Hard to believe the autumn equinox is coming up in a week or so, and the darker months will be upon us.
I’m trying to imagine a story or mythology about the eternal struggle between Light and Dark — half of the time Light gains the upper hand, but Dark rallies and the days grow slowly colder. And like a stopped annual clock, twice a year their game ends in a tie.
One year Dark cheats and wins more than his share, and spring is delayed. The resulting imbalance shows Dark that he cheats himself by cheating his opponent, who is his brother.
I don’t fully accept the metaphor that Light and Dark must balance. Good does not need an equal supply of Evil for a balanced world, so the analogy does not fit exactly. But I can see the balance in nature — life and death, light and dark, summer and winter. In that sense, to everything there is a season.
I don’t agree that there is a time for hate, or a time for war, but I accept that in most cases there must be a balance. Fear not, for the dawn is coming, inevitably.
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.
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.
