Some Thoughts:

...on the wound that will not heal

On my bookshelf here in France is a book I brought with me when I first moved here from the US that I planned (and still plan) to read, The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory by Derek Leebaert.

I have not made time to read the book yet, but the title is very evocative of something I have long felt about the Cold War.

I lived through the latter part of that indirect combat, with all the fears of the cold, inexorable logic of MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, giving my teenage hormone-heated dreams a nightmarish tinge, a fear of dying in a nuclear furnace before I had the chance to truly live.

Although the United States seemingly emerged intact from that conflict with no direct collision of the powers involved, a struggle by proxy with strange periods of seeming amity between the contestants, there was a price that was paid; a price not solely paid in the lives lost during the era, nor in the murders arising from the subsequent terrorist actions seeded by actions taken with no thought to a future with a change in the equilibrium of mutual destruction.

The price exacted was not only in lives, and not only in treasure, but also of the soul.

Those who lived in the era know; for those who did not, please ask those who did.

The old wound will not heal, for it was deep.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
   -H. L. Mencken

Look at those who claim to be worthy of being our leaders now.

Look at how they assert they have a unique insight into what is "moral".

Look at their actions, and their explanations that "I did nothing illegal."

Nothing illegal...

Moral men they are indeed.

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And yet, we need men of honor if we are to survive and thrive.

Even accounting for political posturing, the two are far from the same.

In our fifty year wound, honor seems to have bled out along with the blood and treasure sacrificed.

An age of irony is no substitute.

But we will be crushed upon the anvil of irony, because an honorable man can no longer survive to become a leader...

But a moral man will, if he proclaims his morality loudly enough.

All things, good and bad, come to an end.

To what end is up to us.

Choose wisely when a moral man comes calling, for the men of honor have already been sacrificed.

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