons. First was that she was a very strong speaker, so that virtually everything she said was memorable and seemed to cut through time to speak to us today. She was born into a New England seafaring family and they seemed to be intense by nature, whether they were whaling or traveling around the world. But she ended up in Philadelphia, heart of the civilized world at the time, being a champion of women's rights and other things.

Second was I think that the times she lived in were very intense. People wrestled with basic questions of human freedom and dignity. In short, she had many opportunities to use her clear strong voice for the power of good.

One year I did a play for the dozen or so kids in our southern Illinois meeting in Carbondale. I wrote up this play based on very basic research into her life, and I learned a lot, though much of it I've forgotten and had to remind myself by digging out the rtf which you too can have by following the links on this template, free, right here online. Anyway the play was a success in our small town (Carbondale) and we were invited to perform it up in St. Louis, two hours north. Not every kid could make it so there was some shifting around of parts, etc. But the St. Louis meeting was much bigger and several of the old-timers were history buffs. Boy did they get stirred up! They came and congratulated us and wanted to talk the fine points of history - they agreed with everything that was written (unlike the Bartram play), but it just stirred them up to see the Quakers' role in that part of our early history. The main actors and actresses of course were glorying in just remembering their lines and delivering them well. The parents of our meeting had heard most of these lines dozens of times in the course of practicing; I know that I myself had the whole play well memorized by that time. In fact we might have even said to the new kids (replacement actors) - if you can't remember the line, just look at us in the front row and we'll give it to you.

It was all worth it, because so many people were so excited to see history played out right on their stage, in the meeting house. That's my main memory of that St. Louis meeting.

Lucretia, you made a difference.

six million people

Six million people, mostly Jews but also homosexuals, gypsies, and just "enemies of the state." Enemies of the state of course could be defined as they wanted; in fact they probably maintained that Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were by nature enemies of the state. like us who have TDS.

Nowadays, we meet Germans every once in a while and they're just like us except that they speak German. Most times they're reasonably liberal, smart, educated, generous, logical people. To be honest I have a problem looking at them and wondering about their ancestors, though I know I too have German ancestors. That is, I wonder how their ancestors could have let it happen the way it happened.

A guy takes power in the government. He sets up camps off where nobody's watching and controls access. He says he's just going to do this and not worry about due process or whether the victims have done anything wrong. He separates out people by race but also by perceived difference from the norm as if just being against the regime makes you different enough to send you off to the camps. They call the camps "work camps" but people die there. Sometimes that's all they do. Sometimes they push them into the ovens and the smoke goes wafting over the countryside, the ashes and odor of human flesh burned to nothing. Innocent people: women, children, old people, some young healthy people too. They didn't need a reason. They didn't wait to see if it cleared the courts. They just killed them

Meanwhile the people go on living their lives and in fact, the people we meet today are descended probably from those who just put their heads down, did their jobs, didn't say anything. Maybe they approved or maybe they didn't but they didn't do anything to prevent it. Or maybe they're like me, wondering what they could do short of ending up in prison themselves. You want to survive, and you want your kids to survive, and you don't want everyone to perish in some god-forsaken uprising or attempt to right the wrong. There will be no righting the wrong. It will play out all the way as racism, anger, fear and violence feed of themselves until there is nothing left. In the end people will look at us like we might look at Germans today: How did you let that happen? How are we to forgive that?

Much is said these days about the genocide. In general I avoid talking about it. It is a genocide, a whole race is being attacked, and successfully killed, and in general we Americans are not only funding it but also jumping all around justifying it as part of a war. I'll admit to some complicity here since I feel like those hostages are kin and anybody who takes hostages as an act of war can expect that war to go on until the very bitter end, and very bitter it will be indeed. But children are starving, people are starving, and whether they in fact voted for Hamas (the children certainly didn't) that pales in the face of pure hunger, starvation, and the boxing into fenced-in corners of the earth like life is just a cattle-car, a very hungry one. Do you kill? Do you watch killing? Do you mind standing here just paying for it, with every dollar, every minute, every child-death?

People will look at us forever, and wonder if we could have done something.