NOTE: This post (Mourning in America) will be a just a small tile in the mosaic portraying the decline of this once great nation. It may be of use to some future generation trying to grasp what people in the U.S. were feeling and thinking in the year 2025 much as Germans pondered the loss of their individual freedoms and the rise of National Socialism almost a century ago.
March 29, 2025 (Saturday)
I left the house at 9:00 a.m. to get our car serviced. It was a wet, early spring day and cold (38o.) As I approached the center of our town, I noted the lack of traffic and the appearance of a thirty-or forty-year old, well-dressed woman in a Lands’ End down jacket on the sidewalk carrying a bright orange sign. There were five or six lines of lettering on the sign, but all I could read as I drove by were the words “Stock up.”
Stock up on what? Cash? Food? Ammunition? Two hours later when my errand was done, I returned to the same intersection but she was gone, as was her portentous warning. It was troubling enough to lead me to begin this post.
MY TOWN
My town is an ideal place to live, with the choice of either city life or wilderness twenty minutes-drive from here in opposite directions. It has a rich history as one of the birthplaces of democracy in America. People in New England care about things like this. Though my town is technically not one of the six New England states, we are only 44 miles to North Adams, MA and less than that to Bennington, VT. On the town square where I saw the woman this morning, you’ll find members of a local church demonstrating for Jesus one week night and peace protestors in support of Gazans on another week night. Everyone gets along. Free speech is not only cherished here, but it is practiced as well.
I guess I wondered whether that lonely person with a sign this morning was some sort of sentinel of a coming event. Did she know something that I did not? Or was she driven by inarticulate impulse to warn us of what lay ahead? Like a mysterious and rarely seen oarfish washed up on a beach weeks before an earthquake or the sudden, large-scale migration of birds days before a hurricane hits. Yet, where I live, we have neither beaches for oarfish nor hurricanes to alarm with any frequency.
I hope to make daily contributions to this post in the weeks and months ahead. My goal is to transform the reality of mourning in America to the hope of morning in America.
March 30, 2025 (Sunday)
For anyone who really cares, President Trump says he is “pissed off” today. Get over it Mr. President. Or, better yet, go join Joe Biden in retirement.
I remember when Donald Trump was sworn in as President in January 2017. Though I hoped for the best, I expected the worst and President Trump did not disappoint. Oddly at the time, I thought of The Decameron. The Decameron was a 14th century book written by Giovanni Boccaccio. The setting for the book was a villa near Florence, Italy in the time of the plague, the Black Death. The plague is called the bubonic plague because of the softball-sized swellings (called buboes) in the armpits and groins (boubons) of the victims. Eventually, a madness follows just before death. Plague is almost always spread by fleas on the Norwegian brown rat.
According to contemporary observer Jean de Venette’s “Chronique“:
“At Paris and in the kingdom of France, as in the other parts of the world, so it is said, there was in this same year (1348) and the year following so great a mortality of people of both sexes, of the young rather than of the old, that it was scarcely possible to bury them. They were only ill for two or three days and died suddenly, their bodies almost sound; and he, who one day was in good health, was dead and buried on the morrow. They had swellings under the arm-pits and in the groin, and the appearance of these swellings was an infallible sign of death. This malady or pest was called an epidemic by the doctors. During these two years there was such a number of victims as had never been heard of, or seen, or read of in past times. And in many towns, great and small, the priests were terrified and fled; but some others, considerably braver, administered the sacraments. Soon in many places out of every twenty inhabitants there were only two alive. The mortality was so great at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris that for a long time more than five hundred dead were carried daily on wagons to be buried at the cemetery of St. Innocent of Paris. And the holy sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu, having no fear of death, discharged their task to the end with the most perfect gentleness and humility. These sisters were wiped out by death and were replaced more than once; and they now, as is piously believed, repose in peace with Christ.
This plague, it is said, began amongst the infidels, and then came to Italy, Crossing the mountains, it reached Avignon, where it struck down several cardinals and decimated their suites. Then by degrees it passed across Spain and Gascony, from town to town, from village to village, finally from house to house and from person to person till it arrived in France, and spread on to Germany, though it was less terrible there than it was amongst us.”
Few people indeed were spared.
In Boccaccio’s book, seven young women and three young men camped out for ten days in seclusion in the countryside, to avoid getting sick and dying from the pestilence, hence the book’s name δέκα, for “ten”and ἡμέρα, meaning “day.” The group calculated that in ten days-time, the plague would have burned itself out and Florence would once again be safe to return to. During their exile, the ten young adults crafted a hundred stories, poems and plays to act out as they whiled the time away. It’s been a while since I read the book. Possibly, some musical compositions were included. Boccaccio says nothing of the fate of the Florentines upon their return to their homes. In my musing back then, I wondered if this theme could be adapted to the madness of the first Trump Administration? But then, who would volunteer to go into seclusion and where? Certainly not a quarantine for a four-year period, but perhaps for a symbolic ten days to draw the analysis. Or for a contemporary revision of Boccaccio’s work.
Today, there is more than madness in the air. As former Representative Liz Cheney (R WY) correctly foretold, there is an unquenchable thirst for revenge in this President that drives his agenda.
I read Isaiah, Chapter 5 this morning. The title is “The Song of the Vineyard.” In verse 5:20, God says to Isaiah:
“Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.”
Does this sound familiar to you? Elsewhere in Chapter 5, the vineyard is identified as the nation Israel. But there is also likely a message here for America as well, for God’s Word is timeless. The danger God tells Isaiah about it is calling evil “good,” darkness “light” and bitter “sweet.” This contradiction should be counter-intuitive to most of us who presumably know the difference. The passage may well speak to moral relativism and the question today over what is truth. “Moral relativism challenges the idea that there are universal moral truths or principles that apply to all people at all times. “(ibid.) Applied to this passage in Isaiah, a relativist would say that this verse was God’s truth to Isaiah back then, but it might not be true today. If you buy into that, then the “J6” felons were actually heroes and patriots and not people who broke the law and stormed Congress, even if we saw it with our own two eyes.
The election of 2024 (to Deena and me) had two candidates running with night and day differences between them. My wife and I saw Donald Trump as the candidate of the dark side. He appealed to the ugliness, hatred, arrogance, greed, vengeance and pride that apparently and sadly lurks in the hearts of many Americans. Kamala Harris was to us the candidate of sweetness and light, and she vowed to be more inclusive, representing all Americans of all races, sexes, national origins, religions, disabilities and so on, and not primarily or exclusively the white and wealthy. Certainly, she would not travel down the same paths as Joe Biden given her own opportunity to reshape American policy. Her message was positive and promising, and it resonated with Deena and I.
We can see how voters in the 2024 seven swing states perceived the two candidates based on the words they used. The larger the word, the more it came up in discussions with voters. These two illustrations are called word clouds and they are just another way to array data to make it relevant and decipherable.
Republican voters, courtesy of J.L. Partners and Daily Mail.
Americans made a choice last November. It was not a landslide, it was not a mandate. Donald J. trump beate Kamala Harris with less than 50% of the popular vote and just more than fifty percent of the state. Had Elon Musk not poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the flagging coffers of the republican candidate during the last few weeks of the campaign, the outcome might have been different. As it is, we now have the best president that money can buy.
