Category Archives: healthcare

February 17, 2021 · 22:32

“Deafness Separates People from People” A Note from my Wife Judy on Being Deaf During COVID-19

 

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Helen Keller wrote: “Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.” 

My wife Judy has had a moderate to severe hearing loss since birth or shortly thereafter. She asked me if I would post something that she wrote about her experiences being deaf during COVID-19. I will give an introduction and then post her comments. Her comments will be in bold print. I ask you to read them, share them, and if you encounter deaf or other people with significant hearing loss please show them the simple common courtesy of paying attention and treating them as people with intelligence.  If you don’t know sign language don’t be afraid to write notes and take extra time to help them understand you. It will pay great dividends

Judy has been wearing hearing aids since she was about seven years old. In school she was subjected to surviving the best she could in regular classes where she missed a lot of what was taught in class. But she did her best. She became a vociferous reader, learned grammar rules and how to write, and began her steps to become an exceptional artist. Despite that she was often ridiculed and ostracized by other kids, and some teachers because of her deaf speech, inability to understand, and the hearing aids themselves.

She did her first years of college at our local Junior College where I met her. She began to learn sign language and also took German, and she can function decently conversing with Germans when we travel to Germany.

We both went to California State University at Northridge where she became part of a deaf community through the National Center of Deafness. There she continued to learn sign language not just in class but because she was now part of a good sized community of deaf and hard of hearing people. She was able to get specialized counseling for academics and surviving in the hearing world. I became part of that world and became good enough in sign language that many of her deaf friends assumed that I was deaf because they couldn’t hear me talk. My best teachers were her roommate Kendra and friends Vick and Gael.

Judy has a moderate to severe hearing loss.  She has always used her hearing aids to her maximum ability, learned to read lips, and used sign language interpreters or interpreter/note takers in class. She graduated but as we moved into the real world she was subjected to much discrimination and occasional ridicule. If you know deaf or severely hard of hearing people many have speech impediments and voices which are easily identifiable as being deaf. Judy spoke well enough for most people to understand her. Some people thought that her speech was maybe because she was German or from somewhere in else in Europe. Others assumed that she was either stupid or developmentally delayed, because of her speech. It was very difficult for her.

During the course of the 1990s she lost another 30% of her hearing in the low frequencies. Without hearing aids it is almost impossible for her to understand speech. Now with very high tech hearing aids turned to her hearing loss she does much better hearing, but still struggled with speech. After an experience in dealing with a woman at a fabric store who asked about her being deaf because of the way she talked, Judy resolved to improve her speech. She went back and got intensive speech therapy which has made her speech virtually indistinguishable from a hearing person.

She speaks so well now that unless people see her hearing aids they assume she is not deaf. Audiologists and speech pathologists are surprised by her speech comprehension and speech. She far exceeds the expectations professionals have for a person with her hearing loss. In fact there are many people who have similar hearing loss to her who wear cochlear implants.

But COVID-19 has hit her hard. She cannot lip read through masks. Now we both prefer that everyone wear effective masks in order not to spread the virus. Because she speaks so well when she goes to a doctor’s office or somewhere she is not known people assume she is a hearing person and she has to fight to convince them to believe that she is deaf and get them to be as clear with her as they can in their communication with her. That is frustrating for her.

I am now working to get my sign language proficiency back, not just for her but because I now have a neurological condition related to my PTSD. This condition effects my speech discrimination, in other words I have a terrible time understanding speech except in one on one conversations with little or no background noice or cross talk. In many situations I am functionally deaf. Judy has far better speech discrimination than me. There were times before COVID-19 that she would tell me what people said.

So with that in mind please read Judy’s words. I hope they are helpful to you in communicating with deaf people you know or encounter.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

I have a severe hearing loss. Although I fully support the wearing of masks, and I shun those who won’t wear them, people with masks often are near impossible for me to understand.

My therapist recently had to change offices, and the receptionist refused to believe that I couldn’t hear her, despite the fact that I told her four times. By the time my therapist came to get me, I was in tears. He had to tell her twice that I couldn’t hear her, and she was shocked. Yet, she still insisted in talking at me two more times. Apparently she thought I was making it up? The last time she talked at me, I just stared at her. Now I hand her a note with my information and make her write down any conversation.
This week, I saw my primary care doctor. I first saw the nurse. I informed her that I did not hear well, and she snapped at me that she was NOT going to take off her mask. I don’t remember making that request. I did ask her to look toward me when she talked to me, which she ignored. She started yelling at me, thinking this would help, while talking to the wall. Frustrated, I remarked : “ You don’t get many deaf people, do you?” She became angry. She asked the wall another question, and I asked her to turn toward me. She got louder. By the time my primary care doctor came in, I had a headache. My primary care doctor is very soft spoken. She let me move my chair a bit closer. Despite the fact that her voice is so much softer than her nurse, I understood most of what she said very well, and she had no problem repeating herself. I love this woman.
Here are my tips for communicating with people with hearing losses, especially when wearing a mask:
  1. Believe a person when they say that they can not hear you.
  2. Don’t yell. This doesn’t make your voice any clearer.
  3. Do not lose your patience. How do you think I feel?
  4. Write notes if necessary. There is no shame in writing a note.
  5. Look toward the person while talking to them. If you talk to the wall, you will be even less understandable.
  6. Be polite and treat the person with dignity. It’s disheartening when people get exasperated.

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Filed under COVID19, healthcare, Loose thoughts and musings, Teaching and education

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February 6, 2021 · 03:08

It is a Long Way to Tipperary: thoughts on Return from War and Betrayal

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Today I am a bit tired and going to post something that basically is a rerun with a few edits. Twelve years ago stepped off a plane with the man who had been my body guard and assistant for the past seven months in Iraq. War had changed me more than I had every imagined that it would. Even though I was physically home I wasn’t home, the war remained with me, and in some ways it still does.

I have written about my struggles with what I sometimes describe as the “Demons of PTSD”.  I retired from the Navy at Midnight on December 31st, an occasion that I toasted in first with a glass of champagne with Judy followed by a couple of drams of 18 year old Glenfiddich Single Malt.

But the transition to retirement has been difficult. First was the ordeal of getting the Navy to get my DD-214 that statement of service that ensures that all service is credited, awards documented, and combat service documented for retirement, medical, and Veterans Affairs benefits. I was able to get the basics taken care of but so much was still missing, basically because the Navy probably has the worst system of documenting awards and service than any military branch. The I was told by the same people that our TRICARE medical insurance would remain in place until our identification cards were redone and our profiles updated in another system called DEERS. It was either a lie or something said in complete ignorance. Because of COVID-19 and the limited number of appointments available for new ID Cards we couldn’t get ours until 21 January. Since we were told we were covered during the interregnum we had no idea that our TRICARE  benefits had expired on 1 January until we found out Wednesday. I spent Thursday getting it fixed and the found out that evening the contractor for the Veterans Administration had screwed me on my VA Disability claim quite obviously not even reviewing the massive amount of evidence in my medical records. That sent me into a short tailspin where I actually thought about suicide. Once again I felt completely betrayed by representatives of our country.

Thankfully, I had a lot of friends, former shipmates and comrades come to my assistance. One a retired Navy Doctor who now works for the VA, another a retired Medical Corps Admiral who has friends at the highest levels who help military personnel when they run into problems with the VA, and another who is the personal friend of a high ranking Senator on the Veteran Affairs Committee. I received personal messages and phone calls from many friends and Monday we set about righting the wrong. I have been assured that this is an easy appeal, but the initial shock and sense of betrayal completely wore me out. Though I wanted to gather everything for my appeal today I was so emotional worn down that I couldn’t do anything. I am in a better place today, but I admit my anger at contractors who didn’t bother to really look at thousands of pages of documentation in order to minimize my experience with PTSD and so much else.

I still deal and suffer from PTSD, even if the VA contractor minimized it and did so with other conditions. Their audiologist even admitted that he never looked at my records before examining me. The psychologist didn’t say it but obvious had not examined my records.

However, the fact that I am a historian has allowed me to find connections to other men who have suffered from their experience of war, came home changed, and struggled for their existence in the world that they came home to.

The words of men who I never met, have helped me to frame my experience even in the darkest times often in ways that my faith did not. One of the things that I struggled with the most and still do is sleep. When I was conducting my research on the Battle of Gettysburg I got to know through biographies and their own writings a good number of the men who fought that battle who are now remembered as heroes. One of these was Major General Gouveneur Warren who has shattered by his experiences during the war. He wrote to his wife after the war: “I wish I did not dream that much. They make me sometimes dread to go to sleep. Scenes from the war, are so constantly recalled, with bitter feelings I wish to never experience again. Lies, vanity, treachery, and carnage.”  Those terrible nightmares and terrors continue. My panic attacks continue, my inability to understand speech remains, the pain in my hip, knees and ankles is such that I still need to use a cane to walk or drag myself up the stairs. But I digress…

About every year around this time I feel a sense of melancholy as I reflect on war and my return from Iraq. I didn’t get a chance to re-read it today, but a while back I read a number of George Santayana’s Soliloquies in England, in particular one entitled Tipperary, which he wrote in the time shortly after the First World War. The title is a reference to the song It’s a Long, Long Way, to Tipperary which was written by Henry James “Harry” Williams and co-credited to his partner Jack Judge as a music hall song in 1912. It became very popular before the war, but became a world wide hit when George Curnock, a correspondent for the Daily Mail saw the Irish Connaught Rangers  Regiment singing it as they marched through the Belgian port of Boulogne on August 13th 1914 on their way to face the German Army. Curnock made his report several days later, and soon many units in the British Army adopted it. It became a worldwide hit when Irish Tenor John McCormack recorded it in November 1914.

Interestingly enough the song, like the German song Lili Marlene is that it is a call back to home, not a call to battle.

I think that the first time that I heard the song was when I saw It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, where Snoopy as the World War One Flying Ace alternates between happiness and tears as Schroeder plays the song on his piano. In a number of later comic strips, Charles Schulz, had Snoopy refer to it a number of times, in one strip, exhausted by his march, a tired Snoopy lays down and notes: “They’re right, it is a long way to Tipperary.” I do understand that.

But, back to Santayana’s soliloquy, he comments on the wounded officers that he sees singing the song in a coffee house and he wonders if they understand how different the world is now. I love the song, the chorus is below.

It’s a long way to Tipperary
it’s a long was to go
It’s a long way to Tipperary
to the sweetest gal I know
farewell to Piccadilly
so long Leister Square
It’s a long way to Tipperary
but my heart lies there

Santayana wrote:

“It had been indeed a long, long way to Tipperary. But they had trudged on and had come round full circle; they were in Tipperary at last.

I wonder what they think Tipperary means for this is a mystical song. Probably they are willing to leave it vague, as they do their notions of honour or happiness or heaven. Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it ever would come ; they are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves ; they forget their wounds ; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened…

So long as the world goes round we shall see Tipperary only, as it were, out of the window of our troop-train. Your heart and mine may remain there, but it s a long, long way that the world has to go.” 

In the same work Santayana mused on the nature of humanity and war, making one of his most famous observation “only the dead have seen the end of war.”

In the United States we live in a world where war is an abstraction and the vast majority of people have no clue about it or its cost. When I hear former President Trump  make wild threats of war for four years before attempting to overthrow our own government and democracy on 6 January I feel betrayed by fellow Americans and veterans, but also the Veterans Administration and an overwhelmed and incompetent Naval Personnel Command. 

When I returned to the United States in 2008 it was incredibly hard to readjust to life in a country that knew not war. As a historian I was reminded of the words of Guy Sajer in his book The Forgotten Soldier. Sajer was a French Alsacian of German descent who spent nearly four years fighting as an ordinary infantry soldier on the Eastern Front. When he returned home he struggled and he wrote:

“In the train, rolling through the sunny French countryside, my head knocked against the wooden back of the seat. Other people, who seemed to belong to a different world, were laughing. I couldn’t laugh and couldn’t forget.”

A similar reflection was made by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quite on the Western Front:

“I imagined leave would be different from this. Indeed, it was different a year ago. It is I of course that have changed in the interval. There lies a gulf between that time and today. At that time I still knew nothing about the war, we had been only in quiet sectors. But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world.”

I have to admit that for the better part of the past thirteen years, when I get out of my safe spaces I often feel the same way. I don’t like crowded places, confined areas and other places that I don’t feel safe in. When I am out I always am on alert, and while I don’t have quite the hyper-arousal and hyper-vigilance that I once lived with, I am much more aware of my surroundings and always plan an escape route from any public venue that I happen to find myself. Likewise, I still deal with terribly physical nightmares and night terrors, more than one a month.

As I read and re-read Santayana words I came back to his observation of the officers that he saw in the coffee house and I could see myself in them:

“I suddenly heard a once familiar strain, now long despised and out of favour, the old tune of Tipperary. In a coffee-house frequented at that hour some wounded officers from the hospital at Somerville were singing it, standing near the bar; they were breaking all rules, both of surgeons and of epicures, and were having champagne in the morning. And good reason they had for it. They were reprieved, they should never have to go back to the front, their friends such as were left could all come home alive. Instinctively the old grumbling, good-natured, sentimental song, which they used to sing when they first joined, came again into their minds.

It had been indeed a long, long way to Tipperary. But they had trudged on and had come round full circle; they were in Tipperary at last.” 

I too am now in my own Tipperary on this side of the Atlantic. In a sense I have been reprieved, although I observe things every day that take me back to Iraq. The news from that unfortunate country continues to discourage me. Likewise, the indifference of our former President that talked much about the loving “his” military, but in his and his supporters actions often demeaned military personnel and gutted the medical and mental health systems of the military and the Veterans Administration. But that is an article for another time. Thinking about what has transpired in the last few days and weeks that indifference and betrayal seems so real.  When I see and hear them I remember the words of T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia:

“You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling.” 

But as Santayana noted “So long as the world goes round we shall see Tipperary only, as it were, out of the window of our troop-train. Your heart and mine may remain there, but it s a long, long way that the world has to go.” 

It is that for me as I now go tilting after the Quixotesque Windmills that are such a real part of my life.

Until tomorrow, pray for me a sinner,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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January 5, 2021 · 02:17

A Time to Stand against the Coming Coup of the Trump Cult

Munich Police Defeat Hitler’s Bier Hall Putsch at Odeonsplatz

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

As the evidence continues to mount that President Trump and his nefarious Cult which encompasses most of the GOP minority in the House of Representatives and many Senators, as well as thousands of violent heavily armed Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Fascists, and conspiracy theorists are plotting a Coup to keep Trump in power it is time for every American who stands for our Constitution and Republic to resist them.

Even a few weeks ago most people brushed off the words of Trump and the words and violent actions of his Cult members including the Proud Boys, the Bugaloo Boys, QAnon followers, Christian theocrats, so called self proclaimed Militia outfits, Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Anti-Semites and other authoritarians with a grain of salt.

But our Founders were always concerned about such movements. Historian Timothy Snyder noted in an interview with Sean Illing: “We think that because we’re America, everything will work itself out. This is exactly what the founders refused to believe. They thought human nature is such that you have to constrain it by institutions. They preferred rule of law and checks and balances.”

That is not the way of President Trump and his violent Cult. On  March 14th of 2020 Trump proclaimed:

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,”

However, since Trump’s  indisputable loss in the election by over 7 million popular votes and a wide majority in the Electoral College he has become ever more desperate. His legal team filed over 60 lawsuits to challenge election results all of which were shot down in flames with prejudice because there was no evidence of voter fraud. While those lawsuits were going on and recounts were being conducted Trump supporters threatened election officials, and even Republican judges in the contested states. Even after the recounts, in the case of Georgia three of the, still showed that Joe Biden won, the results were certified, and the electors voted, the threats kept coming.

In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote something that is completely descriptive of Trump and his followers: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” 

Each day they got more menacing. Now the President has issued a call to his followers to gather and disrupt the ceremonial count of the electors in Congress on Wednesday. At least 12 Senators and over 100 GOP Congressmen and women have said that they would object to the count, which at best will delay the final certification by a few hours. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that allows Congress to overturn elections held in the various states. That is a fact. It is part of our Federalist structure of government which gives states certain powers not ascribed to the Federal Government. Congress cannot overturn certified election results in any state.

The German pastor, theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed on the express order of Adolf Hitler wrote:

“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual  stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”

The fact that so many GOP Senators and Representatives are willing to follow Trump into the abyss of his Götterdämmerung shows that they stand against the Constitution and are willing to violate their oaths all in the service of a criminal President. The President’s criminality was on full display last weekend as he was exposed as he attempted to browbeat, bludgeon, and threaten the Georgia Secretary of State and his Chief Counsel to change the votes cast in the election. That is a felony and the men he was threatening were Republicans who voted for him and wanted him to win, but have the integrity and honor to remain faithful to their oaths and obey the law. The same is true in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In all those states elected officials upholding the law and their oaths were and are continuing to be threatened with violence.

Arendt also wrote about the Germans of the Nazi era words that are frightening when one takes a look at the hold that Trump and his propagandists on Fox News, Newsmax Television, OAN, talk radio, and on thousands of fake news conspiracy theory websites and podcasts proclaim:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”


Over the past five years the President has made multiple threats to unleash his followers on opponents. Trump’s statements to that effect are so numerous that I have lost count of them. They began during his campaign and haven’t stopped, in fact they have only gotten worse and on June 1st 2020 he led a violent attack on peaceful protesters by officers of a number of Federal police agencies in Lafayette Park and the historical Saint John’s Church for a photo opportunity outside the Church. It was one of the most lawless acts ever committed by an American President against the American people.

Now we stand at the precipice of violence and insurrection incited by a lame duck President. If Vice President Pence whose life has been threatened by these people had a single working testicle or a couple of solid vertebrae in his back he would move to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from power, but Pence is not a man of courage or honor. Since Pence claims to be a Christian that is even more damning. Not only does he defy his duties under the Constitution, but his obligations to the truth as a Christian. Unfortunately, the Christian faith he represents is theocratic, authoritarian and undemocratic. In fact his version of Christianity is little different than the German Christian movement that wholeheartedly threw itself into supporting Hitler. Jesus Christ is not their God, just a slogan to make them feel good, their God is Trump which is the very definition of idolatry.

Yesterday, the ten living former Secretaries of Defense including former Vice President Dick Cheney all published and signed a letter about the existential threat of Trump to the Republic. That demonstrates the seriousness of what they see on the horizon.

Supporters of President Donald Trump rally outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office Friday, Nov. 6, 2020, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

A coup to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, overturn a free and fair election that Donald Trump lost, and to overthrow the Republic is gaining momentum. It is no different than 1860 when eleven Southern States seceded from the Union and brought about the most deadly war in American history. Senator Stephan A. Douglas who lost the election to Abraham Lincoln when the Democratic Party split into a pro-slavery Southern faction worked as hard as he could to prevent secession after his loss. He could not stop secession and went  back to Illinois where he proclaimed:

“There are only two sides to the question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots – or traitors”

Armed pro-trump militia members demonstrate in Louisville Kentucky on the day of the famous Kentucky Derby, which is held in the city.

Today the Party of traitors are not Jefferson Davis’s Southern Democrats, but the Dixiecrats and theocrats who took over the Republican Party and sold their souls to Donald Trump. Trump didn’t start this, he merely took advantage of a party that grew more unhinged by the decade beginning in the 1960s. Today the Republican Party is not the party of principled conservatism, it is a radical authoritarian party with dreams of dictatorship and most of Trump’s followers imbibe of the falsehoods proclaimed by him, his administration, supporters in Congress and media propagandists proclaim. William Shirer was one of the few American news correspondents in Hitler’s Germany following the Nazi takeover to the German declaration of war against the United States wrote of his experiences with the German Press, propagandists, and people:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

After January 20th the blood orgy of the Trump Cult will continue as they work to destroy the remaining conservatives in the GOP and probably destroy the Party in the process. It will be like the Night of the Long Knives, but they won’t have help from the military.

Make no mistake. There can be no more sitting on the fence hoping that things will blow over and return to normal as much as all of us, including me would like them to be. The next few days and the days leading to January 20th will be critical to the survival of the country our Framers painstakingly crafted together. What they created wasn’t perfect, the Union had flaws, especially in regards to slavery and our treatment of the peoples of our First Nations, but it was an experiment meant to see the continued increase of liberty for all.

If Trump and his Cult succeed in their plans the country we know is dead. In 1933 old line German Conservatives led by former Chancellor Franz Von Papen had President Hindenburg appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. In less than five months all of their political parties were dissolved and Hitler’s Nazis took sole power. A year later, Hitler turned on his former allies in the Night of the Long Knives, killing hundreds of his most loyal supporters, as well a German conservative leaders and some senior military officers.

I am now convinced that between January 6th and 20th we will see a wave of political violence and unrest we have never known in this country. I dearly want to be wrong, but when I look at Trump’s actions and statements, the violence already being committed by his followers, and the proliferation of threats by them against all opponents or those they suspect of not being loyal enough to Trump, I know worse is to come.

Yale Historian Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

That warning is now becoming a reality unless real patriots be the liberal or conservative are willing to stand up and be counted. That especially matters for police and military leaders. General Ludwig Beck the Chief of Staff of the German Army in 1938 resigned in protest over Hitler’s decision to invade Czechoslovakia. In retirement he became part of the resistance against Hitler and on the night of July 20th 1944 when the attempt to kill Hitler and take over Germany failed he was faced with immediate execution or the chance to kill himself. He attempted to kill himself but was just badly wounded and was finished off by an executioner. However before the attempt was made he sounded a warning to military and police personnel about duty to their country against a dictator. He wrote:

“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”

I pray that over the next 15 days that true patriotism and loyalty to the Constitution prevails. If it doesn’t our country is doomed.

So until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

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November 28, 2020 · 03:37

“ I pray to you to help me, and every day I get worse. Are you deaf, too?“ Thoughts of a Washed up Priest and Chaplain at the End of a Military Career


Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

A few nights ago I watched the final episode of the television series M*A*S*H “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.” As I mentioned in my last blog both the series and the film have been important and long lasting parts of my life. It is interesting because when I was first commissioned as an Army Second Lieutenant on 19 June 1983 in the Medical Service Corps, and September 1992 became a Chaplain in the Texas Army National Guard, subsequently serving in the Virginia Army National Guard and Army Reserve as a Chaplain. I also served as a Armor Officer in Texas during seminary. On 9 February 1999 I turned in my Gold Oak Leaf as a Major in the Army for the two Silver Bars of a Navy Chaplain Corps Lieutenant.

Now, 21 years after that move I am a washed up Chaplain and Navy Commander mostly abandoned by fellow Chaplains for openly and honesty dealing with the ravages of PTSD, abandonment which created moral injury that I have never recovered from, no matter how hard I prayed the Daily Office, or studied scripture and theology. Without going into such detail that it would harm me even more in much current fragile emotional state, I can only say that I was abandoned, ghosted, and off revamped by the senior Chaplains who sent me to war, of course I was a very willing volunteer, and then ensured that every subsequent assignment would be harmful to my career, while certain senior chaplains treated me in the most malicious and evil manner knowing I needed a continuity of psychiatric, psychological, and spiritual care, ripped me away from it sending me on a three year geographic bachelor tour, away from home and those supports.

I also continue to suffer physical and neurological disorders related to combat. One is a combination of serene Tinnitus, and abnormal degraded speech comprehension without corresponding hearing loss. The neurologist thought it was due damage to my auditory nerves and auditory processing center related to PTSD. My speech comprehension was rated in the third percentile, meaning that 97% of people process speech better than me. In order to understand speech in individual conversations or in large groups I have to be completely focused and not have any cross talk or background noise. This makes it difficult to function. Basically, I am functionally deaf unless I am completely focused on whoever is talking and they are speaking clearly enough for me to understand. Judy is really deaf, and she understands speech better than me much of the time.

During Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen the 4077th’s Chaplain, Father Francis Mulcahy is exposed to a mortar blast and suffers Tinnitus and hearing loss, which continue to get worse despite his prayers.

In one of his prayers to God, one which resonates much with me, he cries out:

“Dear Lord, I know there must be a reason for this, but what is it? I answered the call to do your work. I’ve devoted my life to it, and now, how am I supposed to do it? What good am I now? What good is a deaf priest? I pray to you to help me, and every day I get worse. Are you deaf, too?“ 

My situation doesn’t simply involve my inability to understand speech but the residual effects of PTSD: hyper vigilance, anxiety, severe depression, sleep disorders, nightmare and night terror disorders that have resulted in injuries including a broken nose when battling the phantom like images of assailants in my dreams.And most recently under the stress I feel, horrible angry outbursts that are so unlike me. They make me feel horrible, but a decade of death threats, internet stalking, being called an “enemy of America”, and for supporting the rights of Blacks a “nigger lover” and “wigger,” and condemnation by Christians for caring about the rights, safety, and decent treatment of LGBTQ as enabling sin against God, but I never saw Jesus turn anyone away. The greatest hurt I experience is when Christian friends attack, condemn, and abandon me, especially over the past five years as so many became members of the Trump Dictatorship Cult. It took a while but I don’t take it anymore and after slicing and dicing their arguments leave things in their hands as where to they want to go with our relationship. Some cut me off and others make sure I know how rotten I am before they cut things off. Back in the early days after returning from Iraq while melting down and being thrown out of my former Church I culled a lot of them preemptively from my social contacts. A few have since renewed and reconciled but not all.

No amount of praying ever changed anything. I still believe in God, but I struggle every day. Sometimes I don’t feel that I am of any use, but too many people tell me that I do. Even so the fourth verse of the M*A*S*H them song, Suicide is Painless rings true for me now. I don’t have the answers. That verse says: A brave man once requested me to answer questions questions that are key, “Is it to be or not to be” and I replied “oh, why ask me?” 

Something that Colonel Potter said to Father Mulcahy and Mulcahy’s reply seems a pretty good place to end this before I sign off from this post:

Col. Potter: Well, Francis, you’ve been a godsend.
Father Mulcahy: Look on the bright side: When they tell us to serve our time in Purgatory, we can say, “No thanks, I’ve done mine.”

So here I am, an old, broken, washed-up Chaplain and priest who is a better historian than many looking to the next phase of my life, with Judy and the puppies, but even so, without a Parish, without an institutional Chaplain position, or any formal place of ministry, I will still be a Priest, and serve whoever comes into my life, even when I struggle and doubt.

Since I am going to have to get a bit of work done  house and do my damnedest to finish the illustration section of my book so I can send it to my agent and publisher tomorrow, which means whenever I wake up, I wish you all peace and safety.

Blessings and Peace,

Padre Steve+

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November 14, 2020 · 00:23

Ten Days In November: COVID-19 Winter Sets In

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

COVID-19 Winter is here. The past month was brutal. Between 14 October and 13 November the United States went from 8,188,931 total cases 11,064,164. That is almost three million more infections. During that time there was an increase of COVID-19 deaths from 222,247 to 249,975. The number of active cases went from 2,675,985 to 4,025,243. Texas and California both topped a million total cases and Texas will soon top 20,000 deaths.

Most states are reporting all time highs in terms of new infections, and the infections are leading to large numbers of hospitalizations and in many rural states hospitals are at or near capacity and their ICU units are full. Across the country the virus is spreading and the same thing is happening. Even worse, the shortage of trained and experienced doctors, nurses, and technicians is stressing the system even more, because those on duty are exhausted, many are becoming infected. It is so bad in North Dakota that COVID-19 infected medical professionals are being allowed to return to work.

The growth is exponential. If the past month was bad, the last ten days were worse, 1,235,146 new infections and 11,337 deaths. The average of those ten days is over 123,000 new infections a day and 1,130 deaths.

The good news is that an effective vaccine may be approved with distribution starting in January. Even so it will take months at best to vaccinate enough people to start making a substantial impact, and the caveat is that a person needs two doses.

That still leaves us with doing the basics and doing them well to slow the spread of the virus: wearing masks correctly, social distancing, avoiding large gatherings, and frequent hand washing. But unfortunately President Trump, much of his administration, Congressional supporters, Republican governors and legislators, and his cult like followers resist doing these things. Trump and his cult politicized public health and the result is disaster followed by worse. This will break our medical system. The corporate for-profit system that prioritizes procedures that make big money from insurance companies, which profit by charging people as much as they can, paying as little possible, and denying coverage for paying customers whenever possible has turned health care into a privilege for those that can afford it and pushes those that cannot afford  it into no-win situations.

When we were traveling in Germany two years ago my wife got a bacterial infection that sickened her. When we arrived at a friend’s house near Karlsruhe it was getting pretty bad. Our friend took Judy to her doctor who took time with her, and prescribed antibiotics. The cost of the visit was minimal, far less than would have been charged here, and the cost of the medication was negligible. If we had been without insurance here it would have such care it would have been very costly. No wonder so many people here, even those with insurance plans put off, delay or don’t seek treatment.

Two weeks ago I began a journey into an abyss that I have just about recovered. I had a molar in the back of my mouth crack from the top to the root. It started with a headache on Wednesday 28 October. The headache was bad enough to make me miss work. The next two days I had contractors in the house and on Friday 30 October the tooth started hurting with my pain level going up to 12 on a scale of 10 by Friday night. Since all the Navy dental clinics were closed I went to the Naval Medical Center Emergency Room with to hope of been to see the on call Dentist. I was examined by a very young Physician’s Assistant who gave a cursory look at my mouth, said that she could not see anything worth calling down the dentist, sent me home with pain killers and antibiotics, telling me to go to my clinic on Monday morning. I have been in the military forever, I have learned to suck pain up and not complain. I went home where despite the medicine my pain got much worse and the infection in my jaw became far worse. By the time I got to the dental clinic the first dentist I saw was in shock at what he saw. I was immediately referred to an Endodontist who determined that the tooth had cracked, the nerve became infected and died with the infection spreading throughout my lower jaw. The tooth was pulled, antibiotics injected into the socket and I was sent home with stronger antibiotics and more pain medication. But I am still feeling the effects. I am having TMJ like symptoms, I continue to suffer bad headaches and the swelling is not yet gone. I called today but just got the clinic and Endontist voice mail. I will have to try to contact them on Monday morning to see about follow up.

Sadly, if I was most of the people I know in the civilian world, they would have received less care and an exorbitant price, because most health care plans severely limit dental care. However, the infection in my jaw could have become life threatening. People die from complications to dental infections, but this does not seem to be import to our profit driven health care system. Our military provided medical insurance payments for dental care are so pathetic that many dentists refuse to accept it and demand payment in full, by the way unless we are stationed overseas our family members cannot be seen in military dental clinics. Compared to most people we are privileged. Is that any way to live? Does that promote any sense of life and liberty? I think not.

How can we ever claim to be a people that values life when we make it impossible for people to have the medical care, mainly preventive care in order to fully realize the premise of the Declaration of Independence, that “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If people do not have a right to healthcare, they give up much of their unalienable rights to life, freedom and happiness. Unfortunately the choices our leaders have made for more than a generation have harmed our health care system and are directly impacting our response to the Coronavirus 19 Pandemic. We do not have enough physicians, enough nurses, or enough trained clinicians to take care of people in a holistic manner, we don’t have surpluses of beds, Reserve ICUs, or equipment because our hospitals and medical systems are based on maximizing profit, minimizing time in hospitals, and oppose traditional doctor patient relationships which at one time were based on doctors who knew their patients, sometimes for generations. Because of how hospital systems and insurers drive payments most doctors no longer have the time to actually know their patients and do what is best for them. This is not the fault of the doctors, most I know would love to have that luxury and are highly frustrated by the constraints placed on them by the insurance and corporate health care complex.

This has redounded to our current crisis. We don’t have the doctors, nurses, support staff, or reserve bed space because to do so is not profitable.

Our COVID-19 Winter Has just begun. Deaths could double. Hospitals will have to pick and chose who they will treat, guarantying that far to many will die and that even survivors will be subjected to lifelong illnesses.

Ten days from now I will write an update to this.

By the way, if you actually care about life you need to read historian Timothy Snyder’s latest book “Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary. It is not a long read, but it is very sobering.

That is enough for now, but ask yourself the question: “How important is life to me? Is it enough to consider that our lives and liberty depend on being healthy? Or does that not matter? It if it does not, then I would dare say that you do not value life, liberty, or anything that is supposed to be an anchor of who we are as Americans, especially if we claim to be Christians. your personal “liberty” involves endangering the lives of other citizens by disobeying the most basic public health precautions involved in the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” and opposing measures to ensure that every citizen has affordable and effective healthcare that does not leave them at the lack of mercy of our current corporate profit driven system, then I think your concept of the Declaration and what it means to be an American, and what it means to be a Christian is wrong. One cannot support our current policies and healthcare system and still say they support our nations foundational ideas, nor the teachings of Jesus.

Until tomorrow,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

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November 7, 2020 · 00:36

Dubious Records: The United States Hits New COVID-19 Highs

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

On 30 March 2020 as COVID-19 blew up with startling quickness I wrote an article called Very, Very, Very Dreadful: COVID-19 and Our Future:

Albert Marrin wrote in his book Very, Very, Very, Dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918: 

“No other disease, no war, no natural disaster, no famine comes close to the great pandemic. In the space of eighteen months in 1918–1919, about 500 million people, one-third of the human race at the time, came down with influenza. The exact total of lives lost will never be known. An early estimate, made in 1920, claimed 21.5 million died worldwide. Since then, researchers have been continually raising the number as they find new information. Today, the best estimate of flu deaths in 1918–1919 is between 50 million and 100 million worldwide, and probably closer to the latter figure.”

The current novel Coronavirus pandemic may not kill as many people as the Great Influenza pandemic did, but the numbers that it will kill will be catastrophic, not only in the number of lives lost, but in the unrest it causes in so many nations will lead to civil wars, usurpation of powers by authoritarian regimes of various ideologies, and subsequent wars that it helps spawn in the coming years. And frankly, after 75 years of relatively small wars, which admittedly have and tragically killed millions of people, the global order has remained relatively stable, until now.

The instability in the global markets, rising unemployment, shortages of so many items that we have come to rely upon, is just the beginning, and the virus has just begun. If it follows the course of the 1918-1919 pandemic, which most scientists believe that it will this is just the first phase. The second will be a slight lessening of infections and deaths in the summer followed by an explosion of it in the fall and winter, and the third wave will be far deadlier than today’s. It may even mutate into a far deadlier strain, as of now we know of two strains of it, and who knows how many there will be in the fall and winter? I cannot say, but I would put money on at least two or three, which even if we can produce a vaccine for the current ones, in record time, the mutations may be immune to it.

We were completely unprepared for this despite knowing that we were due for a pandemic. While industry can produce record numbers of ventilators and PPE, in a relatively short period of time, even which may not be deployed soon enough for this first phase of the pandemic; they cannot produce qualified ICU doctors, nurses and technicians that fast…

Even when we get the beds and ventilators, as well as additional rooms, we will have to staff them with doctors and nurses without or with minimal ICU experience, most gained during their medical or surgical residencies, or rotations through them during nursing school. It takes a special breed of physician or nurse to work in critical care, just as it does to be a cancer specialist, Emergency Medicine Doctor or nurse, or name the medical field. The fact is that you cannot make such specialists in a limited amount of time, and thanks to our managed care, for profit, system we don’t produce enough of them anyway. They are much more valuable than the equipment they have to use…

For brevity’s sake I left some out of the article but I covered what might happen in parts of the Third World. Also the infection and death rates up to that day, as well as the belated announcement of a shutdown by President Trump that was to continue to 31 April and we know what happened after that.

On 30 March there were 722,916 cases of the COVID-19 Virus worldwide, and 33,976 deaths and 536,454 active cases.  In the United States there were 142,178 cases, and 2,484 deaths with 135,135  active cases.

As of now the Worldwide count is 49,666,501 total infections, 1,248,779 deaths and 13,164,331 active cases. Daily deaths are higher than the spring peak, over 9,000 yesterday. In the United States we have 10,058,586 total infections, 242,230 deaths and 3,425,148 active cases and 1,248 new deaths.

In the past week the United States and many other countries records of new infections, deaths, hospitalizations and ICU bed utilization have skyrocketed. Many countries in Europe and in many American cities know that they are being overwhelmed. Many can create additional ICU beds but they don’t have the trained medical personnel to adequately staff them. I think I called that. One can manufacture amazingly beautiful ventilators but without the professionals  to treat the patients they are as good as useless.

I want a good vaccine that can be widely distributed as quickly as possible. I want a cure for those infected, but until that happens we need to do all we can to prevent infection. We have to be smart, but Friday we went over 10,000,000 infections, and Texas went over a million infections. The key is the leadership that President Trump and many other world leaders have not shown. John Barry in his book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, wrote:

“So the final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart.”

There are many times that I wish I wasn’t right about so many things, but then I am a historian.

I could go on and throw out more statistics, historical references, and things I know having worked two pandemics before this in ICUs and ERs. The United States has recorded more daily infections than at any point in the pandemic, over 100,000 a day. This is only going to get worse, winter has yet to begin.

So until the next time,

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

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October 31, 2020 · 02:12

Lying and Dying: President Trump’s Responsibility for the Coronavirus Debacle

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

On February 7th President Trump was being interviewed by Bob Woodward for his upcoming book. The interview was done by telephone and Woodward recorded it. At that point Coronavirus 19 was ravaging the Chinese city of Wuhan and its surrounding province. Not long before Trump had spoken to China’s President Xi and said of Xi:  “I think he is going to have it in good shape. But it’s a very tricky situation. It goes through air, Bob,” … “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus,” Trump said.

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At this point Woodward did not know that the President had been briefed by his National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien had told Trump in January 28th that “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” He was backed by his deputy, Matt Pottinger, was a China expert whose reports on China’s previous responses and lack of transparency on the 2003 SARS epidemic, and the factors that made this new virus worse than it, warning the President that he needed to think in terms of the 1918-1920 Great Influenza pandemic. The President was briefed by Alex Azar, Dr.Robert Redfield, and Dr. Tony Fauci about what he needed to do, everyone recommended shutting down travel to and from China and imposing a 14 day quarantine for Americans returning from China. This happened on January 31st and is something that the President has since claimed that he did despite the opposition of everyone else in the room. It was a lie, like almost everything the President says and does.

Three days after his interview with Woodward the President said at the White House, in a television interview, and in a campaign rally in New Hampshire, said “When it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away… I think it’s going to work out good. We only have 11 cases and they are all getting better.”

In the following months the President consistently undermined those who had warning him about the danger, and despite knowing the danger admitted that “he was being a cheerleader” and “trying to present an image of strength.” At the same time he repeated false information about the virus and the need for passive protection; masks, hand washing and social distancing.

It is now nine months since President Trump learned of how deadly the virus would be, and still claims that it is not a big deal and that he “defeated” it on the day that the nation recorded its highest number of infections, which has since been surpassed, yesterday there were over 101,000 newly diagnosed cases.

Today’s COVID-19 body count:

New Diagnosed Infections: 101,461
New Deaths: 988
Number of Active Cases: 3,056,626
Total Cases: 9,316,297
Total Number of Deaths: 235,159

Let us put these numbers in perspective. The United States has roughly four percent of the World’s population, but we have roughly 20% of the total cases worldwide, just under 27% of active cases, and just under 20% of total deaths. For a country as advanced as ours this is a debacle created by a President who though he knew the truth, went against all of his experts in infectious diseases, and national security advisors. Additionally he works every day with the GOP Senate, and his Supreme Court to deny healthcare coverage to Americans, guaranteeing that those who need healthcare, especially those with President-existing conditions, which anyone who survived COVID will be certain to have.

Additionally,  as I have said many times, behind every number is a name, a face, a man or woman, a father or mother, husband or wife, child or sibling, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend, neighbor, or coworker. Every person infected or killed by this disease is or was a flesh and blood human being, not just a statistic.

His son, Donald Junior, openly mocks those infected and the dead by dismissing the virus as “no big deal,” even as the President continues to deride those who promote sensible public health policies that would save lives.

The President’s actions during this crisis did not reflect incompetence, he knew exactly what he was doing, he was playing to his re-election above all else. Instead they were actions of criminal malfeasance, and a direct violation of his Oath as President. He failed to meet the minimum obligations of his office by lying to the country about the virus and how deadly it would be, and by undermining the nation’s response to it, something he continues to do, even four days before an election that he is promising to undermine if he loses, including telling unconstitutional right wing And white nationalist  “militias” which are nothing more than terrorist groups with more in common to the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, White Leagues, White Liners, and Nazi Brownshirts than they have in common with actual patriots.

It is going to be a very dark Fall and Winter. ICU admissions are filling up the small hospitals in most of the states with the highest infection rates. Hospital admissions are rising, and unlike the Spring and Summer waves which were relatively localized, which made it possible shift medical resources to the danger zones, it is blowing up everywhere. There are no reserves to throw into the battle, soon there will be no room in the ICUs or the hospitals. Doctors are going to have to chose who gets treatment and who doesn’t. The spike in deaths is just down the road a bit. We are staking our hopes on vaccines that are yet unproven, and will likely not be available in significant numbers until next Summer or Fall. By all means I want them to be effective, safe, and given in enough quantities to stop this horrendous virus, but even the most promising vaccines are still problematic, some clinical trials have been halted because of unexpected complications. Likewise, we don’t know their efficacy, and we don’t know when they will be available.

But it didn’t have to be this way. Had President Trump told the truth to the American people and been like Winston Churchill when Britain stood alone, told the British people:

“In this crisis I hope I may be pardoned if I do not address the House at any length today. I hope that any of my friends and colleagues, or former colleagues, who are affected by the political reconstruction, will make allowance, all allowance, for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act. I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war…”

But he did not. He could have been a hero, an iconic figure who told the truth and used every resource of the nation and our allies to defeat a global pandemic of which kind has not been seen in history. Had he done those things he could have gone down in history as a hero despite all his other failings as President. I could have lived with that. But he didn’t, and by Election Day there will be approximately 240,000 COVID-19 deaths. Some models say that by Inauguration Day that number might double.

I wish there were some good news to report, sometimes telling the truth is not a job filled with warm fuzzy thoughts.

So until next time, stay safe, protect yourselves, make sure you vote, and look out for your neighbors.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

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October 3, 2020 · 16:40

A Brief Thought on Trump’s Condition


Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Just a few short words before doing some work upstairs and going back to editing my book.

The White House is spreading so much disinformation right now it is harmful. The fact is that the worst symptoms don’t show up until a week to ten days after diagnosis, and the drug he is being treated with improved symptoms in hospitalized patients but has not been shown to keep people from dying of COVID19.

Dr. Conley said today that Trump he knew he was infected Wednesday and started treatment Thursday. This means that Trump went to multiple unmasked rallies and meetings Wednesday and Thursday in close proximity to people before he announced testing positive late Thursday night. This is indicative of what we all know to be a fact: Trump doesn’t care about anyone’s life, even those of his closest supporters. “Evil is the absence of empathy.” I Hope that he gets really sick and has to fight for his life, not that he dies but that he suffers, and after the worst is over that he becomes a “long hauler” so that he never forgets.

Until next time.

Peace,

Padre Steve+

 

 

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August 30, 2020 · 03:00

Fighting for Truth and Our Political System in 2020: Any Election Can be the Last, or at Least the Last in the Lifetime of the Person Casting the Vote. 

Babi Yar

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have a policy about Holocaust denial on my site. If someone denies the Holocaust or tries to minimize it I delete their post. That might sound somewhat restrictive, but I will not give them the space on my site to posit their race hatred and justification of genocide in any way shape or form. It used to be that I would spar with them, but I realized that by doing so I gave them a sense of acceptability, and when some proceeded to make physical threats against me for opposing their ideas I realized that I couldn’t go down that road anymore.

That being said, every so often I get comments from Holocaust deniers, as well as Japanese deniers of the Rape of Nanking and other Japanese atrocities in Asia during the 1930s and World War II. The Japanese Nanking deniers are almost always Right Wing revisionists and hyper-nationalists who subscribe to the racial theory that the Chinese and other non-Japanese are less than human. But I’ve never had an American take issue with Nanking. That being said almost all of my holocaust deniers are Americans who not only deny the Holocaust, but who subscribe to the most base and repulsive theories of anti-Semitism, and White Supremacy. I find that fascinating in a very clinical way.

I say that because I am inherently suspicious. If someone tells me a story or posts something attacking me for something I write here, or post on my Facebook or Twitter feeds I do my best to not take the comments personally, while recognizing their seriousness, especially if threats to my life or my family are involved. Thus I tend to ask myself “Why this? Why me? Why now?” My Clinical Pastoral Education Supervisor at Parkland Memorial Hospital called this using a hermeneutic of suspicion, because everybody lies, especially to Priests, Ministers, Rabbis, and other clergy. But, when the President and his entourage lie with such ease to change what they did as they did this week at the Trump Party Convention, as it now is the Republican Party in Name Only, one cannot assume anything they say to be the truth. When a President uses the powers of his office for his profit and political gain it is an abuse of power and a violation of the Hatch Act which forbids every Federal employee from the President to the lowliest janitor, clerk, or military recruit to use Federal property, equipment, or resources for financial gain or partisan politics.

Sadly, since the day of his inauguration until this very day President Trump claims that he is not only above the law, but that his word is the law. His enablers, cabinet officials and most of his party’s senators, representatives, as well as sate and officials fall in line with Trump’s, demands, edicts, and policies in a manner completely different than if President Obama and Clinton, or candidates Kerry, Gore, or Clinton had made them. In the former case they jump to attention in defense of a would be dictator and madman, but would have fought to the death if uttered or proposed by a Democrat. But when a Presidential Candidate like Trump says that he would not lose a vote among his supporters even if he shot and killed someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue, one knew at that moment that the GOP was no longer a political party, but a personality cult of  nearly religious dimensions, unless they had subscribed to the ideology of the cult.

To be sure, Trump is no Hitler, though his words sound more and more Hitlerian every day. I will not call the President a Nazi, though he has give tacit support to Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist groups and frequently engages in racist diatribes. That being said I do believe that he has strong Nazi leanings based on his comments about Jews, his disparaging words about racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, as well as those who are physically disabled or chronically ill. These statements of mine are all based on public comments, tweets, or actions he has taken. While he may not be a Nazi, he certainly is acting as any authoritarian leader would, and we have to heed the warning of Russian dissident Gary Kasparov:

“dictators & would be autocrats do not ask “Why?” when it comes to using power for their advantage. They ask “why not?

Today I am writing about the Holocaust Deniers that post on this site or my Twitter or Facebook pages. A coupe of years ago I had one response to this article   The Justification of Genocide: Race Hatred and the Quest for Living Space by shouting “you fear open debate.”  His blog address was listed on the post, so I used some internet tools and went to town. I found plenty of racist, pro-Nazi, and Holocaust denial posts and links made by him as well as an amazingly strong support for President Trump’s racist polices on immigration, and against American Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. So whenever one of these Internet drive by cowards comes to my page I check them out and find that many, if not most of them are incredibly racist, nihilistic and sadistic Narcissistic Sociopaths  emboldened by their Chief, President Trump.

But the reality is that such people fear open debate because when they engage in it they are exposed for the frauds that they are. Some like the English defender of all things Hitler and Holocaust denier, David Irving had the nerve to sue American Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel in a British court where she would have to prove her innocence as opposed to an American court where he would have had to prove that she had libeled him. Even in that setting Irving lost. If you want to see a great film, watch the movie adaptation of the trial entitled “Denial.” It is worth watching.

A while back I had another Holocaust Denier who ripped into me about the Nazi massacre of Ukrainian Jews at Babi Yar, in which over 33,771 Jews were marched out of Kiev and shot on the 29th and 30th of September 1941. There were 29 survivors who managed to escape the death pits by feigning death and climbing out after dark. Massacres of more than 100,000 other people, mostly non-Jews continued until November. The number of Jews killed was documented by the Commander of the Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C which conducted the massacre. The Einsatzgruppe men were assisted by troops from two Police Battalions and Waffen SS troops with Logistical and security support from the Wehrmacht.  Both the records of the Einsatzgruppe and the testimony of SS men who took part is damning enough, yet my denier critic had the nerve to say “There was no such massacre – it is just another example of war time atrocity propaganda.”

I since he decided to leave his comment, email address, and website exposed, I decided to do a little investigation and found that he is full of these zingers On other blogs and news sites, as well as an avid supporter of President Trump. He plays fast and loose with the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust and claims that “It is currently illegal in many European nations to question the official or generally accepted account of the holocaust of European Jewry during the Second World War.” Of course that is not true, in fact in most of Europe the archives are open, the documents assessable, and the evidence undeniable.

Riot police rush protestors to clear Lafayette Park and the area around it across from the White House for President Donald Trump to be able to walk through for a photo opportunity in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church (seen at rear), during a rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, near the White House in Washington, U.S. June 1, 2020. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno

The problem is that the evidence is so great that any to deny it or attempt to revise it deserves both public ridicule and academic scorn. So instead of actually trying to disprove the facts they turn to obvious lies, just as President Trump and his enablers have done with the COVID19 Pandemic and Trump’s both incompetent and evil handling of it, his handling the economic collapse that followed, and absolutely racist and authoritarian response to the protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, used massive force to clear peaceful protestors from Lafayette Park and the area around St. John’s Church to have a photo-op with a Bible that he could not figure how to hold. He couldn’t tell which way was up with it. It was then, that for the first time in my life, felt that an American President had threatened mine as a Priest and Navy Chaplain. But I digress, as closely as this attack is linked to what I am writing about today.

There are laws against Holocaust denial in many European countries precisely because it was such a horrific chapter in human history that it cannot be minimized or defended, but there are no such laws here, just as there are no laws against those who promote the evil, bloodthirsty, racist, and treason laden lies of the Noble South, the Virtues of Slavery, the less than human status of Blacks, and the villainous myth of the Lost Cause. All of these put newly emancipated slaves back into a condition of slavery by another name for another century and more. The repugnant racism of the rebellion for slavery still runs strong in much of the United States and it is not confined to the eleven states of the Civil War Confederacy, but throughout much of the country.

Not surprisingly most of the Holocaust Deniers, are also the proponents of Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, the Noble South, the Lost Cause, Jim Crow and Segregation, as well those that oppose the Constitutional civil and voting rights of Blacks, Women, and other minorities To include LGBTQ+ people of every race, gender, ethnicity, and religion. This is extraordinarily dangerous, because such people have no scruples against killing those that they hate.

James Morcan in his book Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories wrote something very true that I am all too aware of:

“Unfortunately, the historicity of the Holocaust has been undermined and chipped away at by the exact same sinister forces that created the genocide in the first place: racists, religious bigots and the most paranoid type of conspiracy theorists who, together, are uniting – often unwittingly – to form a new wave of anti-Semitism that will not willingly accept the obvious facts of the past. This chipping away (at the truth) began slowly and insidiously – much like the Holocaust itself – but sadly, and worryingly, it is gathering pace.” 

It is interesting to read through the man who posted that I was afraid of honest debate, to go to his blog and see that his issue is not about anti-Semitism, as he is exceptionally anti-Semitic, nor is it about the killing of the Jews, just the number of Jews killed. It seems that if  he, like the other deniers can somehow lessen the number of Jews killed, that it becomes more acceptable, and over time forgettable. I will not open this site up to Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers is Charles Johnson who was invited to the State of the Union Address in 2018 by Congressman Matt Gaetz. In an interview Johnson responded to the question “what are your thoughts on the Holocaust, WW2, and the JQ in general?” (JQ is short for the Jewish Question) His response was telling.

“I do not and never have believed the six million figure. I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic. I think the Allied bombing of Germany was a war [sic] crime. I agree…about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.”

Johnson denies being a Holocaust denier and touts his support for Israel, like many others like him do, but his words ring hollow. Moreover his words are all too indicative of what he really believes, and worse of all he is accepted by leading members of the Republican Party. Such associations do nothing but serve to legitimatize Holocaust Deniers and make their arguments more acceptable, after all, if a President and leading Congressmen espouse a position and associate with its proponents, it must have merit. Of course it doesn’t but when there is a dearth of historical knowledge and general indifference it does not take much for such men to motivate others to violence. As Lipstadt noted about David Irving, and I would extend to people like Johnson: “People like David Irving do not throw firebombs. They throw the words that can cause others to throw those firebombs.” 

The sad thing for us as a nation is that quite a few Holocaust deniers, have the ear of the President, people in his administration, and Republican Congressmen. This makes this topic all too relevant. As Marc Bloch wrote “we can truly understand the past only if we read it in light of the present.”

Now, some 40 hours after the end of the Trump Show, otherwise known as the GOP National Convention, everything is on the line. If Trump wins this election and the GOP holds the Senate, the great experiment of our founders and all those who attempted to make us a more perfect Union will be for nought. Such a thing cannot next allowed to happen or the President that pardons war criminals, parsons men who collided with enemy intelligence services to get him elected in the first place, and attempts to destroy the lives and reputations of military personnel and civil servants who dare to tell the truth, will go much further to establish himself as dictator, trample the Constitution, make the Congress a rubber stamp, and remold the courts so they no longer server justice, but him.

The Constitution that I swore to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic is under attack by President Trump. According to the oath that every Federal, and many state officials swear to defend, President Trump and his supporters are ENEMIES of the Constitution, the Country, and its citizens.

In one of his speeches from March 14th of this year Trump declared:

“I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,”


It nearly killed me to write this article, but how can one not see what is going on and not speak up about it? I love my country, I have swore a sacred oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and now see for the first time in my life a man committed to destroying the Constitution and ruling as a dictator intent on destroying the American Experiment running for re-election on a personal platform little different than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. As the great American Naval hero of the Revolutionary War, John Paul Jones replied to his British Opponent: “Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight!”  And fight I will, as General Henning Von Tresckow said in the attempt to kill Hitler: “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.”

But men like Hitler and any other authoritarian leader including President Trump who has used his office for personal gain, the persecution of the most vulnerable in our society, bulldozed the Constitutional and the unwritten norms that serve as the guardrails of our political system. He has allowed almost 190,000 Americans to die of Coronavirus 19 and of six million more to be infected, hundreds of thousands of whom will suffer the physical and emotional damage of that terrible virus, while impeding scientist attempting to develop a cure, undercuts the public health officials trying to prevent its spread, while promising as if by magic that we will have a safe and effective vaccination by the fall. That is both criminal negligence and mass murder of American citizens of all walks of life including some of his most high level supporters like Herman Cain. 

If we do not fight this battle at the polls and Trump finds a way to win or remain in power by extra constitutional means, this will always be Trump’s America, complete with personal loyalty oaths to him, the mass arrests of political opponents, and the unleashing of his most violent followers backed by the police on political opponents and racial, religious and other “undesirables.” or those they dream to be “Life Unworthy of Life.”

The perpetrators could  possibly include the military unless the Generals and Admirals decide to stop him. No one wants that, because most of us who value the Constitution believe that the military should be as apolitical as possible and remain out of politics. But this has not always been the case, as Herbert Hoover used active duty Army units under the command of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton to attack veterans of the First World War demanding their war bonuses early because the were jobless and homeless during the Great Depression. It was one of the most egregious, amoral, and unconstitutional  actions of an American President against American citizens, and to make that matters worse attacking war veterans and their families with active duty Army troops, Marines, and police, even using tanks and chemical agents.

But if the President basically overturns the Constitution and seizes power, they are the last bastion to save the republic from destruction and will have to act. Hoover, was unwilling to try to overturn the constitutional guardrails between the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branches of government. But Hoover, was no Trump. Many other military officers wanted no part of Hoover’s use of the military.

Today’s military leaders have to remember their oaths as all that serve in government must. They must remember the words of General Ludwig Beck who resigned as head of the German Army in 1938 and died in the attempt to kill Hitler on July 20th 1944:

“Final decisions about the nation’s existence are at stake here; history will incriminate these leaders with bloodguilt if they do not act in accordance with their specialist political knowledge and conscience. Their soldierly obedience reaches its limit when their knowledge, their conscience, and their responsibility forbid carrying out an order.”

Beck also noted:

“It is a lack of character and insight, when a soldier in high command sees his duty and mission only in the context of his military orders without realizing that the highest responsibility is to the people of his country.”

I do believe that we are now at the precipice, standing at the edge of the abyss and that unless Trump is thwarted in his bid for re-election that the 2020 election may be the last free election held in this country. One cannot assume otherwise.

We have to remember the warnings of historian Dr. Timothy Snyder who wrote in his book On Tyranny:

“The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. 

But form me there is a certain timeless component of God’s justice on such people. The German Pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who ended up dying for his connection to the German  conspirators against Hitler wrote:

“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual  stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”

Bonhoeffer’s words are timeless and should send a chill through anyone who claims the Name of Christ, and supports what Trump is doing, and those who oppose Trump for whatever reason and no-matter what their religion or ideology happens to be. We want our fight to be non-violent and follow the norms of our American Constitutional system as it was intended. We do not want to take violent action or undermine our sacred oaths and values as Americans as eschew violence, and promote intelligent and non-violent speech and protest against the crimes of President Trump and his racist and authoritarian followers, including those in Congress, the Justice Department, and too many Law Enforcement organizations and officers. Sadly, it has been demonstrated time after time that peaceful protests will be met with violence and propaganda justifying it.

Please remember that and vote as if our life depended on it and that this may be your last chance to vote in a meaningful election. If you don’t you may never have a meaningful chance to do so again.

Until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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August 13, 2020 · 23:59

“Say I Slew Them Not” Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and the U.S. Response to COVID19

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

I have to admit that the amount of ignorance in the defense of evil that I see daily is simply mind blowing. It makes me shake my head. But then I cannot be surprised anymore. Over the weekend I saw a poll in which nine percent of Americans said that holding White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi views and ideology was okay.

Now nine percent doesn’t sound like a big number or anything to worry about until you extrapolate that percentage into the numbers of people who hold that view. Based on the population of the United States that nine percent equals about thirty million individuals. Now I’m sure that many of these patriotic Americans are not card carrying Klansmen or Nazis, but the fact that they would turn a blind eye to the evil of both in the name of some incomprehensible moral equivalence as did President Trump after Charlottesville is quite disturbing. Perhaps it is his example that enables them to be so open about their acceptance of evil.

Yesterday on my Facebook page a friend of a friend commented on an article which discussed new research that indicates that the Nazis in their occupation of the Ukraine killed perhaps a half million more Jews than previously believed. That woman made the comment that there were others, and yes that is true. Had the Nazis won the war tens of millions more of the Jews as well as the Slavs who they referred to as Untermenschen or subhumans would have been killed, either directly or through a policy of intentional starvation. But make no bones about it, from the months that Hitler spent in Landsberg prison for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 writing Mein Kampf until the end of the war as the Red Army closed in on his bunker in Berlin, the Jews above all were the object of his personal hatred.

Close to six million Jews and millions of others were killed by the Nazis. Millions of Africans were enslaved in the United States and even after emancipation were by law treated as less than full citizens. Under Jim Crow they were discriminated against at every level of government including states that were neither a part of the Confederacy or not even States when the Civil War was fought, they were impressed as forced labor under the Black Codes and thousands were murdered, often in public by people who brought their children to watch Black men die.

But these people were not just numbers. It’s all to easy to blur them into a mass of dehumanized humanity by talking about the millions, when every single one was a human being, yes, I believe created in the image of God. We have to see their faces and we have to recognize their essential humanity as men and women, children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands and wives, whose lives were in the case of the Jews obliterated as if they never existed, and others like African slaves who were simply property.

I explained that in quite a few fewer words and told her that she shouldn’t challenge me on the subject, which of course she did. So I went into more detail and shot her argument down in flames, to the cheers of other commentators on the post. When you have spent much of your academic life studying a subject it really gets old hearing people make excuse for evil by trying to minimize that evil, especially against the targeted people.

It’s like Confederate apologists saying that the institution of slavery which enslaved millions of Africans was actually worse for White people. Yes it is true that many poor whites benefited little from slavery, but they were not bought and sold as chattel, sold away from their wives and children, whipped, and marched across country in chains to new owners, or yes even killed simply because they were not considered human beings but property.

Sadly, as Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote “The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.”

So there are about 30 million Americans who believe that holding Nazi and White Supremacist beliefs is okay. A few years ago I would believed that the number was lower, but after seven months of living in Trump’s America I believe that it might be even higher than the poll indicated. I only say this based on the postings I see on various social media platforms, news comment pages, the proliferation of websites that cater to these beliefs, and the lack of real condemnation of such individuals by the majority of the GOP Senate and House majorities, and the outright defense of them by other GOP representatives at the Federal and State level. These people have not learned the lessons of the Holocaust, nor American slavery.

Again I don’t believe that the majority of these people are real card carrying Nazis or Klansmen. Most would probably be considered great citizens: they work, they raise families, they go to church, and many would claim that they have “a Black or Jewish friend” so obviously they cannot be racists. But that being said they turn a blind eye to the evil of race hatred and White supremacy, and sometimes join in on social media meme wars where they mock the victims. But no matter what, not condemning the purveyors of White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi ideology, or by using the arguments of moral equivalence to minimize those crimes against humanity makes these people as complicit in the past, present, and future crimes of Naziism as if they were.

They may be ordinary people, as seemingly normal as anyone else, but as Hannah Arendt noted about Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis who advanced the destruction of the Jews was that they were so normal. She wrote:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

That my friends is as true as the day she wrote it after Eichmann’s trial, as it is today, and why we must constantly educate people in every forum possible that it is all too easy to become either a perpetrator or evil or a bystander. As Snyder wrote:

“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. …Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”

Since they were human beings the Nazis were not unique to history. In every era of history human beings have committed atrocities, many in the name of some kind of ethnic, religious, or nationalist ideology of supremacy that held other people to be less than human. That may sound harsh, but it is all too true based on history.

Yehuda Bauer wrote: “The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.”

In the movie Judgment at Nuremberg the judge played by Spencer Tracy noted something important about the defendants in the trial. His words need to be heard today as well:

Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning’s record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe.

But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary – even able and extraordinary – men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen. There are those in our own country too who today speak of the “protection of country” – of ‘survival’. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient – to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is ‘survival as what’? A country isn’t a rock. It’s not an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for. It’s what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being.

We have not learned any of those lessons as Americans and it is being seen in the response of the Trump Administration, Republican Senators and Representatives, as well as many GOP state and local, officials to the Coronavirus 19 pandemic. This pandemic has already claimed the lives of over 170,000 Americans, with roughly two and a half million currently infected, with over 50,000 cases a day, a number that with the reopening of many schools is probably going to increase to 70,000 or more in the next few weeks with a death rate that will increase correspondingly a few weeks later. Despite that the lies of the Coronavirus 19 pandemic deniers, led by President Trump continue to deny and lie, as if the dead were not dead. As Justice Robert Jackson said of the defendants at the Major War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg, the blood of these people is on their hands: 

“They stand before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain King. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: “Say I slew them not.” And the Queen replied, “Then say they were not slain. But dead they are ….” If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.” 


That is exactly what Trump and his racist and pandemic denying cult are guilty of, and they will continue to shed to blood of fellow Americans citizens until, and probably after when he leaves office. And every person they kill through their inaction, lack of empathy, and their willingness to share in the crimes of Trump, is very little different from Germans who said nothing as Hitler’s cult slaughtered the Jews and Millions of others in their dreams of a pure Aryan race, and Lebensraum or living space, even if it meant killing millions of innocent victims. American Army Psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote in his book:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

The people of today who support the policies of Trump, the GOP, and their propagandists who are directly responsible through their words, policies, and lack of responsibility are no different than the supporters of Hitler who carried out the Holocaust and regarded their victims very much As such they are no different than Joseph Stalin who said: “The death of one man is tragic, but the death of thousands is statistic.”

It is high time that we learn that again and that we make up our minds to oppose the ideologies that made the Holocaust,  Slavery and our pathetic and often selfish response to the Coronavirus 19 pandemic possible. As Hannah Arendt observed: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”  Those who defend the actions, take part in them, or remain bystanders and make excuses for themselves on demonstrate the depths of moral depravity they have sunk to, the depths of their narcissism, and their complete lack of empathy for the victims. In other words just what malignant sociopaths they are.

So until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+

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