Blog 2311 – 02.20.2022

Trying Too Hard To Fit It

Blog 2311 – 02.20.2022

Trying Too Hard To Fit It

I believe that each and everyone of us is a unique expression of the divine in human form, a balanced and secret formulation, the precise ingredients and their measure known only to our higher power. That is a very long sentence to say as was said of Esther of old that we as she were/was born into the kingdom for such a time as this.

We live in a very polarized culture where people go through great contortions and bend their minds to the breaking point trying to fit into one warring camp or another. When I signed up for Facebook the last time some seven years ago, to promote my writing, it was still a place where differing views could be shared and at least if not agreed with tolerated. In the run up to the 2016 Presidential election all that changed you were expected to pick a side and lock step over a cliff if that was asked of you. I refuse to march to anyone else’s drum. I left Facebook and do not miss it. I watched again yesterday the new Kingsman movie, and I hear again the drums of war beating, and voices urging us into a contracted land war in what was once Russia, the Ukraine. Anyone who has seen the movie The Princess Bride knows a land war in Russia is always a losing battle, just ask Napoleon or Hitler, if you could. In the Kingsman movie the father promises the dying mother, shot by a sniper while trying to deliver Red Cross aid to a concentration camp in the Boer War, that he will never allow their young son, who just saw his mom shot, to see another war. He promises, but it is a promise he cannot keep. The son joins the British Army to fight in France in the first “Great” War. His dad’s friend, the king, orders him stationed to London to keep him safe, and so as a Lieutenant the son orders a corporal to swap uniforms and identification with him and to carry a letter to his dad. In that letter he has written a poem. The poem was actually written by another young British soldier who died but two weeks before the Armistice in November of 1918, Lieutenant Wilfred Owen.

The poem is entitled Dulce et Decorum Est and is short for the Latin Horace quote defined at the bottom of the attached complete poem.

I would apologize for the horrors of war depicted in the poem and I certainly will just as soon as all the politicians in the sway of the military arms industry apologize for glorifying war and promoting the great lie: “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria morum” or “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” What loving parent would ever trade their child for a folded flag? War is hellish and insane.

My mind has for over a week now been focused on a battle that my wife has been waging inside her own mind. Trying to make sense in an insane world that is forever trying to press us all into one or the other molds is enough to drive us all crazy. And so I close this offering as I have several and will, if I live, probably end several more, with the First of Ten Intentions for a Better World:

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

Screw fitting in, just try to be your highest and best self, that unique and special person only you can be. Rest that forever churning mind of yours in the sure and certain knowledge of Who and Whose you are, Love, him/herself, in person.