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Here's the letter I wrote this morning to Donald Trump: Dear President Trump, Along with the rest of the nation I have been closely following the series of unfortunate and dangerous events that have been unfolding in Syria over the past week. By now it's pretty clear that the recent attacks against the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun had nothing to do with taking out rebel or ISIS enclaves but was both a test for you and a trap for our country set by Bashar al-Assad, maybe with the input of Vladimir Putin. Or maybe Putin was the mastermind and the Assad the facilitator. In any case the trap was cruelly baited with the terrible deaths of 85 people, 20 of them children. But you did what you thought you must do and made the decision to involve our country in the civil war in Syria. But you must not take another step until you have a plan of action. You must have a comprehensive, long-range strategy for dealing with both Assad and ISIS, as well as the other over 1100 rebel groups fighting in Syria. Otherwise the next step the US takes in Syria could be the beginning of World War III. The problem is, of course, that at this point nobody has a hint of a clue what to do next in Syria. Nobody, that is, except for one person: Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is the one person in this country, maybe the one person on this planet who has a plan for Syria. I remember last year during one of Hillary’s debates with Bernie Sanders one of the questions was on the situation in Syria. Hillary gave a detailed outline of how Assad first needed to be dealt with, then ISIS, then the rebels. I remember thinking while listening to her speak, this is a situation this woman has tremendous knowledge of, one she’s been thinking about and cogitating over for years, one she’s chomping at the bit to take on. And this is why, President Trump, politics and the election from hell be hanged, Hillary Clinton is the person you should be turning to now to save us from plunging into a disaster of catastrophic proportions in Syria. Convince her to come on board. Offer her a refugee quota in the deal. And then immediately establish a Department of Syrian Affairs and put Hillary in charge. Give her carte blanche with staffing and access to military and intelligence advisors. If you need Congressional approval for this action then do whatever you have to do to get it as quickly as possible. And call Hillary Clinton. Please. Sincerely, Patti Liszkay
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On Monday night Donald Trump's policy on Syria was that Syria's civil war was not America's problem, that the brutal attacks against civilians by dictator Bashar al-Assad were not our concern, that we shut our doors and our eyes to the plight of Syria's refugees, that the Syrians should fend for themselves. On Tuesday Assad dropped an atrocity of a chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Northern Syria that killed 85 people, 20 of them children. On Wednesday Donald Trump saw images on television of dead Syrian children. And so on Thursday he sent 59 American missiles to blow up a Syrian air field, informing the world in a televised address that he'd changed his mind about Syria because "Beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack."
One can draw two conclusions from Donald Trump's newly-hatched concern for Syrian children: 1. For the past six years he must not have been watching the TV channels that have been reporting on the horror being suffered by God's Syrian children since the beginning of the war, and 2. He cares enough about Syrian children to bomb a mostly empty air field but not to save their lives by allowing Syrian refugees safety and asylum in the United States. Or, as one tweeter so succinctly put it: Now Russia is outraged by the American attack and the Russian Prime Minister has threatened that the United States and Russia are "one step away" from a military confrontation. US ambassador Nikki Haley shot back that Donald Trump is prepared to "take further steps if needed." Taking in Syrian refugee families doesn't appear to be one of those steps. In the meantime the runway of the Syrian air field that we spent 49 million dollars worth of Tomahawk missiles trying to dent has already been repaired by the Syrian government and two jets have taken off from it this evening to carry out more strikes against the rebels. Or maybe against civilians. Maybe children. And Russia has committed to replacing the twenty Syrian jets that were destroyed in that expensive American missile strike. So now, along with the government forces and over 1100 different rebel factions that have been feeding Syria's civil war its life's blood, the war may be on the verge of receiving a massive transfusion, a fresh, new, colossal lease on life from two super-powers whose weaponry and resources can provide that the war goes on indefinitely, maybe even morphing into a proxy-war between the two powers, to be fought on Syrian soil, of course. Suffer the little children. But not to come unto us. References
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/04/politics/john-mccain-syria-trump-cnntv/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/06/politics/donald-trump-syria-options/index.html http://www.economist.com/news/21720252-dictator-defies-world-bashar-al-assad-kills-least- 72-chemical http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/07/world/syria-military-strikes-donald-trump-russia/index.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/07/trump-just-discovered-the-slaughter-of-syria-s-beautiful-babies.html https://gma.yahoo.com/us-launches-first-strike-against-assad-syria-decries-130206034--abc-news-topstories.html http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-idUSKBN1782S0 https://mic.com/articles/173486/how-much-does-a-tomahawk-missile-cost-here-s-what-the-us-spent-on-its-syria-airstrike#.lvRmbe7P9 The Lieutenant Colonel is a wiz at many things, the filing of income taxes being among them.
...and he can whip his weight in pre-taxable, taxable and non-taxable entities, gross vs. net incomes, deductions, refundable credits, non-refundable credits, and applicable percentages derived by multiplying the light of the moon by a puppy dog's tail then dividing by your shoe size. The Lieutenant Colonel's wife, not so much. I've had no trouble learning Latin, French, German, Russian, Spanish, or a few words of Hungarian.
The aptitude for that sort of thing must reside on the side of my brain where nobody's home.
Or rather, for the purpose of him doing the taxes and me trying figure out what he's doing. To this end I always take voluminous notes, ...as I did once again this year. "But those are the same notes you took last year and the year before that and the year before that," said Tom, glancing at my notebook as I scribbled away, "why do go to the trouble of writing down the same things year after year?" "Repetition is the key to learning," I replied, though that kind of thinking might just be more of a piano-teacher thing. I do my best, though, to help fill in the forms with Tom's patient mentoring. "Now, how do you fill in this line?" he asks me. "You fill it in with 'ABC,' " I reply, jubilant that I've finally cracked the code of a single line item. "No, you fill it in with "XYZ," he corrects me. "What?" I cry in dismay, "how do you figure that?" "Well, see," he says pointing to the instruction booklet, "it's right here on page 37, number 11, letter C, subject 6-e." As if it were as clear as the nose on my face. Anyway, it never seems to me that we rake in or hand out enough cash annually to merit such a long and tedious tax-paying process. I mean, I'm quite sure our yearly income for the past decade wouldn't cover a down-payment for the cost of Melania's 25-carat rock, ...not to mention the half-a-million dollars a day of my tax money and yours that it takes to keep Donald Trump's family living in Trump Tower in the style to which they are accustomed instead of in the far less opulent First Family's wing of the White House. But then at least I know where a portion of our hard-earned money goes.
Having seen "The Zookeeper's Wife" on Friday night (see previous post), by Saturday night I was craving a comedy.
...to see another World War II era drama, "Land of Mine." Or that is to say, to see part of it. About an hour into the film I had to leave. My anxiety and distress level was getting too high - artificially elevated, albeit; after all, I was only watching images on a screen. Still I couldn't stand to watch any more images of dirty, bruised, traumatized, starving youngsters in soldier's uniforms being blown partially or completely to bits. Maybe I could have hung in there if the film's story line had been fiction. But the terrible story told in "Land of Mine" was based on history. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark from 1940-1945 the German army buried 2.2 million land mines along the Danish coastline, turning that country's beaches into death traps upon the belief that the Allied invasion would occur along those beaches. After Germany lost the war 2,000 German prisoners of war, many of them teenagers who'd been conscripted in desperation by the Third Reich during its dying days, were handed over to the Danish army and forced to clear the beaches of the mines buried by their army. Over half of those soldiers were killed trying to defuse the mines.
...put to work crawling along a stretch of beach,
...under the command of a Danish Sergeant with a heart full of hatred for Nazi soldiers. To say it's an intense movie is an understatement. Now, having the previous night watched in "the Zookeepers Wife," a re-enactment of the heartless brutality of Hitler's troops, ...and the unspeakable suffering they inflicted upon millions of innocents,
And yet from the beginning of the film I felt as conflicted about the story as the Sergeant eventually did about his charges:
- The soldiers being brutalized by the Sergeant were scarcely more than children, as were many German soldiers by the end of the war; and yet how much more pitilessly were Jewish children brutalized and murdered by German soldiers? - The POW's who were sentenced to the Danish minefields after the war may have had nothing to do with Nazi war atrocities, the occupation of Denmark or the mining of that country's beaches; they likely had no choice in being drafted into Hitler's army; were they aggressors or victims of Hitler's war? - Was forcing war prisoners to risk their lives and limbs from mines that their army planted to destroy the lives and limbs of others justice or injustice? If not German soldiers, whose task should it have been to disarm the mines? The Danes, who'd already suffered their share of death and misery under the German occupation? All those questions swirled through my mind as I watched the movie. Until I left the theater halfway through. As I sat out in the lobby waiting for Tom, who's neither as jumpy nor as squeamish as myself, I wondered why anybody even felt the need to make a movie on such an awful subject as World War II minefields. But later it occurred to me that this is a film that looks at not only the horror but the moral conundrum of war and serves as a cautionary tale of how much longer the hatred for the invader lives on after the war is over. I can understand the value of such a film. I just don't want to see it. |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY "Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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April 2024
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