They know not

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They’re having a partisan primary election here in Wisconsin today. There’s lots of conversation and the usual nasty political ads on TV.

I try to avoid the partisan wrangling as much as I can. The two major parties have mostly abandoned the issues that interest me — an end to warfare and freedom from government intervention in our lives — so I almost feel as if I have no dog in this fight anyway.

I do have to admit I’m a little alarmed at the Democratic Party’s shift towards embracing democratic socialism. I sense more socialism and less democracy in the kinds of things they’re saying.

The growth of the movement baffled me until I remembered that the Tiananmen Square Massacre was in June 1989, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, and the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, so people now in their twenties and thirties have never witnessed what a powerful socialist or communist nation looks like.

I was born more than 11 years after Pearl Harbor, so that terrible incident and the war that followed are history to me. I need to remember that to the people who have been born in the last 25 years, the events of 9/11 are as in the same category as World War II is to me.

And so when they advocate for socialism, they have no personal knowledge of the horror they are wishing upon themselves and the rest of us. Since freedom from government intervention in our lives is one of my two big issues, I have no use for this brand of Democrat.

Meanwhile, I did not vote for him, but the president was starting to grow on me when he boasted about ending eight or nine wars in the first year of his term. However, then the Washington war mongers got to him. So, as I said, I have no real dog in this fight because no one is taking seriously the issues that I take seriously. But the lesser of two evils is the side that does not embrace candidates who would remake America into a socialist utopia.

However, as I wrote a year and a half ago for Wisconsin’s spring election, which covers public posts that are supposed to be nonpartisan, my bottom line is the knowledge of two things.

1. My peace of mind is not dependent on anything the government does, nor is my freedom a gift from the government.

2. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, kindness, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

I stay sane by reminding myself of those two facts as often as I can.

The day the sky fell

Illustration © Dominic Sinclair | dreamstime.com

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Tuesday was the day when Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” was to take place back when he wrote it in 1950.

“Today is August 4, 2026,” an automated voice says towards the beginning of the story. It’s a modern house with all sorts of electronic features. The oven makes breakfast for the family, robot mice keep the house clean, and the computer is constantly reminding the family that, for example, it’s time to leave for school.

The problem, we soon learn, is that the house is devoid of life, since humanity has been wiped out by a worldwide nuclear war.

Originally a short story, “There Will Come Soft Rains” became the penultimate chapter of Bradbury’s “accidental novel” The Martian Chronicles, in which he collected a couple dozen of his stories about the red planet, where he often wrote people migrated to escape the craziness of Earth, where especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s the prospect of a nuclear conflagration felt very real.

I read the story again on Tuesday and re-experienced the chill I got when I first encountered the story sometime around 1968, when Aug. 4, 2026, seemed like the far distant future.

I found myself wondering how many world leaders since then, with access to nuclear codes, have read the story and said to themselves, “No. Not on my watch.” How many lives were saved because Bradbury painted such a realistic picture of everyday life after life on Earth has been eradicated?

I also wondered if the author picked an August date at random, or was he conscious, five years after the fact, of the significance of this month in the history of atomic warfare? It was August 1945 when the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated in the only two deployments of a nuclear weapon ever directed against human beings.

On this 81st anniversary, it behooves us to remind ourselves of that horror and recommit to any and all efforts to find peaceful means to settle our differences and especially never again to resort to using such terrible weapons.

Saved by the Beatle

Despite my very own admonition of two days ago, I was scrolling social media as I contemplated what to write in this space, and I was getting discouraged. Many people from my past, people I have always considered friends, were sharing political agitprop full of rage that is demonstrably false about other people from my past and other people I have always considered friends. Oh, the one set of friends was not specifically insulting the other set of friends, but they were saying horrible things about people and issues that I know the other set believe in, so they may as well have been personal insults.

It’s very discouraging, this tendency to frame political disagreements in terms of good versus evil, and after a couple of decades of this, a guy almost loses hope. Yes, I said a couple of decades. It’s gotten downright insane in the past 10 years because of you-know-who and the people who hate him, but this is just the natural evolution of what had been building.

As I’ve said before, I try to come up with things to say here that are encouraging, entertaining, enlightening, or a combination of two or all three. While browsing through the latest servings of seething hatred and anger, it’s nigh on impossible to concentrate on any topic that might be positive or optimistic.

Fortunately, I also had Apple Music in the background playing the “Warren Bluhm Station,” where the algorithm spins a collection of random songs that I have shown an inclination to play more often than not. And suddenly I noticed Paul McCartney was singing about how “People Want Peace,” from his 2018 album Egypt Station.

Brothers and sisters, I beg you to listen,
I know that it isn’t too late,
For we as the people, the voice of freedom
And we’re open and clear, we don’t wanna wait:
People want peace

And I remembered that the world may have politics and government in it, but politics and government are not the world. McCartney’s surviving bandmate, Ringo Starr, always signs off his public statements with “Peace and Love,” and there will always be more peace and love in the world than the politicians can foment the opposite.

That was close, though! I let the merchants of anger and despair get to me for a little while. I will try to remember this lesson.