Solstice Greetings: May Our Mother Earth Prevail
Photo by KD ©2023
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MY APOLOGY FOR for my long absence. As I stated in my 14 October post, Covid fatally intensified my congestive heart failure. My atrial valve's loss of function was formerly medication-stabilized at about 10 percent but has now, thanks to Covid, skyrocketed to an 85 or 90 percent loss, which leaves me short of breath after merely walking the approximately 20 feet from one end of my apartment to the other, and which my cardiologist tells me shortens my life expectancy to no more than two years at most, probably a lot less due to looming kidney failure ironically induced by massive doses of allegedly "life-sustaining" diuretics. Thus it took me a while to decide whether to terminate this blog with 14 October as my final word or continue posting as I voyage toward the final lesson that is death.
And what might I learn thereby? It seems to me death is either the irrevocable reduction to nonexistence my agnostic, dialectical-materialist left brain suspects proves consciousness to be no more than a meaningless electro-chemical coincidence, or, alternatively, death is the passage to reincarnation my right brain suspects might prove consciousness to be the product of an ongoing process of electro-chemical evolution, with an unrecognized but nevertheless implicit evolutionary dynamic of inertial momentum toward consciousness the defining characteristic of any and all forms of material existence.
Obviously I've decided to continue writing as I await whatever lesson the terminable teachable moment provides, though it surely grieves my journalistic soul I won't be able to file a last report. Meanwhile I'll post both here and on sundry comment-threads.
I've also
vowed to never again indulge in the pseudo-politeness of pretending a
personal optimism about our nation's potential. To my mind, whatever
positive potential we might have possessed was rendered gravely
doubtful by the unredressed assassination of President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and eradicated forever by the subsequent,
still more outrageously unredressed murder of his brother, U.S. Senator
Robert Francis Kennedy on 5 June 1968. Indeed I now argue the former
date will eventually be chosen by the more competent historians -- if
indeed any such exalted occupations survive our undoubtedly apocalyptic
future -- as the USian Empire's equivalent of 4 September 476, the day
the Western Roman Empire died.
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A BROOKLYN-BORN, Manhattanite-by-choice, gentrification-exiled son of a Boston-accented, British-Canadian-parented, first-generation father, I was, as many of you know, condemned by familial dysfunction to spend most of my boyhood years in the South. I have also written in detail about the mass-arrest perpetrated by the University of Tennessee and Knoxville's daily newspapers in a racially motivated, existentially nazi effort to ideologically "cleanse" the campus and the city in general. What I have not fully acknowledged in print is the magnitude of violent hatefulness I endured in the South and Middle West during my K-12 years and later as an adult in the Pacific Northwest, targeted in each locale because I "talked funny" -- that is, spoke grammatically proper English with an unmistakably Northeastern accent which (in combination with my greenish-brown eyes, curly dark-brown hair, ebony eyebrows and the equally coal-black whiskers I sprouted after puberty) -- all convinced my detractors I was a sneaky Jew trying to pass myself off as an Aryan.
I should note here that by the year of my birth, 1940, male circumcision in the United States had lost its religious significance and become a routine medical procedure rationalized by concerns for cleanliness and health in general. Nevertheless I -- and as I would later learn, many members of my generation -- were left with intact penises specifically because our parents feared we might otherwise be mistakenly identified as Jewish and thus exterminated once the German Nazis completed their conquest of the world, an outcome that was then rationally feared by a global majority. Obviously I need not add that, though the German military effort failed, global capitalism is on the brink of omnipotently achieving a comparable result mostly by stealth, thereby dooming not just the traditionally targeted minorities but our entire human species.
My memorably traumatic encounters with an existential nazism I once naively dismissed as "Southern Hospitality" but long ago came to recognize as our one true national ethos began during my first weeks on the protectively fenced playground of an exclusive St. Johns River apartment complex, where three older kids tried to kill me by holding me upside-down and burying my head in a sandbox, an incident I describe in the third section of "The Long-Promised Eulogy for My Father." To reiterate, thanks to my birthmother's malicious disruption of my father's career, he had been demoted from an acting corporate vice-presidency, and we had been exiled from New York City to Jacksonville, Florida, where during the latter part of 1943 and the first half of 1944, he was tasked with solving various manufacturing problems related to the war effort. Similar responsibilities transferred him to Roanoke, Virginia, where we lived during the remainder of 1944 and into the late summer of 1945; there the hostility I had encountered in Florida as a "yankee" and suspected Jew continued, albeit mercifully diminished by private-school discipline, at a kindergarten on Rosiland Avenue. My father's appointment to the War Production Board brought us back to Jacksonville, where we dwelt in a neighborhood called Lake Forest Park until 1948. My murder-minded birthmother was by then out of our lives. My father had wed the woman who had been his executive secretary in Roanoke, and in a few short months she had shown me more love than my birthmother would express for me in all her 84 years.
Beginning in September 1946, I attended first and second grades at Jacksonville's Norwood Elementary School, where at recess I was repeatedly assaulted and once knocked unconscious by bigoted students, always those from my own grade, often those from a grade or two above me. But Norwood's public-school teachers, notably unlike their private- kindergarten counterparts, always refused to intervene. (In retrospect, I've no doubt the Jacksonville teachers knew they were encouraging my foes' brutality; obviously these so-called "educators" shared their students' incipiently nazi bigotry.) My plight had become so dire, my father, who had boxed for sport in boarding school, had begun teaching me the rudimentary skills of pugilism, though at Norwood I was never able to successfully employ his lessons, as I was always overwhelmed by multiple assailants.
But eventually my tormentors undid themselves by the intensity of their own collective hatefulness. Their self-inflicted denouement occurred on a cloudy, uncomfortably humid summer-shirt afternoon probably halfway through the second semester of the 1948 school year. It had started a month or so earlier when a half-dozen slightly older Norwood kids began threatening to ambush me and beat me to death if I dared to continue getting off the school bus at its John Paul Jones stop, which was named for the residential street that ended at nearby Saratoga Street, present-day Saratoga Boulevard.
At this point I should explain that in 1948, the Lake Forest area was far less developed than it is now. Despite its name, the school-bus stop was actually on the north side of Saratoga Street. Beyond that was a substantial tract of deciduous forest, a jungle that, if I remember correctly, stretched all the way to the Trout River, ending there at a beach or city park. The site of the school-bus stop also remained in a quasi-natural state, accidentally marked by a small, seemingly mysterious and therefore always fascinating pool of clear water. Vaguely amber-hued with what my stepmother said was proof of stagnancy, this roughly oval-shaped miniature pond extended its perpendicular reach eight or nine feet into the forest's tropically tangled trees and underbrush. Whatever its water's source, it was roughly three feet wide and probably half that measure deep. As I recall, we students were always perplexed by its seemingly permanent size and never-changing absence of aquatic life, and -- as if in childish anticipation of some transformation or emergence we lacked the words to verbalize -- we were always peering into it as we waited for our morning transport to school. Probably 100 feet west of the pool and its bus stop, John Paul Jones Street, today's Paul Jones Drive, terminated in its T-shaped intersection with Saratoga. From there it was an easy walk to my address, a one-story, two-bedroom structure with a red-brick-veneer front; though I don't recall its number, it was on the eastern side of John Paul Jones, I'm guessing maybe 600 or 700 yards south of the Saratoga intersection.
The aforementioned relentless deluge of ambush threats soon poisoned my homeward bus trips with bottomless dread. There was no alternative school-bus stop within rational walking distance of my dwelling; I knew it would be impossible to successfully defend myself against so many simultaneous attackers, and I had found the bus drivers to be as indifferent to my safety as were the teachers. Attempting to spot ambushers in the hope of giving myself enough advance warning to flee, I always rode on the forest-side of the afternoon bus and was always the last student to debark at the requisite stop. Fearfully scanning the surroundings for lurking foes, I'd scurry to John Paul Jones Street. Peering apprehensively over my shoulder, I'd then turn southward on its concrete sidewalk and start homeward at a near trot. I'd let myself begin to relax only after I'd briskly walked maybe 100 yards without incident.
Despite the continuing verbal abuse, the attacks didn't materialize, and after more than a month of the same threats, I began suspect they were naught but bluff. But just about the time I had convinced myself I was safe, the six wanna-be stormtroopers attacked. Earlier in the day, they'd hidden themselves in the dense underbrush beyond the little pond, and now they boiled toward me in a triumphant frenzy. I will never forget the machine-gun clatter their shoes hammered from the Saratoga Street pavement. The boy who had persistently proven himself my most sadistic adversary, a way-too-big-for-his-age third-grader, led their assault; he clutched to his chest a jagged-edged chunk of gravel-reinforced concrete so large and heavy it required both his arms to keep it in place, his snarls of homicidal invective underscoring his deadly purpose. Though the others were visibly unarmed, their savage yowling made it clear they were equally eager to participate in my demise. Terrified, I snatched up a fallen tree-branch, realizing the best I could do was try to fend them off as they closed in, but the leader two-handedly catapulted his missile directly into my face. The impact knocked me senseless and dropped me face-first on the sidewalk.
Schoolyard
scuttlebutt eventually told me they briefly circled my fallen form,
jeering, cackling at the blood pooling around my head, gleefully
congratulating themselves because they thought the bloodshed proved
they'd killed me. Then they fled back into the woods.
My
memories of what happened next have always been muddled, no doubt
because I was moderately concussed. I lay sprawled on the walkway,
bleeding profusely from a gaping wound in my right eyebrow, unconscious
for what I later learned I was close to five minutes. But the only two
friends I ever made at Norwood School, fellow second-graders who were
typically the first kids off the bus at the John Paul Jones stop, had
witnessed the attack, and though they'd been afraid to intervene, they
hastened to my aid afterward. At this distance -- 78 years -- I find
to my dismay I am unsure of their names, an uncertainty I sorely
regret, because I would love to be able to thank them in print. One, a
boy whose last name may have been Townsend, dashed to my family's house
to fetch my stepmother; the other, a girl whose first name may have
been Bunny, seems to have bandaged my wound with her handkerchief and
thereby significantly slowed my loss of blood; I am certain she helped
me to my feet after I regained consciousness and no doubt ensured I
remained upright as I staggered toward my stepmother, who had run to
meet me and was so shocked and horrified by my blood-drenched clothing
-- this I remember clearly -- she turned white as the proverbial ghost. I
don't know how I got the rest of the way home, whether I walked or my
stepmother carried me. I remember hearing her telephone my father,
telling him she needed him forthwith because I'd been badly injured in a
brawl. (In those pre-dial days, extended telephone conversations were
tabooed by the technology; you lifted the receiver; waited for an
operator to say "number please"; told her what that number was; waited
while she plugged in the wires that connected you to the intended
recipient's phone; waited still more to hear the connection ring; and
then -- if and when someone answered -- you spoke your message as
quickly as possible; you were allowed a limited amount of conversational
time each month, and if you exceeded that limit, your bill skyrocketed
accordingly.) Responding immediately to my stepmother's plea, my
father sped from work to drive me to the St. Luke's Hospital emergency
room. I don't remember if my two friends remained with us to await his
arrival or if they departed for their own homes; the girl's house was
directly across the street from ours, and the boy's was in our immediate
neighborhood. I seem to remember my stepmother accompanying us to the
hospital, but I have no recollection of her there after our arrival, so I
may be confusing elements of my 1945 trip to that same hospital for a
tonsillectomy with the 1948 post-assault ER visit. In any case, at the
time of the attack, my stepmother was focused on caring for my infant
half-sister Deborah, born the previous December, and she undoubtedly
would have remained at home had she been unable to find an emergency
baby-sitter. As I said, these memories have always been fuzzy. But I
vividly recall I was nearly as frightened by the certainty of a tetanus
shot and the probability of stitches as I had been by the onslaught
itself, though to my enormous relief, the ER doctor concluded the wound
was shallow enough for bandaging alone to prompt its healing. My father
told me later the doctor chose to avoid stitches because they'd enlarge
the inevitable scar. For that I am thankful; though I will bear the
scar until I am no more, it is mostly hidden beneath the hairs of my
right eyebrow.
Also, as
best I recall, I never learned what punishments -- if any -- the Norwood
Elementary School principal imposed on my assailants. But my father was
a fairly powerful federal official then, a War Assets Administration
executive equivalent to what today would be a deputy regional director.
To whatever extent he and my stepmother intervened -- and I know they
met several times with the principal -- it sufficed to stop the overt
bigotry for the remainder of my time in second grade. After that --
because my father had been purged from the government in retaliation for
his Marxian politics -- we moved to Michigan. Though the same nazified
venom would confront me there, its expression was far more limited,
and the two times it escalated into violence, in early 1949 and autumnal
1956, I won the resultant fights, in the first instance by breaking my
adversary's nose, in the second by brandishing a shotgun to discourage a
pair of burly teens who had shifted the focus of their nazi-minded
violence from me to my physically enfeebled 78-year-old maternal
grandfather.1
Decades
later, I found two Washington state cities to be veritable cesspools of
such bigotry, first Bellingham (c. 1971-72) then Seattle (c.
1972-1978). Seattle is by far the most existentially nazified realm I
have ever encountered, though the business community in Bellingham was
no better. Daily-newspaper managing editors in both cities mistook me
for Jewish and rejected my job-applications with identical warnings:
"you don't belong here; go back where you came from." In Seattle, quite
possibly the most xenophobic, self-righteously hateful city in the
United States, that same nasty "down-with-Jew-York" vindictiveness
was the unifying ethos of the local art scene, expressed by the
malicious and probably fatal theft of a beloved dog, frequent acts of
vandalism including slashed tires accompanied by explanatory notes ("We
Don't Want You Here") and the ultimate insult of being physically
attacked during a gallery-opening party at which I was one of the
honorees. That fight was a draw, though only because a quartet of
pacifists managed to restrain me. By contrast, Tacoma -- strongly
unionized and bolstered by a defiantly working-class ethos -- is one of
the two most welcoming cities I've encountered. That's why I moved
there in 1978 and in 2004 returned there in retirement. The other
most-welcoming city was of course Manhattan, not the oppressively
gentrified plutocracy it is today, but as I knew it in the '60s, the
aesthetically revolutionary realm James Baldwin celebrated as Another Country.
It was nevertheless during my third through eighth years was I most unforgettably schooled in the darker truth of our "sweet land of liberty," a course of instruction that -- whenever I was beyond Manhattan or urban New Jersey -- would continue until my 48th year. In that context, I cannot overlook the portents of doom implicit in how the U.S. Government condemned an entire shipload of Jewish children, women and men to death in the German Holocaust or how it refused to prosecute IBM for organizing and managing the industrialized German mass-murder apparatus; I cannot ignore how the national transformation that followed the assassination of President Kennedy reveals his murder to have been a coup. I cannot un-learn the lessons that convince me this nation's ruling ethos is (and probably always has been) a self-obsessed, morally imbecilic, terminally toxic amalgam of racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, political and socioeconomic hatreds. I am terrified by how that ethos is now omnipotently manifest in Donald Trump and the irrevocable Republican conversion to Christonazi theocracy and Neoconfederate tyranny. I can no longer doubt it will be this nation's doom.
Nor will I politely pretend any further optimism about the future of our species; the "catastrophic" failure of COP28 proves beyond dispute our impregnably bunkered, technologically omnipotent, vindictively patriarchal Masters whether capitalist or communist and (maybe) extraterrestrial have all secretly agreed to maximize terminal climate change as the final solution in their clandestine program of ecogenocide -- its intended extermination of the global 99 Percent already evident in the deadliness of austerity and the "herd immunity" response to the ongoing Covid pandemic. In this context -- just as silence is sociopathic submission not only to the atrocities against our species but to the unnatural and therefore suicidal misogyny of total war against our Mother Earth -- so has empathy replaced ideology as the wellspring of revolutionary defiance.
And I can
no longer doubt what Winston Churchill said in private on the eve of
the Battle of Britain -- "only a miracle can save us now" -- has become
the one irrefutable truth of our entire species, the sole remaining
determinant of the human condition.
________________
1By
way of clarification, the 1949 incident occurred while I was attending
East Grand Rapids Elementary School and living with my father,
stepmother and younger half-sisters; the 1956 incident marred the year,
summer '56 through summer 1957, I lived with my birthmother and her
parents while starting my journalism career and working toward a
potential Naval ROTC scholarship at the University of Michigan, an
effort terminated by my grandparents' decision in August of '57 to evict
me from their household, which forced me to return to my father's
infinitely more intellectually productive, psychologically comfortable
household in academically backward, economically oppressive,
professionally restrictive Tennessee.
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THOUGH I HAVEN'T indulged in the tragicomic self-deception of new year's resolutions since I successfully completed eighth grade and purposefully traded the forcibly chaste academic superiority of parochial education for the academically inferior but more sexually promising realm of public high school -- this in 1954, an age-14 act of lustfully self-inflected intellectual damage I would later profoundly regret -- I will make exception for 2024, repeating as my one new year's resolution my above pledge to never again soften my admittedly harsh opinions with lies of optimism. In fact, what follows is the comment I posted on a recent Popular Resistance comment thread and afterwards realized was my initial declaration of intent, here slightly amended for clarity:
Recognizing our Masters' ecogenocidal intent -- too bad for us their intended, often academically expressed, ever-more-obvious 90-percent reduction of the global human working-class population (aka the "99 Percent") is dismissed as right-wing "conspiracy theory" -- I long ago began (occasionally) daring to label the mechanism of our doom "terminal climate change." I do this now because "terminal" is precisely its purpose -- proven so not only by our (infinitely evil) Masters' deception-camouflaged refusal to abate it, but by their employment of the corollary mass-extermination weapons of mandated "herd immunity," the slower-motion deaths inflicted by denial of health care and social services, and now also by their skyrocketing quest to replace us with "artificial intelligence" robots.
Nor is there any escape for those of us excluded from the impregnable bunkers of the technologically omnipotent ruling class and thus abandoned to a planet they are deliberately reducing to an open-air death camp; by their diabolical cunning, our Masters -- whomever (or whatever) they might be -- have ensured we will never again either evolve the solidarity or acquire the technology necessary to overthrow their ever-intensifying tyranny. Nevertheless I suspect our Mother Earth will have the last word -- that our present-day Masters will find they have underestimated her much as the Weimar ruling class underestimated Hitler -- and that if any of our species survives, it will be only by reverting to the Gaian-centered ethos that sustained our pre-patriarchal ancestors through the first approximately 194,000 years of our species's existence.
To do so, we of course first must learn to despise Gaia's chief usurper, the ecogenocidally misogynistic, sadistically patriarchal god of the Abrahamic religions, the monstrously perverted divinity that despite all efforts at reform and/or liberalization forever lurks beneath even the most benign forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The blood-drenched, torture-mangled histories of these theologies and the irresistible undertow of apocalyptic death-cult fanaticism they exert even now prove them and the patriarchal ethos they sustain to be our species' most elemental Evil. The repetitive proofs of their malignancy span sat least five millennia and are therefore irrefutable. Whether implicitly or explicitly, their creeds are forever poisoned by our species' only genuinely unnatural act -- that is, the eternally irrevocable tripartite condemnation of femaleness from which patriarchy originates and from which its theologies are fabricated, propagated and sustained:
- the hateful, clitoris-envying process exemplified by the scriptural reduction of Eve -- originally the Great Goddess, the Mother of All Being (and therefore the Mother of our Mother Earth) -- to an infinitely despised and therefore monstrous caricature of the first human woman;
- the vindictively pornographic redefinition of femaleness -- the gender originally honored as the source of life and the wellspring of empathy -- to naught but the embodiment of insatiable lust exemplified by the scriptural tale of an Eve who defies a self-proclaimed Lord God of the Universe, eats of a "forbidden fruit," implicitly sates herself on the alleged god's alleged adversary's loquaciously serpentine penis and so seduces her mate Adam to join her in sinfulness;
- the vengeful legitimization and encouragement of rape. femicide and collective punishment implicit in the scriptural tale's conclusion, the alleged god's alleged double-pronged curse in eternal retribution for "Original Sin," all females including the Great Goddess and our Mother Earth forever damned for their alleged lustfulness, all males forever damned for their alleged weakness thereunto, with our species' only salvation thus allegedly the unconditional embrace of the credos mandated by the paramount patriarchal propagandists, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad.
Surely one need not hold a doctorate in psychology to recognize the allegedly "insatiable lust" for which the patriarchy relentlessly denounces females as a clinically classic projection of the murderously sadistic egotism and insatiably self-obsessed avarice that defines the ever-more-apocalyptic morally imbecility of our Masters. Originally documented as the psychopathic fuel of serial killers, it is increasingly recognized as the ecogenocidally terminal ethos by which the .01 Percenters desecrate our planetary womb, methodically reducing it to the mechanism of our species' doom and thus to our evolutionary tomb. (A pair of informatively thought-provoking essays on the toxins of patriarchy are here and here.)
Quoth the Apostle Paul, a patriarchal con-man sufficiently cunning to portray himself as a paragon of honesty:
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11: 14-15; English Standard Version)
Let us therefore acknowledge the death-camp patriarchy is making of the world and recognize the Christian doxology as an ultimate summation of the Abrahamic Big Lie, that were it truthful would:
Curse god from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye suffering host
Curse father, son and holy ghost.
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SEVERAL FRIENDS AND comrades have asked me how I foresee the forthcoming presidential election. The following LA Progressive comment-thread post, slightly expanded for inclusion here, says it best:
With all due respect, Messers. Solomon and Cohen need to stop ignoring the pivotal horrors of our national history. The Bidencrats' de facto surrender to Trump and his seemingly inevitable inauguration-day declaration of the U.S. as the de facto Fourth Reich is the conclusion of a bipartisan multi-generation plutocratic coup first approved and enabled by the immunity Congress granted the nazified Bankers' Plot conspirators in 1934. The plotters immediately began enabling Germany's campaign of Aryan global conquest by forcefully promoting U.S. neutrality, and in 1938 they initiated their methodical conversion of Christian fundamentalism into the formidable sturmabteilung it has since become. When the battle of Stalingrad proved the Red Army would strike German Nazism its death-blow, they sought to guarantee the invincibility of nazism's USian variant by recruiting the evil genius of the German Nazi war criminals they embraced as comrades-at-arms c. 1944-1947. They demonstrated their omnipotence on 22 November 1963, in the aftermath permanently reducing the "Democratic" (sic) Party to the "Republican" (sic) Fifth Column. Meanwhile, with Nazi-guided, Goebbels-caliber cunning, they had already begun the stealthy reconditioning of the entire electorate to accept the Christonazi/Neoconfederate ethos that is the modern variant of the original, pre-New-Deal "Democratic" (sic) ideology and which had secretly become the core "Republican" (sic) ideology during the powerfully Ku-Klux-Klan-influenced years of the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover era. Its pivotal postwar metastases include the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act; Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts; the declaration of Christian theocracy implicit in Eisenhower’s addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance; the subsequent betrayals implicit in LBJ’s Vietnam War, Nixon's Watergate crimes, Carter's Hyde-Amendment misogyny, Reagan's innumerable socioeconomic atrocities and their brazenly relentless continuation by Clinton and every president thereafter. Biden is merely the last comma – or coma – before the victorious Trumpite exclamation point that concludes the apocalyptic imposition of the ecogenocidal agenda originally formalized by our Masters' one true Messiah, Adolf Hitler himself. Such are the circumstances from which only a miraculous national awakening (might) yet save us.
And yes, I find it grievously astounding such an historically obvious sequence of cause and effect is yet belittled as "conspiracy theory."
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THOUGH I SEE no reason to continue reminding us of how our dire our circumstances have become, I am nevertheless linking the following three reports as both significant warnings of what is to come and accurate examples of the logical reasons for our entirely rational, inevitably depressing sense of collective hopelessness. These are all from the World Socialist Web Site, one exposing a Pinochet-type trial run of the genocidal austerity by which our Masters at the International Monetary Fund intend to further subjugate us all, the next documenting the deliberate U.S. reduction of its younger female population's health, the last revealing how an 86-year-old (not a typo) Fed Ex employee was crushed to death in the sort of workplace "accident" that increasingly defines our economic circumstances.
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May the waxing light and dwindling darkness of the Sun's Winter-Solstice turn onto its northward path be a comfort us all. Blessed be.
LB/13-20 December 2023
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