Charlottsville

No good will come of this.  None at all.

The statues were not harming a single person, they were not trampling upon anybody's civil rights or liberty or equality or anything.

But they stood silently as a reminder to all of us of the horrific bloodshed and property damage, when the creeks and rivers ran red and the only beneficiaries were the vultures, whose children's children still guard our blue skies.

Very near to Charlottsville is Monticello, the plantation owned and run by Thomas Jefferson.  Even with 140 slaves on his property, the man still could not figure out how to make a profit, and he died deeply in debt and did not free any of his slaves upon his own death. Are you all going to pull down all of the statues of him, next, including the memorial on the Washington, D.C. mall?  Are you going to ban all of his writings, including the Declaration of Independence?  What the hell do you people think you are doing?

There were family members who died, their faded photos, their names, maybe a few trinkets still remain.  There is no sense at all in desecrating their names. We may all agree that the cause for which they died was not honorable.  Times have changed, and lessons have been learned.  But ask yourselves,  how many of us will like for our own heroes today to be treated the same way (as they certainly WILL be, in time....)

No good is going to come of this.  No good at all is ever going to come of self-righteousness.
There will be repercussions until both sides are grievously damaged and heartily sorry.

Today I learned ...

(source:  A Time-Life book titled FLOOD and copyright 1981)

This image:

 

(For scale reference, the distance from the top of that little map to the bottom is approximately 800 miles or 1300 km.) 

"The notion of blasting open the dike must have seemed like the only recourse to the Kuomintang general who on June 6, 1938, was confronted by Japanese troops preparing to advance from near Kaifeng against the key railroad junction of Chengchou at the village of Hua-yuan-k'ou, the general ordered his troops on June 9 to break down the main dike of the river.

The result was beyond his darkest imagining.  Far from merely creating a local flood that would stop the Japanese -- as it assuredly did -- the breach sent the entire Yellow River pouring to the southeast.  The deluge covered more than 9,000 square miles, drowning an estimated 500,000 Chinese and leaving six million homeless.  The plain remained flooded for seven years; when Japan surrendered, two million acres of fertile farmland were still waterlogged."

Meanwhile, the dear precious folks on Reddit are very, very concerned today about a single "abused" dog suffering starvation and ticks ....