Quiet day, as Ellen spent it at her sister's. Pat slept a lot of the day--he always does now--and I performed my wifely duties...
No, not those duties! I did a lot of wash, went to the supermarket and cooked. Got a web cam call from sister Betty in Santa Barbara, her device newly installed. Later, got another from Mike and Vivian; she's still recovering from her surgery, but is doing well.
Wider: I just re-read the John Caruso quote I posted yesterday, about Israel's crimes against the neighbors they mistreat. It seems to contain in it a sad and unanswerable question about, as he puts it, "the universality of human evil," especially:
"This base drive to impose suffering on others -- out of fear, out of greed, out of the lust to dominate -- lives in us all, in every individual, every nation, every people, every tribe, every sect, every clan."
But why, why, why should this be so? Is there no hope that it will ever be different? I'm old enough to have lived through World War II--now romanticized and nostalgia-coated out of all recognition--and I well remember the pervading sense of U.S. goodness, as opposed to the clear and perfect badness of "the enemy." I believed this right up to a few years ago. Then I finally--I'm a slow learner--began to wonder how it could be that Americans, out of all the world, present and past, could be so loftily different from the citizens of other countries.
Now I know we aren't.
And a riddle:
It's deafening!
What is?
The silence of the Great Black Hope of the dems.
(They're dizzy with happiness over his ascendency, but ignore the lack of condemnation for the latest Israeli rape in Gaza.)