Visiting a Revolutionary War Gravesite in Spring

A panoramic view of the Continental Army soldiers' graves in Washington Crossing
State Park in Pennsylvania. The panorama distorts the straight line of the graves to a curve.

To experience the peace of the place, it was necessary to go early in the morning to the Continental Army soldiers' graves. The graves are located along the Delaware River at Washington Crossing State Park in Pennsylvania.

Most of the graves are marked as unknown. The soldiers died of disease, wounds or exposure just before the Battle of Trenton on December 25, 1776.

It was necessary to view them at peace early on the spring morning. It was the perfect morning for that.

It was perfectly peaceful.

The row of Revolutionary War graves, April 24, 2022.

The graves of two unknown soldiers of the Continental Army.

Only one of the graves is marked, that of Captain-Lieutenant James Moore, 24, who served in the New York artillery directly under Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton wrote that Moore died after a short but painful illness on Christmas Day, 1776.

The grave of Captain-Lieutenant James Moore.

The peaceful spring morning was the right time to visit these soldiers who have been gone for so long. 

No crowds, no noise, just peace.

Endless peace for them.

Undisturbed quiet for these unknown soldiers.

Memory is best experienced in silence, as is peace.

The plaque commemorating the site.

Silence.

The granite slab listing Pennsylvania as one
of the original thirteen colonies with the
date it approved the Constitution.

Go in peace.

Revolutionary War soldiers' gravesite.

The way to the past.

Leave in peace, forever.

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Dawn Fails in Its Evil Intent

Today's nonsensical sunrise.

Dawn failed to meet my dire expectations today.

What a bust it was. There it squatted on the horizon, resplendent in pinks and purples and magentas and mauves and other tones of color I don't know, utterly gorgeous and fine, and it stunk. It stunk out loud. It was a terrible thing, there in the eastern sky. 

It stunk because I thought it stunk.

You might say I hadn't awakened from the 3 a.m. rocket-man blues, when the mind short-circuits in the middle of the depths of night and travels down into inner space and cracks and snaps and sparks like a live wire on the ground and won't let you sleep and won't let you think good and happy thoughts. 

Foul electrified ideas zoom at the speed of light through the brain, and if only space ships could harness that traveling speed down into the mind's depths they could reach the moon or planets in an instant.

Dawn stunk because it was awake and I was grumpy and wasn't.

It still seemed to me that the day waited with evil intentions.

Dawn's pink intrusion.

Luckily, the dog needed to go out and I had a compact camera. Any bigger camera and I probably would have kicked it down the stairs in protest at its weight and its terrible contributions to my raw mood.

I tolerated the tiny camera for the sake of its pitiful existence, trusting it had a soul as other living things do, thinking it might help, so I went outside with it in one hand the the pup's leash in the other.

Was there no end to the 3 a.m. short-circuiting of the brain? I stumbled on the stairs and almost fell.

I walked to the back of the property where the sunrise was beginning its evil decorations of the sky. The cosmic calamity was attacking with painterly careful intent. The sight slashed and tore at me with brush strokes of celestial mastery. It splashed colors across my sparking skunky consciousness. It splashed my mind with hideous brightening wonders and allure.

It made me think the 3 a.m. short-circuiting of wakefulness in the mistrustful dark had permanently damaged me. Where the hell were these thoughts coming from?

If I couldn't appreciate the dawn, would I ever be able to love or eat granola again?

Was all that over? Would breakfast be as bad? Had I gone mad in the middle of the night?

The camera took over for my askew and sleepy brain. 

It was simple to operate, and sometimes simplicity is all that is needed to recover from an oddly profound but silly distress. Clicking the shutter release was fun. It produced interesting results that led to my redemption.

I woke up. Breakfast didn't seem like such a bad idea.

All this was nonsense.

*

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Earth Day Photographic Watercolors

 Earth Day Photographic Watercolors

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A goose poses by his green-water home.

Red maple seeds wait in a cluster to parachute to earth

Spring waits just downstream through the tunnel.

A waterfall rushes along, pushing aside rocks.

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A Simple Proposal to Expand Earth Day

A view of Neptune on a good day.

 Today is Earth Day.

It is the day we humans celebrate our efforts to combat climate change, stop air and water pollution, contain forest fires and secretly throw away our McDonald's wrappers under pine trees when nobody's looking.

Earth Day was invented in April of 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson to bring awareness to the fact that we had no clean air, no clean water and no Starbucks coffee shops. In the intervening years, we've passed the Clean Air Act the Clean Water Act and also built thousands of Starbucks coffee shops across our invigorated land.

Earth Day has been a tremendous success. We've expanded the range and seasons of forest fires, dumped millions of tons of plastics into the oceans and waterways, fought endless wars to devastate foreign lands, elevated the price of a cup of coffee up to $12 and just about brought closure to the thought we might someday damage the earth.

We haven't gone far enough with our noble efforts.

It's apparent with our great successes in preserving nature on our planet means that we can do the same on the other planets of our solar system. Our love of this sphere we live on, this great Mother Earth, is heart-warming. We're been so sensitive and thoughtful in our approaches to living in this lush green world, that it seems we've decided to expand our populations and philosophies throughout the universe through space travel, just because we love our home so much and wish to treat other worlds much as we've treated this one.

Perhaps it's too early to talk of saving the universe, but it's not too soon to express our determination to save the solar system we live in.

We should institute special days for each of our planets -- now. 

If we do not, it might already be too late to save them.

With proper planning we can preserve Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, Pluto, Mercury, Saturn and whatever the last one is. Oh, yeah, it's Neptune. We can save Neptune, too. Of course, Neptune is a terrible place to live with terrible service in the restaurants, so we might not want to have a Neptune Day. That might be going too far. Yuk, Neptune.

All the others we can save by giving each a day to preserve the wonderful environments of those planets.

Imagine Mars Day.

Think of how great Venus Day would be.

Would you rather be anywhere else but Pluto on Pluto Day?

This is serious business, giving each of our planets a day dedicated to preserving it. What's even better is that the length of the days on our planets varies. For example, if we made a Venus Day it would last 243 of our days. Imagine spending your vacation on Venus and think of the tan you could get. Mercury's days last about 58 of our days, so you might want to limit yourself to a long weekend on Mercury. Mars Day would last a banal 24 hours. If you don't like change in celebrating your environmental victories, Mars is for you. On Mars, you can sit on your couch for the exact number of hours that you sit on your couch on Earth.

If you are a skeptic about celebrating planetary days you might point out that the other worlds in our solar system are already barren and lifeless. This is defeatism in its lowest form. Since we aim for a barren world here on our Earth, why not celebrate the barren landscapes we find far away from home in outer space?

So that is my proposal, create a day for each of the planets before it's too late.

And, oh, you might ask why I hate Neptune so much and hesitate recommending a Neptune Day.

I once got rotten sushi there.

I was sick on that planet for a week.

Boo, Neptune.

😉

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Pastoral Scenes in Bucks County

 Pastoral Scenes in Bucks County

April 21, 2022

A fisherman tries his luck in the Delaware Canal.

How small are we when we go out in nature? It seems to go on and on, while we stand alone thinking we're much bigger than we are.

An old red canal bridge reflects the serenity of the picturesque waterway.

Which brings more calm? A man-made old bridge or a man-made old canal? Serene water tops both.

Unshorn sheep enjoy the morning's feast on fresh grass.

The simple things are best. A mouthful of fresh grass, a clear chilly morning and a warm coat. Oh, to be a sheep, as long as there are no wolves around.

A view from under the canal bridge along a high-water canal that stretches on and on.

Well-worn paths are not worn out, as long as they wear well in nature.

The forest of tulip poplar trees is just waking up from winter.

Walk a path that's sparse and simple. Tune out the noise. Make the world go away.

Dutchman's britches make their debut.

How powerful are small things? Will wildflowers still be here when I'm gone? Or will they follow me into winter? Let nature live, even when I don't.

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Forest Paths to Spring

 Views of Spring

Spring is still sparse overlooking the river,
but it is coming quickly.

Nature straining to slough off the shackles of winter has ended. These first steps might be tentative, but they are bold. Winter has been defeated.

Trees beginning to leaf indicate a spring path.

The first leaflets hanging on these awakening trees invite the hiker to read the signs of the season. Color is coming back to the landscape.

New spring growth beside a path.

New growth invigorates the air with fresh oxygen and energizes the hiker with the new purposes of the season. All the little green lives are awakening.

The forest is filling up with flowers.

Spring gives fresh flowers to branches that were bare just a few days ago. The flowers promise fruit when summer ripens in the months to come.

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The Ghosts of Winter

 You can still see the ghosts of winter in the land. They won't leave. It's mid-April and they won't leave. They linger in the bare trees and sparkle in the cold water. They won't leave.

When will the barren landscape change? Will it? Climate change puts all in doubt, even spring. Can we even be sure spring will come?

All we can do is continue on the path. It's not up to us.

Cross the bridge to spring.

That Kind of a Lousy Spring Day

 

Why would an ugly red-winged  blackbird sing?

A friend on Facebook commented that she hoped we are not held accountable for our transgressions after we die because she didn't want to face her house plants.

I replied not to worry, that we don't get shorter when we die.

Then I went to the park and it was so cold on this supposedly spring day that not one of the birds was singing. They were too frigid. Perhaps their lungs froze. They looked ugly, too. There were lots of ugly birds out today with frozen lungs. They were all ugly as heck, too. I like to take pictures of birds, but not ugly birds.

Maybe they were worried about being judged for their singing once they die, or worse, their lack of good looks or their crummy singing voices. What bird would want to face the Lord if it was ugly and couldn't sing?

Then I came home and I couldn't copy even one ugly picture of a bird onto my computer. Even my computer doesn't like ugly birds. I can't blame it, because it's a beautiful computer with lots of RAM and lots of pixels on its screen, but it shouldn't take the birds' ugly looks out on me. 

I guess the machine was right. If I was as beautiful as my computer, I wouldn't have anything to do with ugly pictures of birds, or me, either.

It's been that kind of day.

Friends and birds are worrying about how tall they are when they die and the birds are worrying if God likes lousy singing and too much make-up. My computer rejects my photography, and spring acts as though it dislikes me, my friends and the birds and won't have anything to do with us.

When did nature get so judgmental?

It's enough to make all of us go mental.

I can't win today.

I'd take a nap in the middle of the morning but even my bed rejects me.

It says it wants to rest and to leave this crummy day behind it.

*

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All Ye Who Enter Here ...

 Door of Roses

Door of roses,

Pathway to insanity,

To misery and blind inanity:

I hold the key to my own destruction.

To a Sniper

 

To A Sniper

 

Why, sniper, is it ever so

That I, alone, am in your sights?

By my death I’ve laid you low.

Shooting me, you gave up your right

To innocent days and star-spangled nights.

I am lost, and to hell you go.

 

In eternal silence I shout

You block your eyes, darken your sight

But from inside us is no way out

Even now you can’t touch the light

It died when you chose to fight:

You insist you know what death’s about.

 

It is a fight you thought was ended;

Before God you forgave your sins,

With that your soul you think is mended

My dead immortal voice begins

Its eternal lament within:

With my death your God is dead.

A Look at Bread

 

            For those of us who lean on bread as a staple of our diets, we know it’s the staff of life without any hoary cliché telling us so. Try to replace it with tofu or crackers, and you’ll soon find yourself stumbling onto the tableland of tasteless ennui, and you’ll long even for just one bite of white toast to even out your trembling taste buds.

            Okay, so bread is been the staff of life wheat and yeast addicts everywhere, but it also might be the measure of a restaurant.

            For the years of my wasted youth, like most people, I never thought much about what bread was put before me in whatever restaurant I stumbled into. Usually, bread is first thing you see when served in a restaurant. I never paid much attention to the first impressions it made until I observed a waitress friend of mine acting very befuddled and glum one day.

            “What’s the matter with you?”

            “A critic from the Inquirer came in the other day.”

            “And?”

            “She wrote a pretty nice review.”

            “So what are you unhappy about?”

            “Said we should have more interesting bread.”

            It was the first time I had heard the concept. Interesting bread? Wasn’t that like talking about interesting socks? Or interesting cement? Or interesting underarm deodorant?

            “What does that mean, more interesting bread? What the hell is interesting bread?”

            I was young and foolish then and didn’t realize what awaited me in the awesome world of interesting bread.

            It was completely beyond my friend why bread would even be mentioned in a restaurant review of a spectacular new restaurant. She was young and foolish then, without a clue about bread or its fascinations. The odd thing was she took this slap at the integrity of the bread where she worked very, very seriously. She even went to the high-ups, and suggested to management that the bread be made more “interesting,” whatever that was. But she did not stop there.

            She developed a bread fetish.

            Whenever she visited a restaurant, she checked with great care what is generally that wheaty first course you see practically wherever you dine, no matter how formal or indifferent to form that restaurant was. She became a maniac about checking out the bread, dipping an eager fist into the napkin-covered offering almost before it hit the table. It was almost embarrassing how she took to examining bread, as though that Inquirer restaurant critic had hit a nerve with her criticism and was now unraveling it all the way into my friend’s brain.

            “You know, the bread really does tell you an awful lot about a restaurant,” she said so often it became a mantra, as though repeating it would put a magic spell of goodness on the surprise in the bread basket. “If a waiter or waitress puts those stale, white snowflake rolls in front of you, hard and ugly as bricks, you might guess they won’t take much care with the rest of the meal or service, since they gave you such lousy, despicable bread. That’s a very silly thing to do, when there are so many delicious breads to get you interested in the place, and they’re so easy to find, and cheap. It’s just lazy, to give you bad bread.”

            I might suggest she became the first politically correct advocate of good bread I ever knew. I don’t know in which state legislature she now resides, but I would know if I bothered to check out recent legislation about bread.

            And, of course, I followed her down that holy path toward good bread.

            The first thing that catches my critical eye in a new restaurant is that basket of sweet wheaty aroma that is my introduction to the establishment. If I can smell it before I see it, that smell of warm, fresh-baked bread, I know that first delightful sense with prejudice me in favor of the bread before it comes into my sight, and the place automatically gets ten points positive. If there’s a dish of real fresh butter, not margarine or those junky scientific blends of unpronounceable icky oils, accompanying the bread, add another ten positive. If it’s herbed butter, add another positive twelve points. And if the food goes with the bread, if the restaurant goes to the trouble of learning ethnic breads to match its ethnic foods, add a hundred.

            French, Italian, Greek, Russian, German, whatever. Each has its own wonderful bread, and learning what they are is as much a part of the process of learning ethnic food as a good foreign language dictionary is. Bread comes with every culture. A culture’s bread supports just about everything else in that culture. If there are many types of bread for each ethnicity, and there generally are, you can count on the richness of the culture, for each bread fits somewhere in the imaginations that created the cuisine. If you’re tossed a Kaiser roll before your sushi, you know you’re fishing in the wrong place.

            Whole wheat or white, or mixed grain or rye. Sourdough bread, or Damper bread from Australia or a bagel from New York City or Middle Eastern flat bread. Naan bread from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Chinese steamed bread, or India’s flaky Paratha bread. All have a place within those countries’ cuisines. Germany alone is said to have over three hundred types of bread, from pumpernickel to short bread, to go along with a variety of food and drink that is far more than bratwurst and beer. All have their proper places on the table, and all score points when served at the right time with the right food, just as the proper wine enhances the dishes it’s meant to be served beside.

            So, okay, I’ve defended my snobbishness about bread in a rye way.

              Now if only I could just determine exactly on which side to butter that delicious, aromatic, warm Schwarzbrot ...

Discovering the Unfamiliar on a Familiar Hike

When two suspicious intruders show up, these deer flee for their lives.

 Marvin insisted we take the right fork in the trail, when we usually took the left fork. He pulled on his leash insistently, dragging me along with all his thirty pounds. More important was his irresistible beagle determination, so this time I acceded to his wishes and followed him up the right fork of the trail.

I knew the way was fraught with obstacles, fallen trees and fast-flowing streams with steep banks on both sides and twists and turns I could not predict. 

At the first fallen tree blocking the path, I told the dog I had had enough.

"Let's go back," I said. "I'm seventy-three years old. I can't climb over this. Come on."

No matter to him. He wiggled under the fallen behemoth and emerged on the other side to turn to stare up at me with those big brown eyes as if to say, there, that's how it's done. He proved I was lying to him, because he knew I had climbed over this tree before with him. Wearily, I swung my leg up and over, struggled to roll over the large round obstacle, and managed to come down on its other side next to him, out of breath.

It made him more determined. What did it matter to him if I couldn't breathe? We came to the next obstacle, a stream with two steep banks on either side. This was as far as we had ever come on this trail, and I was going no farther.

"All right, that's it," I said. "Let's go back. I can't climb up that bank."

He sat down. 

This time I wasn't lying to him, but his determination hadn't waned. He sat and he would not move. I cajoled and cajoled, but the only way he was walking was straight ahead through the stream and over that steep muddy opposite bank.

"I'll try it," I said. "but I'm going to slip and fall on my face, and it will be your fault."

He surmounted the bank easily, and surprisingly, so did I.

Suddenly, we were alone together in a strange and unfamiliar land, when this park was so familiar it was almost home. For many years we had come here most mornings, but we had never been to this part of the park.

Would we survive?

Lost in the wilderness

  

There really wasn't any question of that. We didn't encounter any bears or wolves or crazy men with chain saws. We did encounter a young couple, the girl with binoculars and the boy with a video camera, but they just said hello and politely walked past us

.

The trail was uphill. The new feel of the hike energized me with a sense of discovery. When a familiar place shows you a new face, there's a sense of wonder. It's like learning something fascinating you never experienced before in an old lover. Has this been here all this time? Why hadn't I known this before about you?

It was the feeling my dog had been trying to communicate to me. This was the feeling he wanted for himself that day. Maybe he was bored with our old hike. Maybe he just wanted something exciting and new in his life.

Whatever the reason was, I was thankful for the lesson and experience he insisted upon.

There were more trees fallen across the path to clamber over and more muddy streams to ford. We struggled up the hill and got caught on briars and pricked by them, but the little blood I lost from the thorns didn't matter. The fatigue melted away with the newness.

It was the rarest of things, a virgin experience in familiar surroundings.

That was something to treasure.

Thanks, Marvin.

We broke into an open field at the top of the hill and just beyond that was the familiar trail home.

A fern opening up to another spring.

An old stump.

The familiar trail.

Virginia bluebells along the trail.

Trail's end.

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The Woof of a Rainbow

 Last night after the storm I was standing in the backyard on a hillside gazing at a new rainbow, expecting it to fall on my head at any moment.

My dog turned away quickly to face the house. I spun around and saw my landlord and his dog, out for their evening constitutional. I waved my arm to him and pointed to the sky behind me. He ran back into the house.

He wasn't frightened of the rainbow, as I was, but was calling for his four-year-old son to come out and see it.

Soon he and the boy were making their way out to view the colorful arch in the sky. I quickly went into my apartment and grabbed a camera.

He took pictures with his phone and I snapped away with my small but powerful compact camera.

"That's the best rainbow I've ever seen," my landlord said.

I looked at it from several angles and multiple ways, trying to find the right composition in the camera. I snapped away, taking too many pictures. Then I just decided to enjoy it and forget about the danger of it falling on me.

That was pretty silly.

The landlord explained to his son that the rainbow was formed when the water droplets remaining in the sky after the storm caught the light of the setting sun. I added that the droplets broke up the sun's rays into the colors, like a prism.

It was a little too much for the boy. He lost interest and stomped around in the many and various mud puddles. Our lectures were lost in those mud puddles.

What did he care how the beautiful arch in the sky was formed? People are always trying to explain things, sometimes to their detriment, so perhaps the boy was right to ignore us. The ancients thought rainbows were formed when the messengers of the gods left a trail of color behind them. That's a pretty story, perhaps preferable to our story of droplets and prisms.

There are plenty of other explanations of rainbows, some scientific and others just silly.

We poke and prod everything, and thereby diminish the intensity of experience.

John Keats, the English poet, had an explanation for our explanations.

Do not all charms fly,

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings.

Keats was not referring to our canine companions when he talked about the woof of the rainbow, but its substance. Our dogs, by the way, were perfectly happy just to exist with us, but they did not experience the rainbow on our level. They barely knew it was there. They barely knew its woof.

So maybe there is a middle ground of knowing, when we experience most intensely without getting caught up in the details.

Maybe it's enough simply to gaze at the glories of nature without needing to stomp around in mud puddles after trying to consume too much information about them.

Go find your own rainbow.

Look at it as you will.

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Coming in for a Careful Landing

It's amazing how carefully a tiny female downy woodpecker has to be in the wild, just to get a taste of suet. She hesitates in the treetops, and then swoops in. She has to look around thoughtfully for danger, and then can take a few mouthfuls. Then she has to look around again with care. Somebody might be out there looking to do her harm.

Envying the Life of a Bird

Wouldn't you just love to live like this guy does?

 Most people get over wishing they were some other species but human by the age of ten or so.

Not me.

On a day like yesterday, when a half-dozen palm warbler put on a spring show for me, I thought it might be nice to be a bird for a day or two.

Usually when you see a small flock near the brush surrounding a lake, you think the birds are the usual suspects you see all year. Sparrows, titmice, chickadees -- those guys.

A flash of yellow made me think otherwise.

I had my Sony DSC HX400V bridge camera, which on certain settings allows me to photograph at up to 100x, so I didn't have to get too close and spook the birds.

What I saw with the first few photos made me wish to shed this human form.

A palm warbler surveys the feast before him.

I'm old, so I'm no where nearly as attractive as these warblers. I know it's impossible to shed this human form, but it's not impossible to enter a dreamlike state where I might. I saw the birds living a life that seemed simple and beautiful. The day was a gem, bright and warm and clear, the kind you slog through winter in anticipation of, and the palm warblers were taking full advantage of it. There was something good on the ground to feed on, seeds or insects or whatever. I've never deliberately eaten an insect, so I can't comment on how delicious they might have tasted, but the seeds must have been a special treat.

A palm warbler breakfasting in the grass.

What a life.

The ability to fly anywhere you need or wish to be is enough reason to seek out a better existence as a bird. Roosting in a tree or bush on a gorgeous day like this one adds to the allure, and then finding such delicacies for free at your feet seals the deal.

On a day like this, you want to be a palm warbler.

It certainly beats waking up in a stuffy apartment hacking your lungs out and getting into a rusting piece of junk and driving to the nearest convenience store for a bitter cup of coffee and a stale bagel.

No, I had to envy those palm warblers.

The next best thing was to enjoy the morning photographing them and indulge the dream of being them in the spring sunshine.

That wasn't half-bad.

Of course, it might be worthwhile to taste those insects, too.

The lovely habitat of the palm warblers.

A Wood Duck as Shy as Me

 

A shy wood duck doesn't know what
to make of the world.

Maybe you've had days like this.

You don't want to get out of bed. The world seems a horrible place to be. Your feet ache, your head feels like a balloon filled with Covid or maybe that smelly cheese you ate last night and your stomach feels like Mount Vesuvius.

You're not alone.

Everybody in the natural world feels like that now and then.

I saw this wood duck slap down in the pond as I was photographing in the bird blind. I was taking the day off because I felt as described above. It was the first nice day of spring, and I had had it with just about everything. I wanted to zone out at the bird blind and do nothing but take photos of beautiful creatures.

I thought I found a kindred soul in the wood duck.

These birds are some of most attractive around here, maybe in the world. This male was the first I've seen this year, so it was a thrill just so see him splash down.

But there was something wrong.

He didn't want to come out in the open and let me photograph him. He simply swam around in the debris and branches of the pond and didn't climb up out of it to feed at the bird blind. Wood ducks I've seen here before usually do.

After all, how much food can there be in the pond for a duck. The pond was barely alive in early spring. I thought he'd have to come up out of the pond.

He didn't.

This wood duck won't leave the pond.
 Is he paranoid?

He simply stayed for a long time floating at the edge of the pond, looking longingly at the bird seed on the ground just a few feet away. He wouldn't be tempted. I had to fiddle with the camera to get the longest zoom possible out of it.

He wouldn't come closer.

I realized he felt as I had in bed that morning. We're reflected in nature, and nature is reflected in us. The creatures of the world have the same pains and problems we do, and they lead to the same fears and reluctance and anxieties we have.

Just by getting his photographs, I had a better day than he did.

I got out of bed and got some beautiful shots of him, while he let his fear and pain overcome him.

I hope he got something good to eat in the pond.

*

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What's So Great About War?

Think about your two selves - give peace a chance.

"It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it."

--Robert E. Lee

We might want to ask ourselves: what is so great about war? The answer might scare us.

In a long life of observing one war after another, endlessly occurring, there is one disturbing thing I've noticed.

People love it. 

They love the thrill of watching it on TV, of hearing it discussed on the radio, and of talking about it with their friends.

They love war.

I loathe it, but I don't think I'm wrong about this: most people love it. It's the shame of the human race.

Erasmus said that war is exciting for people who have never experienced it, so maybe that's a qualifier that needs to be added here. If your family and friends are killed or mauled, if your home is burned to a cinder, if your wife or sister or daughter is raped, then you might change your tune.

What is going on inside our heads that we constantly engage in war? One generation after another engages in it. We make dishonest movies and books and TV shows about the glory of it, and suppress art and information that excoriates it.

There's a conclusion that can be drawn from that: war takes place inside our heads.

The human mind is a wondrous thing with hidden horrors. When it's excited, when we hear a gorgeous piece of music or see a great painting or fall in love, our bodies react with excitement. An excited mind makes the body feel pleasant things.

So to make the mind and body react positively to war, we turn it into a beautiful thing.

It's heroic, it brings out the best in mankind, it saves us from the evil other, it teaches us courage and honor and self-sacrifice.

The ancient Greeks said that all good things come of war.

Nonsense.

As Erasmus said, it's exciting until we experience it.

It's the job of propaganda to make us believe war is a good thing. All the excitement the human mind can experience is called up by the propagandists of Madison Avenue or the politicians in various world capitals, and naïve friends who are stimulated by the prospect of war.

It's created stupidity made by the unscrupulous who understand how to make people believe in ridiculous things.

Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

But don't we have the common sense and intelligence to see this when a despot wants you to kill for him? All that's in it for you and yours is pain and suffering, while he profits in power.

In all my long life, I've seen people disregard what war is time and again in their excitement.

The young fall for it all the time, simply because they're blank slates filling up with information while their fully functioning intelligences are led astray. It is the habit of sophisticated and unscrupulous humans to take advantage of the young for their own ends.

But even that doesn't fully explain it. It doesn't fully explain why people are so fond of war.

A year before Adolph Hitler killed himself, the great psychologist Carl Jung predicted that he would commit suicide. Jung believed we have two sides to us, all of us. Simply put, there is the real self and the shadow self. One or the other can predominate. The shadow self is something we create in our minds after suffering trauma or disaster and it allows us to live after such things have happened to us. With the shadow self, we believe ourselves better than we are, that we a noble creatures always trying to do the right thing, despite the failures of our lives. Then someone comes along while we are vulnerable and tells us we are wonderful if we destroy what he tells us is bad. The enemy is bad and we are good.

How big of an idiot are you?

Philosophers, priests, politicians and psychologists have long understood that human beings have several sides and that one side or the other can be watered with false or true information to create the kind of plant they wish that person to be.

Sometimes it just happens naturally.

Jung thought the shadow self had completely taken over Hitler's mind and personality. He was far more a shadow self than a real self. Perhaps he had experienced the horrors of World War I too deeply, having seen his beloved nation fall, having been wounded and having suffered hysterical blindness from all his trials. Trauma had destroyed his real self because the real self was nothing but pain.

His shadow self was that great and good savior of his country, so he killed everything in his path to make sure his horrible shadow self triumphed, because that was the ultimate good, to avoid trauma was the ultimate goal. Everyone else was a sub-human preventing the triumph of his shadow self. They were shadows that didn't matter.

His real self had shrunk to the size of an atom. It no longer held any sway over him. When the impossible happened and his great and good shadow self lost the war, he had to murder his real self to prove his shadow self was correct in killing millions and destroying much of Europe. He couldn't tolerate his shadow self being wrong, he couldn't tolerate the pain of reality, despite the obvious.

It's the same way today. Our shadow selves play off against each other in politics, religion and war.

Our real selves are reduced to atoms.

Why else would Putin invade Ukraine?

So the next time you get excited about war, think of a bullet flying directly toward your forehead.

Who is that bullet going to kill, your shadow self or your real self?