I can think of two times when rather than being paid for hard work, one is presented with a bill. The first is when one hires a physical trainer, which is a foolishness I have never been guilty of, and the second is when one does ones taxes. I have to deal with roughly 360 receipts per year, all at one time because I put off dealing with them until I “have the time” (which means “absolutely have to.”) To do all that work and then be billed thousands of dollars tends to crash me into a depression, and this year my funk was worse because I am funding a government which apparently has gone utterly mad. That is my excuse for writing the “Quitter’s Sonnet” I posted earlier. It was three AM and still hot outside and sleep was elusive.
It’s amazing what a couple hours of rich, deep sleep, and a bit of rosy daylight, and a fresh coffee, can do to a man’s mood. I wrote this Restoration Sonnet three hours later,
God is patient with those who chose what’s wrong For the right reasons. Not that the sinner Will escape the penalty, but along With remorse comes humor. The brave grinner Who bears his hangovers, and who laughs at His own stupidity, make’s life’s schooling A tale worth telling, and makes scorn fall flat. The scoffer is a fool who is fooling No one; few like the brags of a vain man, But he who laughs at himself makes all laugh With him, and may make God smile. One can Be rebuked and still see a better half. Though God always points out what is worse, He Gentles the sting with patience and mercy.
Death’s dark seems to be a gladdening shroud, To be preferred to the unceasing sting Of sly lies which goad the maddening crowd. Old salts can’t abide such a slick peppering Of pure truth with political speckles. It is like watching one you love chose wrong; A son chose disgrace. No true heart heckles When witnessing fear cower. I must long For courage I lack, for I flinch away From shame on display. I just cannot stand The lunacy. I am old and I am gray, And death seems better than to see Truth unmanned, Naked on the cross again, once again mocked; But my eyes won’t close. This path must be walked.
In the winter of 1776 those standing against tyranny and the world’s greatest army had shrunk to a few thousand ragtag soldiers, cold and hungry and some bootless and leaving bloody footprints in the snow. In a few days the weary men’s enlistment would be up and they could give up on the lost cause and go home. What hope had Liberty?
Black Civil War soldiers in Washington DC; (Not the 54th)
The desecration of the statue honoring the 54th Regiment on the Boston Common by Antifa puppets is typical of a Globalist mindset which believes the way to resolve our differences is through destruction. Such resolve is as futile as attempting to turn humanity into identical clones with identical fingerprints; even if such a stark utopia was forced upon humanity, the clones could not all stand in the same place at the same time, and therefore their brains would not hold identical data, and no amount of dogma could prevent the spread of creeping individuality. Differences cannot be destroyed.
Actually such destruction is an affront to the Creator, for He is the one who made us so marvelously different. If you have a problem with the fact we are not all the same, take it up with Him. Not that you will stop talking long enough to listen. For thousands of years He has been telling us that the answer to the problems created by our differences is not destruction, but Love. Yet who has listened?
The chief problem is divisiveness, which draws a distinction between “them” and “us”. Weak minds cannot see beyond such distinctions, and fall prey to a mindset of murder; IE: The way to resolve a difference is to remove the person who differs. Such murder does not need to be physical; it may be as subtle as shunning. But it is not Love.
The problem is not discrimination. We all discriminate. How else are we to judge what is good from what is evil? Martin Luther King asked us to discriminate, but to base our discrimination upon the quality of character and not the color of skin.
This is easy to say but hard to do. It is not easy to understand why people behave the way they do, when we do not share the same background. If you grew up in a trailer full of empty beer-cans you might better understand the mindset of people called “white trash” by the unsympathetic people some call “the elite”. However you didn’t grow up that way. Even if you share the same skin color misunderstandings may arise.
The path past misunderstanding is through respect, rather than tearing others down. This is not to say you can’t fight in self-defense, but that you shouldn’t start a fight based merely on the fact others are not the same. At the start of the Civil War the so called “Abolitionists” didn’t want to abolish individuality, but rather slavery. They drew a distinction and employed discernment, which the mob desecrating the statue to the 54th seemed to fail to do.
If the mob thought at all, they likely disliked the fact the statue portrays a white man up on a horse as the black foot soldiers are on foot. However this is historically accurate. Robert Gould Shaw did ride a horse, and may well have died with his troops, shot from a horse. On the other hand he may have died after dismounting to fight by their side.
But die he did.
At this point full disclosure demands I state my last name is Shaw. Robert Gould Shaw cannot be anyone’s ancestor because he died as a young man, without children. War is the opposite of Darwin’s Theory; those most fit to live are often the ones sacrificed. However I do count him among my ancestors.
I cannot be free of bias, because my own family is involved, but I can pass along some insights that have been passed down to me, that you will not find in Wikipedia.
The Civil War was far more complex than two groups of men dressing in blue and gray and squaring off, and the rivalry between Boston and New York predates baseball’s Red Sox and Yankees. Some of Boston’s elite and many of New York’s actually sided with the Confederacy, for reasons having to do with profit more than anything spiritual. For example, some did not desire to see the price of cotton go up.
For a young idealist like Robert Gould Shaw, who grew up benefiting from inherited wealth he didn’t have to get dirty fighting for, such grubby materialistic concerns were incomprehensible. Therefore his letters confess the “them” against “us” attitude of a young Abolitionist. He definitely was not perfect. If you want to find imperfections to excuse your desire to tear the Boston statue down, look to his letters.
If you want to find evidence of “racism”, look towards his inability to comprehend the Irish. Few could, for few had been through the hell the Irish had endured.
During the Great Famine of 1844-1849 the population of Ireland declined by roughly 20% through starvation, and around a million children died, as, rather than sending help, the English “elite” exported food from Ireland for profit. This heartlessness did not make the Irish expect much from the non-Irish. They expected little in the way of love from their fellow man. If they didn’t put themselves first, no one else would. They left Ireland in droves, penniless and with little but sweat to offer, and were not welcomed arrivals in many lands, unless you were a member of the “elite” and eager to exploit cheap labor.
In the American south the Irish were used for dangerous work that might kill a man. A slave cost the modern equivalent of several thousand dollars, and, if a slave died, it represented a sizable loss, whereas if an Irishman died it cost nothing.
In the north the Irish did receive pay, where southern slaves received none, but southern slaves had to be fed, clothed and sheltered, whereas the Irish had to fend for themselves, living in squalid tenements we can hardly imagine, yet calling themselves better off than in Ireland. They did not like the idea of slaves being freed, for they feared the slaves would come north and take their jobs.
All Robert Gould Shaw saw was the tip of the iceberg, and he had a hard time comprehending why the Irish behaved the way they did. In the privacy of his letters he expressed frustrations which he likely would not speak to an Irishman, face to face, (or would not speak without employing the care of a diplomat.)
In like manner, even as an Abolitionist, Robert’s letters express frustrations he felt about the African Americans who lived in the north as freed slaves, or in some cases as men who had been born free and were well educated, and were themselves exasperated by illiterate Irishmen.
(As an aside I should mention that when I was Robert Gould Shaw’s age, 110 years later, some “elite” quasi-genius (more dense than a half-wit) decided it was wrong for the Irish to have one neighborhood and the African-Americans to have another, in Boston, and the answer was “busing”, which in a sense was to forcibly rip children from safe environments and place them in unsafe areas. It went over like a lead balloon, and I recall experiencing great anguish as a witness, because I liked both neighborhoods and both peoples, yet saw the worst being fomented. I may have written some things at the time I would now rue having published, for frustration creates a fume that does not smell nice, and I basically became angry at three sides: African Americans, Irish, and also the leadership which was banging the two side’s skulls together.)
If you really feel it is a good thing to speak badly of the dead, and crave some evidence they were not perfect, look to old letters, or diaries they kept when they were young, or some traceable record of emails they wrote when drunk but deleted the next morning without ever sending. If you want to find some proof Rembrandt was not a good artist, find some work he did when he was five-years-old, and use that as an excuse to burn his masterpieces. All you are doing is proving you are an absolute snob, incapable of true understanding, true sympathy, and true Love.
The tale of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Regiment is told in the movie, “Glory”, and is well worth retelling, though perhaps not by me. To put things in context, the battle of Gettysburg was July 1-3, the New York City Draft Riots were July 13-16, the Battle of Grimball’s Landing occurred on July 18, and the ferocious Second Battle of Fort Wagner was fought later the same day. Even Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you desire a broader view.
I bring up the Draft Riots to accent the complexity, and also the irony, involved. The riots occurred because the Irish were told they would be drafted to go fight and die to free slaves who would then later take their jobs, and they didn’t like the prospects, especially as rich people could escape the draft (for roughly $6200 in current dollars) and black people were exempt. In the sweltering heat of pre-airconditioning New York City the “peaceful demonstration” turned ugly, (sound familiar?) and the Irish turned their wrath onto the African Americans of New York City, brutally killing over ten, as over a hundred Irish died when troops, that had to be diverted from pursuing the retreating Confederate Army, were used to”restore order”. The irony is that this riot helped the Confederate Army escape, and therefore prolonged the very draft that was being protested, and also, even as the Irish protested that blacks were not going to be drafted, the 54th was marching south, many to their deaths, led by a white man who was only 25 years old.
At this point I’ll just add some family lore.
First, Robert did not initially want the job. He’d been fighting since the start of the war, had seen the bloodiest battles and twice was wounded, and did not want to desert his comrades. There was some doubt about the ability of black soldiers to face withering gunfire, and he feared he and his troops would be relegated to some behind-the-lines duty. The fact he was chosen was not so much a case of him stepping forward as it was of others stepping back. (It should be added that once he took the job, whatever racist preconceptions he had he shed, doing things such as demanding equal pay for his troops.)
Second, it was not merely in the North that there was doubt that black soldiers could withstand military discipline. In the south it was felt that, at the first bang of a gun, former-slave’s eyes would get very big, round and white, and they’d bolt. The 54th disproved this belief. Even before the first battle they created a sensation marching through southern streets in close order, radiating discipline, their uniforms impeccable and their buttons gleaming. The African American onlookers were especially impressed, (which the southern aristocrats felt set a bad example). Then in battle they fought without fear, basically rescuing the 10th Connecticut from envelopment early in the day, and gaining the ramparts of Fort Wagner in the afternoon. Although the higher command chose not to send further troops in to exploit this gain, instead ordering a withdrawal, there could be no doubt as to the skill and bravery of the 54th. But the reaction of the rebel troops was not admiration, but rather hatred and loathing, especially towards the commander who led them. Where the body of every other Union officer was returned to the Union side after the battle, the body of Robert Gould Shaw was stripped naked and dumped unceremoniously into a mass grave with his troops.
After the war there was an idea floated that his body might be exhumed and buried in some cemetery with honor, but the Shaw family stated he was proud to have served with his men and would likely be equally proud to be buried with them.
No long afterwards the mass graves were exhumed and the all the decomposing bodies were lain in neat rows with gravestones reading “Unknown”, but the Shaw family only wanted his sword back. Somehow they got it, and it was hauled out to be sentimentally displayed on occasion, until the blade gradually was forgotten and gathered dust in some attic until it wound up in a museum. However the surviving black troops didn’t forget, and were behind the erection of the memorial to the 54th, which was took decades to see brought to fruition; the statue itself was begun in 1884 and unveiled in 1897, and in 2020 took mere moments to desecrate with graffiti.
I often have wondered about the complete contempt displayed by the rebels toward the 54th and Robert Gould Shaw, for there is a contrary logic seen among soldiers wherein they must hate their foe to fight them, yet also feel admiration for the courage they witness in the men they maim and kill. What happened to the admiration in this case? I imagine what happened was that, despite the fact the rebels had defended their fort and won the battle, the 54th whom they had fought was a living proof the South had lost the intellectual war. Why? Because hand in hand with the concept of slavery is a concept like a caste system, which clashes with the idea that all men are created equal. The 54th had proven they were equal.
This leads me to a final anecdote from family lore, involving a similar caste-hierarchy in Boston, and the 54th marching off to war and passing the front of a prestigious club on Becon Street where the Boston Brahman were wont to gather.
By the summer of 1863 it had sunk in that, through the troops sung, “When Johnie Comes Marching Home Again”, many would not be marching home. The death toll was well on its way up to 600,000, which is basically a number the same as how many Americans have died in all other wars added together. Every older graveyard in New England has a crumbling monument to men buried far away, standing as mute testimony to the carnage which a Civil War involves. Therefore a poignancy was involved in the cheering, as the 54th marched by, with people putting on a brave face, and some holding back tears, until the troops marched in front of the club full of Brahmans. Their response? They pulled down the shades in the windows of their prestigious club.
Even 157 years later their snooty, self-imposed blindness is, upon this page, angrily remembered. It demonstrates that even in my own family bitterness is difficult to drop.
Not all memorials are raised to people’s most noble side; bitterness is a stone statue in our hearts, making hearts heavy, burdened. God urges us to love and forgive, but we prefer a poison which we ingest thinking it will harm others, when it harms ourselves and our children, just as the feud between Montegues and Capulets in the end killed Romeo and Juliet.
“The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.”
My great-grandfather was born in 1850, and that makes me the “fourth generation” since the horrors of the Civil War. I like to think my children are freed from the bitterness, for they are the fifth generation. However to achieve such freedom we must pull down statues, but not those erected externally, but rather the inner ones in our stony hearts.
Pulling down external statues is like pulling down the shades. There is something we do not want to see. But if we do not look at history and learn from it we are doomed to repeat it, as are our children.
‘The fathers eat the sour grapes, But the children’s teeth are set on edge’
If we only see the error of the past, we accent error and fail to see the glory which, if God is everywhere, is in every situation.
For, when you think of it, if your forefathers were completely bad, and all they did was bad, then you should start by pulling down yourself, for you are their creation. However, if you think your forefathers were good to create you, and it is only other forefathers who deserve destruction, then you are on the road to a Brahman racism all your own.
I actually have learned to like the image of the Boston Brahman pulling the blinds as the 54th marched by. It has great poetic value as a symbol. For the fact is this: A parade is marching in front of all of us, and we can either pull the blinds, or see the glory.
To those who can see no noble parade marching by, I say look beyond the blinds. Often what modern technology brings to the forefront is an ugliness in the way of beauty, but the beauty is still there, parading by behind it.
. UNWATCHED PARADE SONNET
I paused my weeding, ceased my looking down And gazed across the pasture to the trees That wavered green; looked up from dirt’s brown Hearing and seeing an invisible breeze Part summer’s locks with a sigh that’s unheard With the radio on. Every green leaf stirred. Every green branch swayed. Far too short a word Is five-lettered “trees”, and it seems quite absurd Such marvelous wind invisibly passes Unseen and unheard, like an unwatched parade, When I fret about news of rioting masses And make myself deaf to music God’s made. God knows how we ache and sends us His balm. Turn off the radio. Heed, and be calm.
While finishing up my taxes I found this old sonnet in the scratchpad I was using. It seemed fitting for Independence Day. It is a “hidden sonnet.” Can you see the sonnet?
Oh Beautiful! Oh Beautiful! God shed his grace on me, Though I was sulking mightily And full of self pity. Said I to self, “Self, stop this milking Pity from the stones; It’s such a crime And waste of time To make such moans and groans.”
Oh Beautiful! Oh Beautiful! My time was gray each day, But I knew in my bones deep down The sun would free its ray, And skies of blue and apples red Would waken hope in me As on the upland slope there lies A sung eternity.
Self, remove the rope you noose That binds creation’s song, For nothing God’s made worldly’s really wrong.
In sonnet form, the above verse would look like this:
Oh Beautiful! Oh Beautiful! God shed His grace on me, though I was sulking Mightily and full of self pity. Said I to self, “Self, stop this milking Pity from the stones; it’s such a crime And waste of time to make such moans and groans.” Oh Beautiful! Oh beautiful! My time Was gray each day, but I knew in my bones Deep down the sun would free its ray, and skies Of blue and apples red would waken hope In me, as on the upland slope there lies A sung eternity. Self, remove the rope You noose that binds creation’s song, For nothing God’s made worldly’s really wrong.
As I recall, Shakespeare had Romeo and Juliet speak to each other in hidden sonnets. In like manner, because God is everywhere and God is love, hidden blessings are in our darkest days, even when we describe those blessings as being very well hidden.
The so-called “Swamp” has a horror of being drained. Not merely will a draining result in the loss of the perks of power, but it also will involve the exposure of abuse of power.
Formerly such exposure was hidden by hypocrisy. Politicians kept their cheeks as smoothly shaved as choirboys, thinking naive people would think they were innocent. They liked to portray their “resistance” as if it was a noble thing, with a capital “R”: “The Resistance”.
However the persistent erosions of Truth made their hypocrisy more and more obvious, which made them more desperate, until now the resistance definitely has no capital “R”. No payments of blackmail to the picture-taking owners of Pleasure Islands can hide the whoring, and killing the whore-masters only makes the evil greater.
I have worked many jobs in my time that made me reek, although the stink was superficial, and deep down I was a hard-working fellow. For example, next time you open a can of sardines, pause to think how the people who worked at the cannery smelled. There was no deodorant that could hide the smell of fish, once it got into the fabric of your jeans or soaked into your hair. Ten washings wouldn’t work; you had to get new jeans or a haircut, to stop people giving you disapproving looks when you stepped into a shop for a slice of pizza.
Therefore I thought things might be different when I worked in a herbs and spices warehouse where my job included filling tiny quarter-ounce bottles with essential oils. Especially popular was the oil of roses, and when I stepped into the shop to grab a slice of pizza after filling several hundred hundred small bottles with rose oil I did not expect disapproval. What I heard was, “Peee-yoooo! You smell like a French whorehouse!”
Apparently people are not fooled by superficial scents. A man may associate perfume with a certain woman, but he hopefully looks deeper than her skin or her scent. When people look deeper they tend to see your hypocrisy, at which point a person can either be humble and confess their shortcoming, or become increasingly desperate in their attempts to preserve their privileged position among the so-called “elite”, though they are increasingly called “snakes of the Swamp.”
We are increasingly seeing “the resistance” resorting to desperate measures. It is not merely Harvey Weinstein and Jeffry Epstein whose sleaze is being exposed. The bribes handed out to Hunter Biden by Ukraine and China, and the falsified warrants sought by the FBI, and the twisted science employed to frighten people with Global Warming or the Corona Virus, are exposed, and the sycophants in the Mainstream Media only make the obvious more obvious when they attempt to hide the obvious, while also exposing themselves as complicit in the shams. What began as a pebble is becoming an avalanche.
More and more people are becoming fed up. Every action has a reaction, and “the resistance” is creating “The Pushback”.
The media does not want to show it, but here is an example:
And here is another:
The “Push-back” is not reported, and apparently there are efforts to censor it from Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, but such efforts are merely the Swamp growing increasingly desperate. Hypocrisy is dependent on hiding the truth, whereas honesty admits our blunders and displays a willingness to “stand corrected”. In fact most religious discipline is not a matter of pretending one is perfect, but rather a matter of looking towards Perfection and being led towards that Truth, while confessing imperfection. To pretend one has no problems is a problem in and of itself.
To tear down statues because the past isn’t perfect is a way of hiding from imperfection. It is better to see the imperfection in our founding fathers, and to study how they strove towards perfection even while confessing they themselves were imperfect. In the words of Saint John, “If we say we have no sin, then the Truth is not in us.”
Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. We must bravely face even that we wish forgotten.
(In actual fact the above photo wasn’t taken at the Democrat Convention in 1924; I Duckduckgoed “Klanbake”…..[I never use the word “Google” anymore, unless I have to.] It turns out there is quite a battle going on in the internet, with Republicans trying to to tar the Democrats as racists, and Democrats defensively pointing out Republicans were also members of the KKK. At both 1924 conventions motions were put forward to condemn the KKK, and neither party would vote to do so. In the Democrat convention “a platform plank favored by Smith supporters that would have condemned the Klan by name went down to defeat after a raucous debate that degenerated into fisticuffs”. Democracy in action is not always pretty.)
If you want the real scent of roses you have to bear the thorns.
The Greek myth of Pygmalion involves an artist falling in love with his artwork, and the artwork actually coming alive. Don’t scoff. The same theme appears over and over in human history. Even Walt Disney used it, when the lonely old woodcarver Geppetto makes a statue of wood named Pinocchio, wishing he had a real son.
Opposed to such an idea is the religious concept that such images are false gods, and in violation of the Second Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me.” For this reason followers of Islam blew up an ancient statue of Buddha in Afghanistan.
BEFOREAFTER
On one hand it is preposterous to make any sort of statue of God. How can one make a statue of Infinity? Especially Infinite Love? But, on the other hand, how can our small, mortal hearts embrace such a vastness? We need smaller concepts, father figures or mother figures we can walk with, holding hands with Incarnated Love like small, trusting children.
God is so vast He is stated as being Beyond the Beyond, and therefore without attributes, yet at the same time He has infinite attributes. Our puny brains should know better than to attempt to grasp such infinitude with our intellectual conceptions, especially when it causes us conflict rather than begetting love. In India there are all sorts of signs of the conflict between Hindus, who built all sorts of statues representing various worldly manifestations of God’s infinite attributes, and Moslem intolerance of such representations, which they hacked at with their scimitars when they conquered.
The joke is that just because you forbid an “image” of God, you cannot repress the human heart’s desire to in some way worship, pouring out song, or dancing, or painstakingly producing amazing illuminated artworks without “images”.
No matter how masterfully an artist creates, he can never match the Creator. It’s best to be humble about this reality. However there is something in the human spirit which wants to draw closer to the Beauty which inspires.
Said the singer to the song, “It is for your lips I long But I cannot reach the charms Of my creation.”
The song came singing back, “You are everything I lack And we need each others arms For celebration.”
There is a tale from the life of the Hindu seeker Ramakrishna wherein he is meditating and meditating and meditating before a stone statue of the feminine representation of God’s infinite attributes called Kali, thirsting for an experience of union, but drawing a blank. Finally he cannot bear the sense of separation and decides he is better off dead, and grabs a sword to kill himself, but before he can do so the statue comes alive and grants him the exalted samadhi he yearns for.
Perhaps, rather than ripping down and destroying statues, we should rip down and destroy that wall within ourselves that keeps us alone, and divided, and unable to feel one with our Maker and our neighbors.
Sunrise's Swansong 