TEACHER, TEACHER

     How often have our teachers taught us the varying forms of the reminder that if we do not learn history and take lessons from it, we will be doomed by these actions or inactions to repeat the worst of history. And yet, time and again, we refuse to accept that lesson and there we go again and folks, here we go again right now.
     Yesterday we saw a movie called The Samuel Project which in essence was the story of a grandfather and a grandson connecting - via the grandson's project for school wherein he discovered the early life of his grandfather, a hidden child of the Holocaust. There is much to this movie and should be seen, even the kids and there are no horrific scenes of truth to be seen, but the implications for the adults are there. Particularly when we see some scenes, a picture or a map, of immigration and the fact that even after the war, after the slaughter, there was still no room for the Jews at any inn!
     We saw ships being turned back, victims being sent back to the slaughterhouse of Europe, desperate people going under fences, and maps which traced the useless paths of refuge. And echoed in all this, though unseen, were the ships being turned back today, the caravans of humanity being dehumanized, called criminals, ranted about by a demented and hate filled President and his followers
     And I wonder. Teacher, teacher, teach me the lessons again. Teach the world the lesson again. Hope that it is not to late, that we have not trashed all that made this world a good place to live, that we have not thrown out all the progress mankind has made since the first steps to a peace treaty ever took place or the first time one man extended a hand to another in a time of danger.
     We are killing ourselves. We are doing this in so many ways and I fear, as do a growing number of people, that we are killing off a refuge for the future for Spaceship Earth will be no longer. We are welcoming the killers, the extremists into government again, allowing them to implement their awful and dangerous policies. We are engaging in dangerous arms races once more. We are ignoring science, denying science - how stupid is that!!! How dangerous is that, even as the people stand in their ruined homes, their trashed lives due to extremes of Nature grown ever more common! Today we find that the largest living organism on this Earth is dying, a huge interlinked common system of roots which allows for thousands of 'children' trees to have grown from the 'mama' and yet today - we are killing it with our stupidity. How much longer till we kill all ourselves off and stage our own The  100, not as a TV show, but as a fact of life.
     Teacher, teacher. Answer me this. How long must one trust a perpetual liar? What does that say abut us if we continue on this futile and dangerous path? What do we do about those in positions of leadership of which they have made a mockery, and hear them deny the nose on their faces, then admit they are indeed there but did not get there the way people are saying, then agreeing to that, but adding conditions, and then agreeing with the facts but still adding conditional statements of disbelief. How low do we go in accepting killers, haters of humanity, selfish people, how low do we need to fall before we realize what we have done?
     So Trump is threatening to call out the troops and stop the caravan. My heart and mind quails at the images. We, at war against people who are the same as our ancestors, coming here to escape from danger, coming here to live a better life, coming here to provide  a future for their children, only they are coming a different way in different times. So what! Why are we not overhauling our immigration policy, ripping out the roots of hatred and installing proper and peaceful methods of accepting new blood, fresh minds and ideas into our country. But when one has an idiot at the head who persists in calling this caravan a conspiracy of the "Democrat" party - read that Democratic as that is how they are listed in legal formation papers - how do we handle and negate this idiot and his followers? And how do we tie together our country once again, bind up its wounds with the echoes of Lincoln's voice urging us on?
     Teacher, teacher. Help us to understand the schism and the abyss that is before us. Help us see that we have already lost precious people and ideas to that abyss and the chasm is ever widening, ever making more room for the blood that will be spilled. Teacher, teacher - I know what I hear and I know what I fear.
      So all of us - get out there and do what must be done, what is on YOUR shoulders to do -
     VOTE    VOTE   VOTE
Stand up against the hatred, the darkness that is encroaching upon the once bright and shining place known as the Golden Mountain, the Goldener Medinah, a place where all were welcome, even if that welcome took a generation, even as we integrated the children as the parents built new lives.
       VOTE      VOTE     VOTE
     Dear G-d! Just saw a video of the caravan and watched the men, the women, the children, the infants, babes in arms, as they came, came to us, in hope, in peace. And we are going to greet them with guns? We are going to find people, our soldiers, who will shoot these innocents? They mean no harm; only looking for life. Dear G-d!!