Can’t believe the summer is over, another one in the dust.
Little Big Man counted his age by the number of “summers,” and there’s another
one gone.
The house in Virginia Beach closed on June 30, two full
months ago, but the moving process started earlier than that, so some version
of chaos for over four months. It has been the most difficult move of my life,
partially because we seem to accumulate more “stuff” all the time and partially
because the physical work is getting harder in my mid-70’s.
Actually, the realization that I just can’t do some of the
physical work is part of the difficulty of this move.
And then there is the HEAT. Corpus Christi is a very hot
place. What the hell did I expect, you might ask, but “heat indexes” constantly
in excess of 100 degrees, sometimes reaching 114?!! Yeah, more than I expected.
Read a great book that Marcee loaned to me, “Winter Garden,”
that has (ironically, given the weather here) as one of its central themes the
fight against intense cold. Specifically, the record cold winters of the early
1940’s during the German siege of Leningrad that lasted nearly 900 days (1941-1944)
with over 3.5 million casualties. The civilian deaths in the Leningrad siege
exceeded the civilian deaths in Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined. Not the typical book I read, but pretty powerful stuff.
This is a repeat, but I find it to be astounding that Russia
suffered 20 million deaths as the result of Stalin and Hitler. Stalin and his
Communist regime must qualify as one of the most-evil in history, and the
effects were apparent during the Cold War and still today. Fact: Western Europe’s
economy is ten times the size of Russia’s. The population is 140 million,
one-tenth the size of China and one-third that of the US. Virtually all the men,
regardless of age, were either killed in the war or starved (men don’t survive
famine as well as women), and today there are 11 million more women than men in
Russia. Alcohol is the biggest enemy right now.
I realize that Russia is corrupt and the government is
basically an extension of the criminal element, but please, people, can we get
our politicians to quit obsessively concentrating on Russia and figure out what
to do about China? Fortunately, our military understands that China is THE threat
for the future of our world.
Yep, another Russia/China rant. Sorry.
