IGNORANTIA AFFECTATA

     "A willful ignorance." How many times have we seen a wrongdoer claim innocence because he did not 'know' the deed was wrong, or did not think it through to the bitter end? Even as the maxim states, "Ignorance before the law is no excuse", how many continue to try using it? Worse, so many get away with it And I am not talking about small nuisance laws used to 'get' people, but rather serious and consequential actions, and especially, word usage.
     So many of us just throw words around without paying attention to them and what they wrought. G-d commanded the creation of the world, our world, which we are at present trashing, using words, and after the act, evaluating, and saying it was good. How many of us today can look at our lives, can look at our affiliations, at the words exiting our mouths, at the thoughts rising in the mind, and then say - it is good? I think not many, certainly far fewer than you might hope for.
     We become willfully ignorant. When people march down a street with candles, with militialike music, with matching haircuts, yes, there are consequences, and to not 'see' them, is to engage in willful ignorance. To hear a supposed leader of a nation tear at the Constitution which gives it its structure, to shred its provisions and laws, well, that is willful ignorance - when we excuse it, making excuses, and why should a president need excuses for his words and deeds - or lack thereof?
     Further worrisome ignorantia affectata? Millenia ago, supposedly Pontius Pilate washed his hands, literally and figuratively, of the blood of yet another crucified Jewish victim, declared his innocence, though why he would have to is also a question not answered. This Jew was just another victim of the thousands already crucified, a common form of execution by the Romans. Yet we are to believe that in the middle of Passover, a major holiday for the residents of Judea, they would gather to hear Pilate talk and declare innocence, as they would shout together - why? - that "the blood was on them and their children". 
    Just a few words, eight or nine, and generations of attempts to wipe out a people. Time and again, pogroms, attacks, mass and individual, expulsions, starvation through economic sanctions, forced conversions, and always, always, a vicious anti - Semitism that never seems to vanish. There can be no ignorance here. To claim otherwise, is to lie, to be willfully ignorant, or denying of two thousand years of brutal, blood soaked history.
      Why am I so concerned now? Well, just open a paper, hear the news. Jews killed, institutions vandalized, dangerous words emerging from dangerous people. The old canards emerging again, full throated, even as people lie, to disguise this eternal blood trail as something other than an ignored, or so they say, connection to the slaughter, even unto the pogrom to end all pogroms, the Holocaust, even as the Catholic Church in the voice of the Pope did nothing - nothing - to stop it, not even to protect its  'own' Jews. The acts of individual priests or nuns or lay people, while heroic, did not excuse the formal deeds and words of the head of the Church. Nor can the other organized religions of the Christian world claim ignorance and innocence. None can. Willful ignorance does not have a place here.
      Nor does it have a place anywhere. On the smaller side of life, we cannot remain ignorant as to what is going on here in CV. We have a President who is running the joint by sole dictat. What is going on? Where are our monies being spent? Where are the meetings? Why are they always canceled or held behind closed doors? Where is transparency? Where is the ability to ask tough questions and demand answers? What is going on with the gross violation of contract by Atlantic Broadband - after we signed for ten years! Ten!! What about the new agreement? Thank you, David, for once again screwing the residents royal. Willful ignorance? By the residents in failing to do something, to stand up, to impeach him? You decide. I know where I and many others stand.
     And on to the national world. The best statement I read yesterday was thus: "we need to reset". Oh, brother, do we ever. We have a President who believes in and pushes woo-woo science, imagining devils and aliens having sex, producing demons - anyone check his parents - LOL -  or under that complicated mound of hair of his - and we continue to disintegrate every day, hour by hour.
     How about some other gems of the day?
    " our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at this moment,”    and   “bullying, intimidation and retaliation” by Trump and his allies"   and re the pandemic war, "It’s time to reset,”    and  “If the nation does not change its course — and soon — deaths in the United States could be well into the multiple hundreds of thousands.”
     Can we afford to engage in ignorantia affectata any longer? No, is the resounding response.
     So Trump is going to be nominated in secret, behind closed doors. Yet another example of his new version of America. Threats to reject election results. Threat to never leave or cancel elections. Threats to rend asunder this land of ours, this hope of mankind.
    Ignore this at our own risk. There is no ignorance here. You know that. I know that. We all know that. We have seen all the consequences. We cannot be blind or excusing any more. Not if we are to survive as America, to be true to our definition of Americans. VOTE!!