SEPTEMBER

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.