"Mein Herz nach stiller Ru"

Blizzard warning this morning. If indeed it arrives, it will be our second this week, in a strangely warm winter season that appeared to take aim at proving global warming. November was October, as was December. Now, suddenly, we're promised yet another blizzard, followed exasperatingly by abominable cold--and wind! Half way through January, winter appears to have arrived, and more than a bit angrily.  

Wasn't that way in 1888. Here’s how David Laskin describes this morning, January 12:

Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the “great waves” of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun.

Then this: “The one aspect they all agreed on was the sudden, welcome rise of temperature.” A January thaw, a morning to remember, but a balmy prelude to horror.

Laskin’s book, The Children’s Blizzard, tells the story. When that strange warmth suddenly lifted, hundreds of people, most of them children, perished in a blizzard that made prairie skies dark as night and created massive drifts in winds that drove crystallized snow into your face so ferociously it filled up what flesh it didn’t tear away.

Seven miles east of Freeman, South Dakota, five boys died, lost in the unremitting blast of snow. Three of them were Kaufmanns--Johann, Heinrich, and Elias. What they and two other boys intended was simply to get to safety at the Graber house, a quarter mile east of the school, Ratzlaff #66. The wall they hit was a zero-visibility blizzard.

The victims’ families were all “Schweizers,” German-speaking Mennonites booted from Russia, who’d come to the Dakota Territory with fifty other families seeking the religious freedom they’d looked to find for 200 years--and the opportunity to live a good and safe life. None of them had it easy; sometimes their children would alternate attending school because families didn’t have shoes enough to go around.

But there was promise here in Dakota.

Then came “the Children’s Blizzard.”

Those five Freeman boys just disappeared; and even though search parties went out the next morning in the swirling remnants, no one found them until three days later, on the Sabbath, when a man spotted an arm jutting from a snowbank, an arm belonging to the eldest Kaufmann, Johann, who was likely holding up a coat to shield the younger boys from the killer.

They ended up two-and-one-half miles southeast of Ratzlaff #66, buried by the blizzard, just forty feet from the farm house of the man who found them.

The story goes that man went to church with the news that Sunday. I don’t know if he interrupted worship. I don’t know what they might have been singing, but I can guess how hard they prayed.

No one knows precisely how many people perished in that massive blizzard.  Most estimate the grim death toll at somewhere near 250.

It all began with a sweet January thaw that quick as a fox descended into madness. At Valentine, Nebraska, the temperature was 30 degrees at 6 a.m., six degrees at two in the afternoon. 14 below at nine that night.

Somewhere out in south central Nebraska you’ll find a highway marker that tells that neighborhood’s chapter of the story, but there’s nothing up at all east of Freeman, where five boys died. There’s no sign, no story, only endless rows of corn and soybeans. Even the farms are gone.

All the way from Russia, those Schweizers carried with them an old Mennonite hymn, something with a first line that went like this: “Wherlos und verlassen sehnt sich oft mein Herz nach stiller Ruh”—“When I’m lonely and defenseless,/my heart longs for rest and peace.”

Maybe that Sunday, that old favorite was the one they went back to, all of them. If not that Sunday, surely the next.

1888 Blizzard--what they remembered

For many years after the Great Blizzard of 1888, a group of survivors held annual reunions calling themselves The Blizzard Club. For years, the stories were told again and again.

>>>A teacher by the name of McKinley taught in a tiny country school, where he told the children, that January afternoon, that they simply could not risk the danger the massive storm presented. They had to stay overnight. No one came by to free them or bring them bread. To keep the schoolhouse warm, he burned their desks.

>>>An older boy, no longer in school, went out to the barn to check on the cattle. When he tried to return, he lost his way, then stumbled over a plow. Because he knew exactly where that plow had been left, he found his way back to the house. Needless to say, he might have perished had not that plow got in his way.

>>>The Shenck family didn't leave their house for four days because the entire house was drifted in, totally covered in snow.

>>>The moderate temperatures that morning promted many ranchers to turn the cattle out off their barns and send them into the what was left in the cornfields. Many of those cattle died in the blizzard, but others, finding some kind of shelter somewhere, showed up later, sometimes weeks or even month later.

>>>A man named Ben Freeman had created a makeshift telephone by stringing a wire between his place and that of his brother. They called it a "thump box," eight inches square with a hole cut in the end and fascined to the wall in both places. Family members would "thump" the copper plates of the box and actually speak to each other, handy, her niece claimed, in the middle of the storm.

>>>A handful of young guys got separated when the wagon they were using to haul lumber back from the woods along the Niobrara got hung up in a massive drift. One of the boys, the youngest, stumbled on alone until he just happened to reach the farm place of a family he certainly didn't know. His trip there had thoroughly depleted whatever strength he had, so he told his blessed hosts that surely the others must have froze to death somewhere in the storm. Just so happened that the host worked for the railroad. The next day, at work, he mentioned that several boys had died. The agent told the Omaha newspaper, as well as the boys' parents. Not long after that, the boys sure enough showed up at home.

>>>A teacher in Schuyler determined that her students' best chance for survival would be to get them all home. Thus, they started out, all of them tied together by a rope they found somewhere in a closet. On they went, the troops from some Custer County school. But the going got tough, very tough. Every few minutes they would turn their backs on the storm's incessant wind just to shake the ice from their faces and once again gather breath enough to go on. But their teacher kept them going by making a game out of the danger: "About face," she'd say, and the whole gang would salute and turn again. They made it.

>>>A man named Frank Burwell felt the agonizing desire to just fall asleep in all that cold and snow. He'd crossed the river to get to his place, stepped in a pool of water from an artesian well--his feet were frozen. He'd thought he could find a little sod shack but couldn't, missed it completely, just as he'd earlier missed his brother's place. He started following a fence, then came to the very last post. That's when he began to think it might be easier to just allow himself to sleep, to welcome death, but he knew he wasn't gone, so he struggled on. When finally he crawled, hands and knees, up to the back door, he was, his brother remembered, more dead than alive. "We cut off his shoes and clothing and worked over him all night," his brother said.  "He lost some of his toes, but otherwise he made it all right."

>>>A woman named Mrs. Calkins became alarmed when her husband did not return from the barn, so alarmed, in fact, that he left her baby inside the house, pulled on her own coat and hat and mittens, and went out to try to find him. Not long after she left to look for him, he returned to the house and found her missing. He spent the entire night looking for her, returning now and then to the house to put in fuel and look after their baby. The storm broke in the night, but not until he looked once again for her did he find her body, only a few rods from the house."

>>>Teachers got nervous when it became clear that the light and fluffy snow was but a prelude to a real horror show outside. The day had been exceptionally warm, so warm, in fact, that in some of those country schools, windows were opened because the fire in the stove was more than sufficient. Besides, the breeze felt good.

NY Times 2023 photographs - vi

Art isn't art if it doesn't make you work a bit. Here, the photograph's darkness works against recognition--if you want to understand what's here (and why the NY Times considered it one of the best photographs of 2023), you have to look closely. The little lights in the darkness are from something akin to old fashioned mining lamps, the kind miners wore on their heads (maybe they still do).

But we're not in a mine. This is open air, a place I could not have recognized if I hadn't read the caption. It's New Mexico, an onion field, at night. What's going on here is harvest. Farm workers are working at night to get the crop in. Why would they do such a thing? Because the heat of a July day is too intense for man or beast or onion.

Just yesterday, what loads of people felt was declared "official." CNN said it this way: "Global warming in 2023 hit 1.48 degrees Celsius, data published Tuesday shows, as the hottest year on record propelled the world just hundredths of a degree away from a critical climate threshold."

It's one thing to call 2023 the hottest year on record. There are plenty of hot-blooded Lone Star State conservatives who'd agree, but they'd walk out of the room if the phrase "climate change" arose, because when that phrase is mentioned you can just about smell a tree-hugger, someone who's got their eyes on my oil wells.

Odd thing happened in 2023, President Biden slowly and even a little surreptitiously lifted the lid on oil production, a move that, if widely publicized, would have put him at odds with a goodly chunk of his constituency--the tree huggers. Climate change runs on fuel oil, but the public seemed fixated on the believing the nation's was suffering a lousy economy--even if we weren't. 

How did people get the idea that the economy was lousy? Easy. Just about every last American drives past a gas station once a day, and there in flashy, big letters was the story. It didn't take a genius to remember gas prices at about $2 a gallon during the Trump era. For most of Biden's term, those prices were about $3.50. And there's the numbers on your local Sinclair, in your face.

My guess is, in order to bring down those big prices, Biden turned on U. S. pumps again, thereby lowering prices (they're now $2.75 or so), which looks tons better on the nation's millions of gas stations, thereby making it harder to argue that the economy is tanking.

But, the open wells bring more carbon into the air. Hence, more heat. And just yesterday, those in the know made it clear that what you might have felt last summer--or even throughout the winter so far--was 2023 was the warmest/hottest year on record.

Climate change. Texas says no, but nobody had it worse last summer than Texas.

I am not as green as most of my friends, largely because I don't know as much as most of them. So I listen, and stand affirmatively with the tree huggers.

New Mexico farm workers harvesting onions in the middle of the night says it better than any story could--in 2023, more people shed more sweat than they normally do. Call it what you want, but it's hard to avoid those two dirty words--"global warming."

Does everybody understand what he's saying?

"I just hope we get fair treatment," said Trump at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa Friday afternoon. "Because if we don’t, our country’s in big, big trouble. Does everybody understand what I’m saying? I think so, because they’ll cover that completely differently."

It was a fool's errand for him to think--if, in fact, he did--that a second visit to the little town of Sioux Center, Iowa, would resonate with that big line he threw out to the nation the last time he was in town, the one about him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue or Broadway, or whatever it was. Specifics are less important than analysis, and he seemed, way back in 2016, to be explaining his own level of surprise, as if to say, "Can you believe  I've somehow created, this whole MAGA crowd?" 

No single line of that magnitude emerged from his second visit to Sioux Center just last Friday. The only one repeated with any effect from both sides is the one above--"because if we don't, our country's in big, big trouble." That one made news. And he understood why: "they'll cover that completely differently."

If you're a regular at Fox, then the line needs only to be read for what's there, probably didn't even merit a mention. Donald J. Trump, the much-maligned ex-President, is repeating what everybody knows: if he doesn't get treated fairly by the courts, then the U. S. of A is going to be even more divided--after all, he might have said, a house divided against itself can not stand. If your sympathies lie with the MAGA crowd, he's merely declared what everyone knows-- there will be trouble, even in Sioux Center.

But if you believe Donald J. Trump is a red-tied Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost, the line trembles because it carries a stiff warning (as did several shot from his arsenal before January 6, 2021). He's not assessing the state of the union, he's telling disciples, the ones who set up Pence gallows, that it's time for yet another hymn sing, "stand back and stand by." 

Among other things, Trump is a poet. His words demand interpretation, although there's no particular mystery to what he says, and, either way, what they reveal is someone who, plain and simple, is not to be trusted, able to say one thing and mean another. "Does everybody understand what I'm saying?" he asked, making sure everyone discovered the meaning of "if we don't, our country's in big, big trouble?" 

Think I'm wrong--just imagine where we'd be if he hadn't originated "the Big Lie" long before the 2020 election. If he'd done what every other President has done since the constitution was written, if he'd simply passed along the keys to the White House to the man who almost sixty court appeals determined was, in fact, the candidate who was the winner, if he'd dropped the big lie we would not be in this mess, that Minnesota guy would be back selling pillows, hundreds of mad men and women wouldn't be imprisoned, Trump wouldn't still be dominating all of our lives.  

That's exactly why he continues to broadcast the big lie.

This week's New Yorker sends another message. Here our guy is as a composite Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, a rotund man with orange hair, kicking his way down the street, his ample chest adorned with medals he's earned with his bone spurs. 

If I was MAGA, I'd see that magazine cover as yet another way in which the deep state (New Yorker readers???) have been out to get the poor guy ever since he and what's his wife's name again? came down that elevator in Trump Tower. The lame-brain media are always picking on him. You can't help feeling sorry for him because those bastards are always devising something--they planted FBI phonies in that January 6th crowd, you know. Antifa too. That's what was really going on--false flag. Ask anyone who was there!

That cartoon may be prophetic. Watch him marching up Fifth Avenue, arm in arm with Putin and Kim Jong Un, brilliant men, brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

NY Times 2023 photographs - v

A couple years ago on a visit to Honduras, we couldn't help but learn that aid to developing nations was vital to stemming the kind of migration that's we're experiencing in this country, but also throughout the world. What the Times photographer caught here was a group of young moms involved a program that attempts to help young women stay in school and, eventually perhaps, have fewer babies. 

"More than a third of the world’s young people will live in Africa by 2050. The implications of this 'youthquake,' as some call it, are immense yet uncertain," according to Hannah Reyes Morales in The New York Times. Some results may be uncertain, but others aren't: those numbers will lead to more "migration," the word experts might use when speaking of our own immigration problems. Almost certainly, economic disparities will lead to millions upon millions of men, women, and children to adopt unsafe measures in order to scramble to the borders of countries where standards of living vastly surpass that of their countries of origin. 

Simply using different language--migration instead of immigration--doesn't stem the tide of poor people at our door, but it does provide a wider context: our problems aren't just ours. Free-world countries are being besieged by people who want little more than to feed their children.

I sat in a similar room with approximately as many women--older women--when we were in Honduras. It was a program designed to help grandmothers who were locked into motherhood once more, some of them sixty or seventy years old. They were taking care of little kids who would have had nothing if their grandparents hadn't offered room and love. Their parents had left Honduras for America. 

But, as this grandpa couldn't help but note, being a dad again wouldn't be for me. Do I love my grandchildren?--of course, tons of love. But would I--no could I--care for them 24/7? Undoubtedly, I would--whether or not I could is a different question. 

Sitting there in the middle of all those Honduran grandmas made very clear how important foreign aid is, not simply because giving is "the right thing to do," but also because foreign aid builds up national cultures that disintegrate when hundreds of thousands of moms and dads--and kids--up and leave to places where grocery store shelves hold a half-dozen different kinds of Cheerios.

If we want to fight migration, an essential component is foreign aid. 

Tell that to the MAGA hoards, some of whom descended on Sioux Center last week. "America First" is hateful when it's just another way of saying "me first." Yes, hateful and, maybe worse, downright stupid. 

What is happening on our southern border is part of a worldwide phenomenon that shows no signs of abating. These young Nigerian mothers and their children are participating in a program titled "'Center for Girls' Education," a program your tax dollars are paying for. 

And that's a good thing.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

“I was young and now I am old,

yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken

or their children begging bread.”

 

“Piety gave birth to prosperity,” Cotton Mather once wrote (or words similar to those), “and the child devoured the mother.” But then, Cotton Mather really believed that his beloved Puritan theocracy got shipwrecked by the diminished righteousness of the children of New England’s “visible saints.”  The new-found wealth of the second and third generations of the Puritans simply destroyed orthodoxy and faith itself. 

 

He may have been right, of course, but then, as ex-President Bill Clinton might say, a whole lot depends on what one means by righteousness.

 

We could twist this verse of Psalm 37 into something entirely different from what David likely intended if we listened to European history or, for that matter, Professor Max Weber, who, a century ago already, argued that capitalism and its myriad excesses descended, in no small part, from the Protestant work ethic. It goes like this:  great piety creates a deep sense of calling, commitment to task; but once the piety fades, what’s left the industry, the work ethic; and that work ethic is the dynamo that empowers capitalism. 

 

Odd to think of Max Weber and Cotton Mather sitting down somewhere and agreeing, but their arguments aren’t that distanced.  And those arguments are a far cry from what King David claims to have experienced in his life. The children of the righteous, Mather and Weber might argue, don’t beg, not because of God’s faithfulness, but because they come heir to generous fortunes created by their righteous parents’ commitment to work. 

 

Throughout the psalms, it’s not so common to hear David reflect in the way he does here—as if he’s sitting in Sun City, fingers arched over a keyboard, reflecting on the life that stretches behind him. I like that picture. He’s trying his best to convince us of the basic melody of the whole song—that God almighty loves the righteous fully as much as he hates the wicked.  And what’s crucial in Psalm 37 is that you can see it—that’s his point. You can see it all around, if you just look. Observe the plight of the wicked and the prosperity of the righteous, he says. In all my life I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging bread, he says.

 

End of story.

 

But even Charles Spurgeon has his doubts about what we might call David’s hyperbolic claim. Spurgeon says that what David sees may well be what he saw during his lifetime, but it’s not what Spurgeon observed. Nor can I say that it’s what I’ve seen. Good people suffer. Good people readily feel forsaken—and often. In hurricanes and floods and wars and persecution, good people are swept out of their homes by tidal surges that seem brewed up only by the Devil, not the loving hands of God.  Bad things happen to good people. Apparently, David never heard of Job.

 

 

But our doubt of the specifics here, or of David’s rhetoric, “does not cast doubt upon the observation of David,” Spurgeon says with reference to this verse.  “Never are the righteous forsaken,” he writes “--that is a rule without exception.”

 

David isn’t so much stretching the truth as he is pounding it home.  What’s behind his almost unbelievable claims is the central truth of God’s love to those who love him:  “Be not afraid.” 

 

Here and everywhere in scripture, that’s the bottom line.  Sometimes, in scripture as in life, you’ve got to get behind the words to find the truth. 

NY Times 2023 photographs -- iv

 

And so it happened again just yesterday, in a place nobody thought it would--just as it always does. 

This time in rural Iowa, right here, half a state away. Feels as if it could have happened at the high school MOCFV will be playing tonight--it's Friday, isn't it?

Could have been anywhere. In fact, it will be next week, and I'm no prophet. Gun violence is this country a horror that shows no signs of lessening because gun advocates are hellishly sure that those evil libs are coming after everything--BB guns to bazookas--and, doggone it, the constitution says--didn't you ever read it for shit sake?--that we get our guns because, dang it, it's America here, land of the free, and besides you never know what might happen when this country's weirdos take over, which could happen next election, after all, if you don't vote for Trump. It's the land of the free here. Don't like it?--then fricken' leave.

You know how it goes.

One result is daily deaths from gun violence, and weekly deaths in mass shootings, the latest yesterday in Perry, Iowa, where a 17-year-old messed-up kid named Dylan Butler, got up early, marched off to school armed with a shotgun and a pistol, and proceeded to shoot up a cafeteria for some insane reason, killing a sixth-grader, wounding several others, and then, courageously (!) offing himself. 

It does not require an MSW to say Dylan Butler was horribly messed up. All of them are. They're hopped up on something, often nothing more than a lifetime of waking up to loveless mornings. 

Somehow they get a gun or two or three, so one day--who knows what happens?--something inside Dylan Butler's brain misfires and he does what he did yesterday. 

There's no good reason for him to have done that, of course, and there's no good reason for American citizens to have 433 million. . . let me write that out: in America today, there are 433,000,000 guns in a population of approximately 350,000,000 people. You do the math. 

That many of those guns are stored under lock and key is certainly true. That a chunk of that number are used for hunting, often a family tradition, goes without saying. That some people like to shoot at clay pigeons is undoubtedly true. But if you add up all of those guns, I'm guessing the number would get nowhere close to--let me say that again--433,000,000. 

What's more woeful is that what happened at Perry, Iowa, yesterday, quiet little town in the middle of the Iowa prairies, will happen again, if not this week, the next.

And once more, nothing will happen to thwart the carnage.

The NY Times photograph at the top of the page features a little girl being taken away from Covenant Christian School, Nashville, where a similarly messed-up shooter who, Lord knows, shouldn't have been anywhere near a gun, did what Dylan Butler did yesterday, although the tally was worse: three children and three adults. 

To someone who has Christian education in his blood and soul, this shooting--at a PCA school--was especially shocking, not because I'd simply assumed that the Lord of Hosts would never allow such horror at a Christian school, not because the name spelled out a theology I know very, very well, but because the suffering kids and supporters of Covenant Christian could very easily have been my relatives. 

Perry too. Iowa. Cornfields and weekend ball games, big crowds, active PTAs, community spirit, strong churches, prayers groups meeting all over town, dozens of Bible studies. Even Perry. Even Covenant Christian.

Don't expect change. We'll always have misfits, and it appears that, lacking the resolve to do anything about that massive pile of firearms, we'll always have an inexcusable number of guns. Nothing will happen. Nothing will change.

Who knows, this week it may be the school my grandson attends? 

Why not?

____________________

Note: Letitia James, New York's AG, who has yet another five-star crook in her sights, is trying to strip Wayne LaPierre, the chief cook and bottle-washer of the NRA, of his job. He's been a fraud, she claims, and no one doubts it. No single man or woman has been more bullheaded on gun control than the head of the National Rifle Association. He goes down and maybe, just maybe, things in this country will change. Stay tuned.  

NY Times 2023 photos - iii

Seems to me that true conservatives are never really happy until they can draw lines around things, create parameters, keep out the riff-raff. True conservatives are all about rules, about setting them and policing them, and making sure the rest of us do too. He said it about puritanism, but let me paraphrase that long-gone crank H. L. Mencken, who said something to this effect: conservatism is the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere is having a good time.

Let's be candid. Lord knows the ship of state needs its conservatives. After all, age-old values are worth holding on to. If we'd simply give the world over to the libs, they'd be dangerous to us all. Sometimes we need people to push the accelerator; then again, breakneck speed isn't the best way to travel. Sometimes we need people who will hit the brakes.

But we're talking about conservatives here, two of them, Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL) and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (CA), who faced off right there on Main Street, when McCarthy was running to fulfil his life-long ambition to be the Speaker of the House, only the nation's Vice-President standing between him of  her and the job. 

Some people like Matt Gaetz; but then, maybe some people like poison oak. To me, he's a MAGA blowhard, a Trump lieutenant in service of the the Orange Patton. Some months ago, Gaetz and McCarthy faced off in an insane epic, when it took how many?--15 votes of the Republican caucus to elect a Speaker. After all that nut case toil, they gave the job to McCarthy. In the wink of an eye, they took it back, and McCarthy threw in the towel. He's back in CA.

Gaetz didn't get the job; he was smart enough not to ask for it. But Gaetz did more than anyone else to stoke the fires of chaos. Here they are spilling testosterone on the floor of the House like a couple of WWW grapplers a minute before the match.

Here's my theory: conservatives never quite get there, so they're never-ever truly happy. If they win a race or two, look for them to self-destruct because they're calling is to be critical, to draw lines and draw blood, to make sure people aren't having fun. They can't help it. They wired that way. It's their default position. So, once they achieve power, they turn on each other, just like they did here in the photograph. 

Look what's happening to the Michigan Republican party--all-out civil war; look what's happening across the lake in Wisconsin, where Republicans are ready to commit harikari on Robin Vos, who's been their main man. They can't help themselves really; Look at Trump. His Christmas greeting wished me and others like me to rot in hell. It's in their nature to snarl.

And look what just happened today. Some splinter group from a red hot conservative Islamic sect took credit for a bombing that killed 84 mourners celebrating the death of some other terrorist, another bunch just trying to out-radical the radicals. 

As they did in 2023, clearly documented in this NY Times photograph. 

NY Times photographs - ii

 

Happens to be my home state, where--or so it seems from afar--things are as rent asunder as they are anywhere in the nation. Wisconsin's problems are not at the heart of what prompted the NY Times to include this photograph as one of its most telling of the 2023. It concerns abortion, as issue which, since Roe v Wade, has rent asunder American culture like no other. Others come and go, but abortion's advocates--both pro-life and pro-choice--shall not be moved. Hence, the battles. Hence the war.

What happened in 2023 no one would have predicted. President Trump got a rare blessing when three Supreme Court judges left open seats, allowing him to restock the already existing conservative majority, his then-friend Mitch McConnell aiding and abetting. Trump, in a rare moment of being true to his word, chose candidates for the high court who came in as sworn enemies of Roe v Wade, bringing something almost unheard of to the Supremes--a "super majority." 

It looked--honestly--as if SCOTUS would actually overthrow that 1973 ruling, reversing a law half a century old. And the newly Trumpified SCOTUS did just that. It took apart Roe v Wade not by reversing its substance but by determining the states should determine its legality, not the federal government. 

Just exactly what those court conservatives thought would happen isn't clear, but for most of the country, what did happen was totally unforeseen. Already in August of 2022, the state of Kansas, right there in America's bread basket, a conservative stronghold, shocked the nation by tossing out anti-abortion legislation. Wasn't even close, a complete surprise to the nation. More such rejections followed in other states otherwise determined to be conservative. 

The great analogy, used generously by talking heads, was that pro-lifers were somehow like the proverbial mutt who chases cars but wouldn't want to know what to do if he ran one down. Pro-lifers stood strong, but they were and are clearly a struggling minority, as some Republicans, including the Donald, realized the anti-abortion drum had created a death song for conservatives. 

Speaking of the Donald, you got to love those hats in the picture. They're little cat hats, triangular across the forehead, and they're pink, of course. Millions of them exist; they're everywhere women fight for choice. 

How does Trump have anything to do with those hats, you ask? They're called pussyhats, a reminder of that specific place on the female anatomy Donald J. Trump so brazenly claimed he'd brazenly grabbed on any women he pleased. Remember that taped conversation? Maybe not. There's so much to forget about the man. 

In 2023, the decision millions of pro-life activists had worked for 50 years got was accomplished. Hallelujah, some said, an answer to prayer. The tribe of Trumpsters had beaten the baby-killers.

Only to lose.

An amazing turn of events.

By the way, this is what the MAGA folks call "woke."

NY Times 2023 photos - i

This phot may be too dark, but, as they say, if you watch the news at all, you get the picture. It's one of a couple dozen photographs the NY Times ran last week, when all of us were looking back at what we've been through. It's just the second day of the new year now; most of us are looking forward, not backward. But the Times' pics are even bigger than whatever the photographer intended to show us when he stood there and snapped it, because some photographs grow into something more than pictures.

We suffered, and are still suffering, through two wretched wars (maybe more) that simply had no right to exist. Putin's insane attempt to kill Ukrainians in order to save them crawled into its second year. The sheer madness of war headlined daily news reports, journalists and their cameras covering thousands of stories, all of them wretched accounts of fighting men and women, old men with canes and little girls in football shirts, thousands who died or didn't but unimaginably suffered.

On October 7, Hamas fighters took motorbikes and hang-gliders across the border with Israel and committed atrocities that reminded a stunned world of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Yet today, brave family members hold out hope that somewhere amid the rubble of Palestine a handful of men, women, and children are still alive. Meanwhile, in retaliation, Palestinian bodies are dropped into mass graves, dozens daily.  The five o'clock news was full--and still is--of horrifying stories of the endless suffering on both sides. Hamas terrorists were beasts, shockingly inhuman. Today 20,000 Palestinians are dead, the vast majority innocent men, women, and children. 

It's January 2, 2024, this morning, feels like a brand new day. But in the Ukraine and Palestine, it's same old, same old. Sheer horror.

In 1995, I taught a course in the literature of the holocaust. It was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of occupied Europe, and hundreds of prison camps and death camps throughout all of the region. Class met once a week and often featured guest speakers, including a quartet of men, now all passed away, who had been with Allied forces who stumbled into those pits of horror.

Fourteen weeks long it was, a dozen books. I was the prof, the leader. I'd written one of the books myself, in fact. But when we approached the end of the semester, I suddenly couldn't read anything anymore. Something in me refused, shut down, and it wasn't a refusal that anything to do with will. I couldn't have predicted it. It just happened. I couldn't read about any more atrocities. My soul was full. I limped through the rest of the semester. 

2023 was a year of senseless wars that still have not abated. The photo at the top of the page is iconic, not because it is so unique but because it isn't. Remembering 2023 will mean grimacing at the unending that always, always, always comes with war. I'm a news junkie, wouldn't miss it for the world, but by the end of the year I was turning off the tv. There are thousands of stories in Palestine and the Ukraine. In 2023, we all heard way, way, way too many.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Morning Thanks--New Years, 2016

It's been, thus far, a very odd winter--perhaps I should say a very odd December, for winter, heavenly body-wise, has only just begun. 

For starters, those in the know say we've never had a wetter final month of the calendar year--never. We've had three and half snowstorms already, not one of them blizzard-y, each of them quite gentlemanly, two of them simply disappearing thereafter in unseasonably warm temps. Honestly, such favors make you think this ain't Iowa 't'all.

So the land on New Years' morning seemed almost marshmellow-y, puffy white and so bright my camera was wincing. Look for yourself. It just doesn't happen often that farmland in windy Siouxland wears a fine, alabaster robe.

By the time I left, the wind had come up a bit--look at the bottom of this shot; but for the most part the whole world seemed to rest most comfortable beneath a quilt of snow that had fallen already a couple of days ago, then just stayed as if resting. Very peculiar, but really pretty.

Corn stubble protrudes, but the constancy of its impeccable order creates its own kind of beauty.

If the temps come back up above freezing, the rivers will stay open; but yesterday, three or four days into a freeze, the Big Sioux was getting close to pulling its own icy quilt up and over itself for a winter's nap that's already going to be shorter than most. 

Here and there along its banks, tufts of dried out weeds stuck in overhanging branches are a reminder of spring floods that seem, in January, unimaginable. 

Here's a bow-tie reminder of a not-so-rare weather event that likely rushed through the whole river valley at couple years ago already. 

The untrammeled snow leaves stories wherever anyone or anything disturbs it. Some winters snowmobiles never get out of the shed, but this year is a paradise. Their tracks are everywhere, but not as ubiquitous as the lines deer leave behind. Those in the know claim there are far more deer here now than were here in the days of the Yankton Sioux. They do well in Siouxland these days, where there's no end to corn. 

Never got up close to these tracks, but from a distance I couldn't help thinking it was an old buck. The trail looks tired, cut by an old man who had to work hard to catch his breath up this long hill.

I don't need encouragement to get out early with a camera. Yesterday, once again, I was disappointed when I sat here at the screen and looked over the catch--I always am. What I saw out there was so much richer than what I could get into the camera. 

You'll have to trust me on that.

Not all mornings are created equal, but all of them are unique. This cottonwood on the Big Sioux will never take this pose again. It'll be there, just as will the river behind it. But it will never look quite like this again, the ingredients of this particular still life unique within the first few moments of the first day of the new year.

New Years morning worship services are pretty much gone from church calendars, even in Siouxland, where just about everyone is a churchgoer.  I drove out to the Big Sioux in the morning of the first day of 2016. 

Even if nothing I came home with catches the beauty of the world I was in, I was blessed to have been there. My morning thanks are for the dawn of a new year.

_____________________ 

If you're wondering about this January 1, it's absolutely nothing like 2016--no snow, warm temps, no frost in the ground. If I'd have gone past all of these places this morning, I'd have come home with little more than 50 shades of tan.

“. . .though he stumble, he will not fall, 

for the LORD upholds him with his hand.”

 At the turn of the 20^th century, what Willa Cather experienced as a child out on the Great Plains, surrounded as she was by a weave of ethnics, recent immigrants all, was something she never forgot and always celebrated.  My Antonia, a great pioneer novel, has given us one of the most powerful women characters in American literature, Antonia Shimerda, whose strength of character and purpose out on those broad plains simply will not be defeated.

 And hers was not an easy life.  When she was still a girl, her father, an educated musician in his native Bohemia and someone clearly not fashioned for opening rugged prairie, takes his own life one cold night in his first winter as an American.  Because he was a suicide, the local cemeteries wouldn’t take the body; the most unpardonable sin at the time, it seems, was the despair he suffered, the abandonment of hope itself, which is to say, by those old religious calculations, the abandonment of faith.  Mr. Shimerda, who shot himself in the barn, was buried in the road.

Willa Cather frequently drew her stories from her own experiences, and if you’re ever blessed to visit Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she grew up, you can follow dusty roads through the bleak, unforgiving landscape she loved, roads which pass places where she found some of her stories. 

 Mr. Shimerda had a prototype on the land west of Red Cloud, and on one of those roads you can actually drive over the intersection where an anguished suicide, forbidden a place in the local cemeteries, was once buried, very much alone. Driving through that intersection is eerie, even though the man’s remains have long since been removed and reinterred.

Today, suicides are not refused burial in any local cemeteries that I know of, and, for that, all of us should be wonderfully thankful.  I can not sympathize a whit with those who kept Mr. Shimerda’s body out of proper burial, but when I read a verse like this—from David—I can at least understand something of their fear, for fear is what it was, I’m sure. To take one’s own life is to reject the eternal truth of what David says:  “though he stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.” 

Even though, out here on the Plains, we have come a long way from Mr. Shimerda’s—and others’—horrific rejections, we don’t know quite what to do with those among us who depart on their own. We don’t know what to do with them, in part, because we do know—those of us who are believers—that the act of suicide defies the eternal hope of this line and so many others from the Word of God almighty.

Not long ago, it happened again, in a community not far away.  I didn’t know the man, never met him, but I know his family and I know of their profound grief.  Since it happened, no one has said much about it because, well, there’s not much to be said. By all accounts, he was a believer. And he suffered, suffered badly, within, for the past several years. I know very little else. But I know--as we all do--the horrific toll darkness within can register.

What I do know—what I can believe because I know this much of the Almighty—is that he alone will judge the living and the dead. 

And I trust Him and his promises.  I trust he will do what he has always done and promises he will do forever—he will love. He is love.

Saying no to the Orange Man

Here's Donald Trump during the primary season in 2016. He's at the BJ Haan Auditorium, and just about to tell the audience and the world that he is himself shocked at the immense loyalty of his following. "I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and never lose a vote," he said--or something like it, and that line, spoken there, turned out to be immensely prescient. It's true and still is. It's impossible for me to guess what might make his minions lose heart or allegiance. 

That Trump would like to come back to the BJ Haan on the campus at Dordt College is understandable. Any appearance there would be historic, not simply because he's an ex-President, but because it would remind a national audience of the immense resonance of his prophetic judgement in that single, oft-quoted line. So, my guess is his people tried to line up a date for another Dordt appearance.

Dordt said no. That's a story.

I don't care how it came about, who did the heavy lifting, or why someone or other shut the door, but I'm proud of the institution I attended years ago, the place where I taught for most of my life. I don't care if the reasons for the marriage of the institution and the ex-President had only to do with procedure, something in small print, I am thrilled that there is some "incongruity" between Donald J. Trump and Dordt University, because there is and there dang well should be.

People don't often say no to Trump. When it has happened, that no has created some untoward effects. Trump's army takes care of business for him. I can't imagine that the administration at Dordt isn't already getting some raucous testy emails and flaming text messages. Trump's loyalists don't like their savior, their "retribution," scorned.

But I'm happy--and proud. I'm all for free speech, and I think it's just fine that the whole rally thing was passed along to another venue in town. That I would hope people don't listen to him doesn't mean I think he has no right to speak. News stories claim it was a question of format that undid the union--political candidates are invited to campus to talk to and with students all the time, but not just to have a rally. It seems the Trump team didn't really questions, said it was a rally or nothing. DU admin then advised them them to look for another venue.

That's just great. I'm happy.

And proud. 

In and around Oyens, IA

An uncle, now deceased, used to tell me that Oyens, largely Catholic, had lots of partying girls when he was a kid. Whether or not he was right, it stuck me then as the kind of reaction one might expect from a kid from upright Orange City. Yesterday, however, an abundance of sheer beauty hung on the branches in the neighborhood, enough to make me pull over, try out the camera in my new phone, and take a bit of that beauty home.

Sleet that blew in on Christmas Eve made for a bejeweled yule--not a white Christmas, but even two days later, a remarkable crystalline world.

Wasn't really hoarfrost. For that we wait. When it comes, as it will, the world here holds its own unique charm.

Sleep--and ice storms--bend and break limbs, a reminder that once upon a time out here there was no distinguishing feature anywhere to be seen other than endless prairie grass.

There will likely not be a day quite like yesterday again any time soon--no snow to speak of on a backdrop of naked earth tones, trees and fence posts adorned in that low December sun.

Somehow humbling to think that what was out there yesterday may not be repeated in my lifetime. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Why some moments the camera catches are gorgeous is something I can't explain.

I couldn't help thinking--and I still do--that this featureless space, outfitted in jewelry, foregrounded for that remarkable puffy winter sky, is somehow beautiful just plain beautiful.

Those spicy Oyens girls, circa 1955 or so, likely attended the little church in town. Who knws, some few of them may be laid to rest beneath the churchyard's stunning statue, which, right now, is hardly Christmas-y, but always appropriate.

 

 

Testimony of Het OWC

It's a story from the New York Times, a story just out this morning. You can read all of it right here. At its heart is a German Jew from Holland, who created a magazine while hiding in the crawl space of the home of a Dutch undertaker during WWII, this magazine, Het Onderwater Cabaret (OWC). The word onderwater (under water) is a derivative of a designation given to those men (usually) who, rather than serve the cause of the German war machine, chose to hide--to be hidden--somewhere out of the view of the Gestapo, those who "dived under." 

In Wiltz, Luxembourg, American forces swept out the German occupiers, the village grew exponentially because so many of its own men were "under water," hiding under cover. They were in town, but not there to anyone who didn't know.

For the war years, Kurt Bloch--who had already fled Germany during the 30s to try to find safe haven in the Netherlands--was onderwater, living as he did "under water." With what scraps of magazines and newspapers the underground could get to him, he'd slice and dice until he could create a little monthly magazine for friends and accomplices, The Underwater Cabaret, he called it, like the one above, featuring "Santa Claus at war"--ho, ho, ho with a sword. Or this one. 

Bloch's magazine was only a few pages thick, often featuring his own little poems. 

Who read it? Anybody's guess, I suppose, but it's hard to imagine he could have had a wider readership than dozen or so, most of them, probably hidden-away Jews or onderdykkers. Not a ton of circulation, but immense creativity under the constant pressure and dangers from the war all around. 

Bloch's devotion to his little hidden away magazine, like the diaries of Anne Frank or Etty Hillesum, or the war time saga of Berendina Eman, are the kind of stories that need to be rebreathed, need to be read and told again and again. They offer all of us mighty examples of human courage and selflessness amid life-threatening dangers. These magazines--a granddaughter of Mr. Bloch unearthed them--are a testament to heroism, to conviction, to the human spirit rightly driven. 

Percentage-wise, the Netherlands lost a higher percentage of their Jewish population during World War II than any other occupied country--100 thousand of the 140. The two population groups most involved in Resistance work during the war in Holland were the Marxists first, and then the Orthodox Protestants. In Bloch's case, the center point of the Resistance group who tended to his needs was led by a Dutch Reformed preacher named Leendert Overduin.

About Overduin I need to know more. . .

The Gold-standard Christmas, circa 1958

Almost inevitably, they picked it out of a Sears Roebuck catalog. The J. C. Higgins brand name belonged to Sears Roebuck, and after the war they put it on their whole line of bikes. See that one at the top of the page, that's the one Mom and Dad bought. That they paid that kind of money for a bike for their little boy seems a stretch, but that Christmas obviously they did. 

I don't remember the light out front, but I do remember the whitewalls, the fancy, mid-ship tank--complete with push button horn--and the luggage rack, which never held luggage but often lugged buddies. 

I don't remember thinking that bike was ultra fancy. It wasn't a Rollfast, built for speed, or a Schwinn, the Cadillac of bikes. It was just an ordinary J C Higgins from Sears, the Walmart of the era. Still, I can't help thinking that Gilson Brothers must have forked over a healthy Christmas bonus that year, maybe 1956 or 57.

It likely wasn't my first bike. It was a 26-inch, full-size, after all, and didn't come with training wheels. Lakeshore Christmases were almost inevitably white, so I'm sure I had to wait weeks before actually taking a spin. I had some kind of spoked transportation before that Christmas, but that J C Higgens I will never, ever forget because it created in my heart the greatest Christmas ever.

It started with the Christmas Eve Sunday School program, the only service of the year when kids moved the podium off the stage and took the place over. Everybody got "a line," a verse or two to say when appointed, and I remember being scared witless about forgetting. Don't remember if I ever did. I was a kid before anyone risked candles, so there was no lights-out "Silent Night" kind of thing, but the kid program on Christmas Eve was blessedly special, as well as a test of patience and faith you simply had to get through in order to get back home and open presents. 

That bike and its fancy tank was the biggest Christmas present ever, and a real problem to hide. Wasn't about to fit under the tree in the living room, and there really was no place in the house where it could sit and wait for the ritual opening of presents. I don't know whose decision it was, but Mom and Dad did what they could to hide it behind that big red sofa against the west wall. Dad must have moved that thing out of the way to get the bike behind it, then realized the handlebars weren't about collapse. Maybe Mom had the grand idea of just throwing coats from the vestibule over it--add a couple of blankets over the back of the couch for a bundle, a cloud of stuff to cover the whole thing.

And it worked. That night, when I sat cross-legged beside the tree, I had absolutely no idea. There'd been nary a whisper about what little Jimmy was getting for Christmas. I had no suspicions and wasn't even hoping for a bike--it was December, after all, and nobody was going anywhere on bikes over those icy streets. Who was thinking of bicycles anyway?

Half-way through maybe, not before. I don't remember thinking somehow forgotten, so I'm sure that bike wasn't last; but at some appointed moment that Christmas Eve, Dad pointed to the hills of clothing and blankets over the back of the couch and directed me to peel 'em off. I was still in complete darkness.

But when I did, that Christmas moment became the gold standard. I was a boy, a child, a kid, and I had absolutely no idea it was coming. I was shocked, overwhelmed--that J C Higgins was about the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen or owned. I don't know that I could breath. Then Dad moved the couch again so I could slip that monster gift onto the living room rug where it took over the room.

There are fragments of maybe seventy Christmases in my memory bank, but none are as complete our bountiful as the year--mid '50s--Mom and Dad hid that brand new, white-walled J C Higgins behind the couch and blew me away with their love.

We have definitely scored some bigger gifts--inheritance checks that, decades later, silenced my wife and me. But no single memory will ever climb the heights that Christmas around the tree did, the moment Dad suggested I grab those silly coats from the back of the couch.

The story at the heart of Christmas is the blessed saga of a child in a manger, a newborn surrounded by gawking visitors, maybe even a lamb or two or three. It's a baby who is king, a king in a manger, but a child, a baby. 

Maybe that's why, a couple thousand years later, Christmas will always be a day for children.