There was a Christmas Truce in 1914. Most of us have heard about this. It occurred during WWI.
It was an amazing thing that happened, on Christmas Eve of 1914 and the following day. Along the Western Front in Europe.
Both sides of the fighting had been in the trenches for quite some time. Yep. So on that day, the rank-and-file soldiers spontaneously arranged informal cease-fires. With the enemy. The ones they had shot at and blasted. Those soldiers in the trenches opposite them. They all came crawling out, and, in many cases, met in the No Man’s Land between the trenches to socialize with each other.
They smiled and laughed. They shook hands and began singing carols, exchanging small gifts. They danced and played soccer. And then, in many instances, they began to bury the dead. Together.
As a note. These impromptu truces by no means involved the entire Western Front. For the most part, they were widespread, especially between German and British soldiers (though in a few places French and Belgian troops as well).
World War I (WWI or WW1), was also known as the First World War, the Great War, or the War to End All Wars. It lasted from July of 1914 to November of 1918.
Over nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a result of the war (including the victims of a number of genocides). Unresolved rivalries still existing at the end of this horrible war contributed to the start of the Second World War only twenty-one years later.
The first and the second. Since then, America, as an entire country, truly hasn’t lived a war. We have not been asked to ration, or curfew, or to quit our jobs to work for the war effort. Many people have lost plenty of sons and daughters. Too many too count, in a flurry of Gulf Wars, and Desert Wars, and in Rice Patties, and on. But as Citizens, we have not been asked to sacrifice.
I fear that is about to change. I heard someone say the other day that they liked President Trump because he has balls. I was aghast. My take on this? We don’t need a president with balls. We need one with brains.
He is driving us to “take care of America first.” He suggests that we need to disregard the other countries, and all of their unfair ways. We need to think about America again. Watch out for Number One.
Here is the problem with that. America is on Planet Earth. The Earth does not belong to the USA. We share it with a WHOLE bunch of other people in other countries. We should really try our best to get along with those other people.
I have friends who volunteer to help people in other countries and continents. Africa, India, South America, and the whole world around. They are trying to feed them, and get them clean water, and medicine, and such. We have given too.
So. Sooooo…. Shame on them? (Shame on us?) Why are they NOT helping America first? How dare us? Those other countries? Shitholes, I think he called them.
I give my apology to the four people out of 10 here, reading this, who think President Trump is doing a good job. If I have offended you. But. I have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. And still, all I see is a narcissistic, racist, unthinking, oaf. An embarrassment. A travesty.
Oh. I don’t pretend to understand the politics of the world.
And I surely am not smart enough to have an answer for it.
But I learned from a very early age, the difference between right,
And wrong.
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“I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
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“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
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“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.”
― Mark Twain, What Is Man?
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