"Guilt which remains guilt is dangerous.
It will become too heavy a burden sooner or later,
and may in the end result in blaming the victim…
We must help our students transform their sense of guilt
into a sense of responsibility, for the present and the future."
Holocaust historian Eva Fleischner

The guns fell silent on the Western Front at 11 a.m., November 11, 1918, hours after German representatives signed a peace treaty.

Days later Australian violinist Daisy Kennedy was celebrating in Mayfair, an affluent area in London’s West End, and became absorbed in a conversation with the handsome young officer sitting next to her - a veteran of fighting on the Western Front, and, during the conversation, Daisy mentioned New Zealander Harold Gillies, a fellow Antipodean – person from Australia or New Zealand, whose work was renowned the world over.

Alabama.

Hmmmmm!?!?

Alabama.

Despite the fact that in May U.S. News and World Report ranked Huntsville as the “Best Place to Live,” there’s so much more to say about Alabama.

Rooms in the Gray Bar Hotel are about the size of an elevator and very unpretentious – a steel bunk bolted to the wall, stainless steel combination toilet-and-sink, (maybe a footlocker for the really fortunate) and no view.

Asked to hear second graders confessions, then newly ordained Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois of Lutcher, Louisiana - You know Luthcher: “between Gramercy and Paulina.” – still has one of the best “Confession stories” of all time.

In the Twenty-first Century United States, what happened at Las Llamas under the Chimu empire is incomprehensible.

Except it’s not!

The dream catcher travels no longer.

It has travelled too far.

Too often.

It has captured too much pain.

As “a gift from our hearts,” Debra Gutowski, a member of the Little River Band of Ottawa Native Americans in Muskegon, Michigan, created the dream catcher.

“We couldn’t hold him or hug him or nothing.
They said it was too ugly.
His body was supposedly torn to pieces.
The only way they identified him was because of his clothes
and a scar on his left foot.”
Christopher Salazar, uncle of fourth grader Jose Salazar,
killed at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas

In an interview with CNN, Jose Sr.
said that a Texas Ranger told him,
“As a father, I wouldn’t let you go back there
and see him, because he was not recognizable.”

“We are all sufferers from history,
but the paranoid is a double sufferer,
since he is afflicted not only by the real world,
with the rest of us,
but by his fantasies as well.”
Richard Hofstadter

Because she had sworn unending loyalty to a despot,
“Tizia” loaded a syringe with carbolic acid and injected it
into the arm of a man who had only been kind to her.

Perhaps because they feared the leader’s wrath,
maybe out of loyalty to the ruler.
In truth, we will never fully understand why –
except for his constant insistence on the equality of all people –
soldiers took the young husband from his cell,
forced him into the jungle and shot him.
First three times. Then twice.
Finally, three more times.

At the recent – and completely over-the-top - Washington Gala for the Benefit of Magniloquence and Theological Self-Aggrandizement, the orotund and supremely well-coiffed and haute-coutured audience held its collective breath, anticipating the announcement of this year’s recipient of the coveted “He Didn’t Really Say That, Did He? Prize.”

“Now I only see one thing – people are dying…
Is it worth all these orphans, widows,
cripples and mountains of the dead…?
Every mother gives birth to a son in the hope of having grandchildren
in old age. And for her, her Vanya or Magomed –
it doesn’t matter – he’s the best.
There’s no need to interrupt this natural life with bullets or shrapnel.”
Alexander Vostrodymov, a Russian Orthodox priest from a village near Moscow

Surely it was not his intention.

Nonetheless, in the earliest days of Lent, 27-year-old Alex Karpenko dared – DARED, perhaps unwittingly - to proclaim an Easter message.

This week, hovering above a bubbling, caldron-like body of water in Hot Springs, North Carolina, God - The Supreme Being, The Creator of the Universe, The One Beyond All Telling, The All-Knowing - gave an interview to a select group of multi-lingual but English-speaking international journalists.

The obituary barely told the story.

It’s possible – no one will ever really know – that the news reports over simplified a complex issue.

And, at a time when a so-called “truckers’ convoy” was eating up news columns and minutes of airtime, a genuinely good story of a “truckers’ convoy” and some of its lessons were overlooked.

The Ukrainian grandmother was clear. While being interviewed minutes after crossing to safety in Poland, she was briefly interrupted by her grandson - speaking Russian. “No! No Russian! Russia, go to hell! Putin, damn him to hell!” Her hatred was visceral.

Despite all their hatred, vitriolic lies and anti-immigrant bombasts as they paraded through the streets of Charlottesville shouting “Jews will not replace us,” many of those “good people” (and the insurrectionists of January 6) owe their American freedoms to some courageous Jewish refugee immigrants.

The February 2022 death of Patriarch Abune Antonios of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the world’s longest serving political prisoners, makes it difficult for to take seriously the claims of the terrorists and insurrectionist who invaded the Capitol of the United States in an attempt to overthrow results of the 2020 presidential election that they are “political prisoners” and “non-violent trespassers” who engaged in “legitimate political discourse.”

A widowed, single mother of eleven children has a word or two for politicians and parents who fear their children will “feel bad” if they learn about the murder of Emmett Till, the mob castrations and lynchings of Black men and boys, Bull Connor, the exclusion of Black athletes from professional sports, and the numbers of the nation’s Founders who owned slaves:

“Shhhhhh!

“Listen!

“Kids are resilient and it’s you adults who are afraid.”

A NEW REPORT WE WISH WE WOULD SEE!

(Vatican City. February 13, 12022) Two newly established Vatican commissions – one acting in conjunction with the Anglican Church of Australia - are sending icons and memorial medals to select members of the Congress of the United States as an expression of “prayerful hope” that recipients in the House of Representatives and Senate will “emulate the moral courage of these defenders of truth.”