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nicklloydnow · 1 year ago

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“When we spoke this week, she made clear that the decision of whether Ukraine wins or loses is now on us — almost entirely. As Congress debates how much more money to authorize for Ukraine’s assistance amid growing Republican opposition, she says that what we are really debating is our own future. Do we want to live in the kind of world that will result if Ukraine loses?

Hill is clear about her answer. A world in which Putin chalks up a win in Ukraine is one where the U.S.’s standing in the world is diminished, where Iran and North Korea are emboldened, where China dominates the Indo-Pacific, where the Middle East becomes more unstable and where nuclear proliferation takes off, among allies as well as enemies.

“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” she told me. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

(…)

“The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front,” she said. “People are incapable now of separating off ‘giving Biden a win’ from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.”

“In that regard,” she continued, “whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”

(…)

Ukraine has succeeded so far because of massive military support from European allies and other partners. So in that regard, we’ve now reached a tipping point between whether Ukraine continues to win in terms of having sufficient fighting power to stave Russia off, or whether it actually starts to lose because it doesn’t have the equipment, the heavy weaponry, the ammunition. That external support is going to be determinative.

(…)

It’s a question of whether Ukraine has enough resources, financial resources, not just to keep going on the battlefield, but also to keep the country together at home. And up until now you’re still seeing a lot of European countries stepping up. Not just you know, the United States, but definitely the EU, Japan, South Korea and others. Japan recently made an offer of additional major financial support. The Germans have said that they’ll make sure that the Ukrainian economy will continue to not just survive, but thrive, and over the longer term, they’ll help rebuild. This is still somewhat positive.

On the political side, however, we’ve got the problems of the policy battlefields on the domestic front. Ukraine has now become a domestic political issue in a whole range of countries, not just here in the United States, but in countries like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany and many more. And that’s an issue where it’s going to be very hard for Ukraine to win. Because when you get into the transactional issues of domestic politics, and you’re no longer thinking about national security, or these larger imperatives, then Ukraine dies a thousand deaths from all of the transactional efforts that domestic politicians engage in. Most political constituents, no matter the country, can’t really see beyond their own narrow interests.

(…)

One thing that we need to bear in mind here is that Putin turned for assistance to two countries that should give Americans and members of Congress pause — Iran and North Korea. Russia has had significant shortfalls of ammunition and sophisticated technology because of sanctions and other constraints. Ammunition has come from North Korea, which continues to provide Russia with all kinds of rounds for shells, and Iran has stepped up with the production of drones. Iran and North Korea both see this as a kind of international opening for them. If Russia prevails on the battlefield, you can be sure that Iran and North Korea will get benefits from this. We already see Russia shifting its position on the Iranian nuclear front, and we also see Russia making a major shift in its relationship with Israel. Putin has gone from being a major supporter of Israel, to now an opponent, and has switched from what was always very careful public rhetoric about Israel to pretty antisemitic statements. Putin never denigrated Jews in the past. On the contrary, he presented himself as a supporter of the Jewish population. This is a dramatic shift and clearly because of Iran. Now, whether Iran asked Putin to do this, I honestly can’t say, but we can all see this deepening relationship between Russia and Iran. That is a real problem for the administration and for others who are now looking at the Middle East and trying to figure out how to stop a broader war with Lebanon, with the Houthis in Yemen, and all of the Iranian proxies, because Iran and Russia have become fused together now in two conflicts.

(…)

But it’s not just China and Russia who are learning from this war. So are we. We’ve seen the impact of drone warfare and we’re thinking about how we deal with this ourselves. We’ve been kind of shocked to see how much wars like this take up ammunition stocks — this is not the type of war that we’ve fought for a very long time. When we’re thinking about our own defense, our own national security, we need to be looking very carefully at this conflict. The way that Putin has played with the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons, the use of drones on the battlefield, the use of mines, the use of ships and blockades in the Black Sea, the difficulty of pushing forward in a counteroffensive against these deep entrenchments, how various military systems including defensive equipment actually perform in real time and conditions. We can see how effective our ATACMS were, for example, our Patriot batteries. This is, in a way, a proving ground for our own equipment.

(…)

Well, there’ll be multiple ways he will define it, one of which is defeating the United States, politically, psychologically and symbolically. If the United States doesn’t pass the supplemental [bill to approve aid to Ukraine], and we get this chorus of members of Congress calling for the United States to pull away from Ukraine, Putin will be able to switch this around and say, “There you go. The United States is an unreliable ally. The United States is not a world leader.” And there will be a chilling effect for all our other allies. In the past, Putin has actually, for example, approached the Japanese and said, “Look, we can be your interlocutor with China. The United States is not going to be there to assist you in a crunch.” And that’s certainly what this is going to look like. The Japanese, the South Koreans, the Vietnamese, others that we have bilateral treaties with, are going to wonder, “OK, the United States made such a push here to support Ukraine, along with other European members of NATO, and now they’ve just walked away from it.” And you put that on top of Afghanistan and the withdrawal, also the withdrawal from Iraq, withdrawal from Syria, and the whole fraught history of United States interventions in the last two decades, and Putin will be able to present a pretty potent narrative about the United States’ inability to maintain its commitments and forfeiting its role as an international leader. So that that becomes a major political win.

(…)

We’ll be at each others’ throats. There’ll be no way in which this is going to turn out well. There’ll be a lot of frustration on the part of people who thought that this was the easier option when we reel from crisis to crisis. There’ll also be the shame, frankly, and the disgrace of having let the Ukrainians down. I think it would create a firestorm of recrimination. And it will also embolden so many other actors to take their own steps.

One key challenge is going to be the nuclear front. There’s several different ways in which we can look at the nuclear front. There’s the moral imperative. We pushed Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. And we gave assurances along with the United Kingdom, that Ukraine would not end up in the situation that it is in now. We guaranteed its territorial integrity and sovereignty and independence and also assured Ukraine that we would step up to help. This opens up a whole can of worms related first to the moral jeopardy of this, that we obviously don’t stick to our word.

But also in terms of nuclear weapons, we could face proliferation issues with Japan, South Korea, other countries — even NATO countries who currently see themselves covered under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. They will start to worry about how much we would actually support them when they needed it, and how vulnerable they are to pressure or attack by another nuclear power. Think about the dynamics between India and Pakistan, for example, or China and India, or China and South Korea and Japan; and the predicament of leaders in other countries who will be thinking right now that, “I’m going to be extremely vulnerable — so perhaps I should be getting my own nuclear weapon.” You’re hearing talk about this in Germany, for example. You hear it all the time in places like Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, we know that they have nuclear aspirations. So this opens up a whole set of different discussions.

(…)

That it’s actually being spent at home! That’s the irony. Because every time you send a weapon to the Ukrainians, it’s an American weapon. You’re not buying somebody else’s weapons to go to Ukraine. It’s also a fraction of our defense budget.

It’s really a circular process here. We are providing weapons to Ukraine, we’re buying them from major manufacturers of defense systems here in the United States, which are obviously providing jobs for the people who are making them. And then we’re going back and we’re ordering more because we’re replenishing and upgrading our own weapons stocks. This is all part of our own system. These defense manufacturers account for huge numbers of jobs across the whole of the United States, so arming Ukraine means significant job creation and retention across the United States and also in Europe and elsewhere.

People in Congress know that, it’s just that they’re playing a different game. They want to play up this issue of “it should be spent at home” because of the transactional nature of congressional supplemental bills.

Let’s just put it frankly — this is all about the upcoming presidential election. It’s less about Ukraine and it’s more about the fact that we have an election coming up next year. The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front. People are incapable now of separating off “giving Biden a win” from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.

In that regard, whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.

For Vladimir Putin now Ukraine has become a proxy war. It’s not a proxy war by the United States against Russia. We’re trying to get Russia out of Ukraine, period. But for Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage. He’s trying to use Gaza, and Israel like that now, as well. He’s trying to whip up anti-United States sentiment wherever he can. I’ve just come back from Europe and from a whole host of conferences where there’s just so much rage and grievance about the United States and Putin is fanning the flames.

Putin sees Biden as a major opponent. He is an obstacle for Putin to be able to win on the battlefield of Ukraine. So Putin wants Biden to fail. Putin would be thrilled if Trump would come back to power because he also anticipates that Trump will pull the United States out of NATO, that Trump will rupture the U.S. alliance system, and that Trump will hand over Ukraine. So right at this particular moment, Putin sees an awful lot that he can get out of undermining Biden’s position.

Now, the problem, of course, is that currently many members of Congress and others are thinking about whether they want to run to be vice president for Trump, and what they should perhaps do now to support Trump and pave the way for his presidency. So the idea of giving Biden anything that could positively affect the election is just a bridge too far.

(…)

We’re not doing anything to put Putin in political jeopardy. We’re just fighting with ourselves all the time. And we can’t see past that. Biden’s got to try to help Ukraine, but can he get enough people to see past the election and also see the jeopardy we are in? We are in peril. We don’t see it. There’s such an anti-American wave that’s out there in the world. People want to see America fail and pulled down to size.

Ukraine has become a battlefield now, for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership.

American leadership is still very important. But other countries are starting to make plans for a world without us at this particular point. And you can be sure that Vladimir Putin, and President Xi and many others will be pretty ecstatic if we give up on Ukraine. And that could happen just as soon as December or January, because if Congress goes home for the holidays without passing the supplemental, and everyone’s back in their constituencies, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen in their absence, in that vacuum, that void that we have created. Everybody else in the rest of the world would be wondering, not just, “Where is America?” but, “What on earth has happened to America?” And if President Trump thinks that he’s going to be the leader of the free world when he comes back into office — well, think again. There won’t be a free world to be leading at all. And that’s not an overstatement. That’s just a fact.

(…)

So the best case scenario is, of course, one in which Ukraine continues to be able to hold its own and if we helped build it up militarily, where it can make another push or another series of pushes. If we think about World War Two and other wars, there were multiple offensive efforts, counteroffensives, and you just kept on trying until you succeeded. It will be very difficult to have an absolute victory over Russia. But what you want to have is Ukraine in a position to have a negotiation, a diplomatic solution, on its terms, not on Russia’s terms. A solution in which Ukraine is recognized as the party in the right, as the aggrieved party by the whole of the international community, and where Ukraine is, if not completely in territory, but materially and in every other way possible, made whole.

Another aspect of having this war resolved on Ukraine’s terms is that Russia is going to have to pay for or contribute to the reconstruction of Ukraine in some fashion. That is another major reason why Putin would see the U.S. and its allies stepping back as a major win, because then there’d be no leverage whatsoever or pressure put on Russia for rebuilding Ukraine. Russia could just step back, wash its hands of all of this and let everybody else fix what it broke.

So the best possible outcome here, beyond Ukraine being able to prevail on the battlefield, is a negotiated settlement that is in Ukraine’s favor, that leads to commitments to its security and reconstruction, and leads to some soul searching in Russia. That’s not going to happen under these current circumstances. The only way that that happens is when Russia believes that everybody else has the fortitude and staying power for this conflict. And right now, that’s not what we’re displaying at all. Actually, we’re looking pretty pathetic, I can’t think of any other way to describe it. And for Putin, this is just such a gift. This is such a gift.

(…)

He’s about to, and it’s on us. We’re at the point where it’s on us. If we leave the field, then he will win. His calculation is that our domestic politics and our own interests override everything, and that we no longer have a sense of national security, or of our role in international affairs. This is a moment for him to get rid of not just Pax Americana, but America as a major global player.

(…)

The decision is ours, this decision is entirely ours. We’re just falling all over ourselves to engage in self-harm at the moment. Ukraine shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I just hope that people are going to be able to dig deep, and realize the moment that they’re in.”

“The skeptics are correct that our recent counteroffensive did not achieve the lightning-fast liberation of occupied land, as the Ukrainian military managed in the fall of 2022 in the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. Observers, including some in Ukraine, anticipated similar results over the past several months, and when immediate success did not materialize, many succumbed to doom and gloom. But pessimism is unwarranted, and it would be a mistake to let defeatism shape our policy decisions going forward. Instead, policymakers in Washington and other capitals should keep the big picture in mind and stay on track. A Ukrainian victory will require strategic endurance and vision—as with our recent counteroffensive, the liberation of every square mile of territory requires enormous sacrifice by our soldiers—but there is no question that victory is attainable.

(…)

The current phase of the war is not easy for Ukraine or for our partners. Everyone wants quick, Hollywood-style breakthroughs on the battlefield that will bring a quick collapse of Russia’s occupation. Although our objectives will not be reached overnight, continued international support for Ukraine will, over time, ensure that local counteroffensives achieve tangible results on the frontlines, gradually destroying Russian forces and thwarting Putin’s plans for a protracted war.

Some skeptics counter that although such goals are just, they simply aren’t achievable. In fact, our objectives will remain militarily feasible as long as three factors are in place: adequate military aid, including jets, drones, air defense, artillery rounds, and long-range capabilities that allow us to strike deep behind enemy lines; the rapid development of industrial capacity in the United States and Europe as well as in Ukraine, both to cover Ukraine’s military needs and to replenish U.S. and European defense stocks; and a principled and realistic approach to the prospect of negotiations with Russia.

With these elements in place, our effort will bring marked progress on the frontlines. Yet that requires not veering off course and concluding that the fight is hopeless simply because one stage has fallen short of some observers’ expectations. Even with significant challenges, Ukraine has achieved notable results in recent months. We won the battle for the Black Sea and thereby restored a steady flow of maritime exports, benefiting both our economy and global food security. We’ve made gains on the southern front, recently securing a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. And elsewhere, we have held off enormous Russian assaults and inflicted major losses on Russian forces, including by thwarting their attempts on Avdiivka and Kupiansk. Despite their gargantuan effort, Russian troops failed to secure any gains on the ground.

(…)

The problem is not just that a cease-fire now would reward Russian aggression. Instead of ending the war, a cease-fire would simply pause the fighting until Russia is ready to make another push inland. In the meantime, it would allow Russian occupying troops to reinforce their positions with concrete and minefields, making it nearly impossible to drive them away in the future and condemning millions of Ukrainians to decades of repression under occupation. Russia’s 2024 budget for the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, amounting to 3.2 trillion Russian rubles (around $35 billion), is clear evidence of Moscow’s plan to dig in for the long haul and suppress resistance to Russian occupation authorities.

Moreover, whatever the arguments that such a scenario would be less costly for Ukraine and its partners, the reality is that such a negotiated cease-fire is not even on the table. Between 2014 and 2022, we endured approximately 200 rounds of negotiations with Russia in various formats, as well as 20 attempts to establish a cease-fire in the smaller war that followed Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of Ukraine’s east. Our partners pressed Moscow to be constructive, and when they ran into the Kremlin’s diplomatic wall, they insisted that Ukraine had to take the “first step,” if only to demonstrate that Russia was the problem. Following this flawed logic, Ukraine made some painful concessions. Where did it lead? To Russia's full-scale attack on February 24, 2022. Declaring yet again that Ukraine must take the first step is both immoral and naive.

(…)

Skeptics also argue that supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom is too expensive and cannot be sustained indefinitely. We in Ukraine are fully aware of the amounts of assistance that we have received from the United States, European countries, and other allies, and we are immensely grateful to the governments, legislators, and individuals who have extended a helping hand to our country at war. We manage the support in the most transparent and accountable way: U.S. inspectors of military aid to Ukraine have found no evidence of significant waste, fraud, or abuse.

This support is not, and never has been, charity. Every dollar invested in Ukraine’s defense returns clear security dividends for its supporters. It has enabled Ukraine to successfully rebuff Russian aggression and avert a disastrous escalation in Europe. And Ukraine has done all this with American assistance totaling roughly three percent of the annual U.S. defense budget. What is more, most of this money has in fact been spent in the United States, funding the U.S. defense industry, supporting the development of cutting-edge technology, and creating American jobs—a reason that some local business leaders in the United States have publicly opposed withholding or cutting military aid to Ukraine.

Moreover, while the United States is Ukraine’s top defense partner—and Washington’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine has been exemplary and essential—the United States has hardly borne the burden alone. As NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently noted, other NATO members, including European countries and Canada, account for more than half of Ukraine’s military aid. A number of countries have provided more support as a percentage of GDP than the United States has: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom. Germany's assistance continues to grow, making it Ukraine's largest European supporter in absolute terms.

Attempts by some skeptics to brand Ukraine’s fight for freedom as just another futile “forever war” ignore these facts. Ukraine has never asked for American boots on the ground. The deal is fair: our partners provide us with what we need to win, and we do the rest of the job ourselves, defending not only our borders but also the borders of global democracy.

The United States has spent decades, and hundreds of billions of dollars, building and protecting an international order that could sustain and protect democracy and market economies, thus ensuring security and prosperity for Americans. It would be foolish to give up on that investment now. If democracy is allowed to fall in Ukraine, adversaries of the United States will perceive weakness and understand that aggression pays. The price tag for defending U.S. national security against such threats would be many times higher than the one for supporting Ukraine and could spark decades of global turbulence with an uncertain outcome.

(…)

At the end of last month, I attended a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels. What struck me most was the disparity between the mood inside the chamber and the mood outside it. On the sidelines, reporters opened their questions by asserting that the war had reached a “stalemate” and that “war fatigue” would cripple support, before wondering why Ukraine wouldn’t offer to trade territory for peace. Yet such defeatist narratives were absent in the official discussions, with ministers making a firm commitment to additional military aid and sustained support.

However prevalent a false narrative of attrition becomes, we should not allow it to set policymaking and our shared strategy on a disastrous course. Nor should we be duped into believing that Moscow is ready for a fair negotiated solution. Opting to accept Putin’s territorial demands and reward his aggression would be an admission of failure, which would be costly for Ukraine, for the United States and its allies, and for the entire global security architecture. Staying the course is a difficult task. But we know how to win, and we will.”

#fiona hill #dmytro kuleba #putin #trump #biden #russia #ukraine #war #nato

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queenbirbs · 5 years ago

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what if the closest we get to the moment is now | Ethan Ramsey x MC

WC: 10k+

Rating: Mature

Content: N*FW, contains semi-graphic medical scene (nothing too bad, but I don’t know everyone’s level of comfort with these sorts of things)

Summary: An OH AU where everything is a little bit different, but also very much the same; or, Ethan is an ER attending and MC is a paramedic, but they still manage to fall in love. Title taken from Katie Herzig’s Closest I Get.

+ + +

He sees her three times before he learns her name.

The first time is at the intersection of State and Congress, which he approaches with that tight feeling in his chest. It’s the feeling that only comes from jogging the three-mile route from his apartment, where he goes up around the government center and back down Bowdoin, before taking a lap around the Common. Then there’s the historic facade of King’s Chapel and the less-historic Chipotle on the corner, where he can choose to extend his route by taking Water Street up to Congress and circle back to his apartment.

Which is the route Ethan takes this morning with Jenner at his side, dawn slowly approaching as the sky shifts from that deep blue to a hazy gray.

The only light comes from the streetlamps and the headlights of the delivery vans and buses that idle at the major intersections. State and Congress being one of those -- his last one, actually, before he crosses to return home.

The appearance of another jogger at the intersection isn’t strange. Though he purposefully goes for his runs before five a.m., he knows he isn’t the only one with the same exercise preferences (or the same work schedule). There are others he sees along his route sometimes, though he doesn’t know their names, as he’s never been inclined to strike up a conversation while waiting on a light change before.

The woman in front of him is much the same; he spots the earbuds at the same time he hears the humming. She paces back and forth on the sidewalk, trying to keep her heart rate up. Ethan moves closer to the curb and into her peripheral, making her aware of his presence so he won’t frighten her by hovering behind.

“Morning,” she says to him, offering a quick smile. He returns the motion, suddenly unsure of himself, as he finds that he wants to say something back.

The light changes, cutting off any chance of a reply.

And then they’re crossing and he’s watching the way her ponytail swings in the beam of the headlights and the white piping down her leggings that frames tall, shapely legs that end in a pair of bright orange sneakers and then, suddenly, they’re on the other side.

Where she goes right and he goes left.

He thinks of her once more that day, hours into his shift, before deciding that he probably won’t see her again.

+ + +

The second time he sees her is at Derry Roasters.

It’s the local coffee shop down from the hospital that he frequents when, instead of pulling out every follicle of hair one-by-one, he goes to drink expensive lattes to escape the doe-eyed nuisances that are his interns.

Ethan is nearing the front of the line when he spots her at the back. Instead of running gear, she’s dressed in a black T-shirt and navy cargo pants, clearly dressed down out of some uniform. Her hair is pulled back in that same ponytail; she runs her fingers through it, her wide eyes giving off an overwhelmed vibe. It’s been years since he’s actually looked at the scrawling cursive above his head, having ordered the same drink so often that the baristas automatically charge him for a Vienna as soon as he steps up to the counter. In theory, he could take his drink and get back in line, sidle up to her, and offer his suggestion. Maybe she would chat with him, maybe he would get to know her name.

Maybe he would promise to see her again to share a coffee at a later date.

Before he can test such a theory, a young man darts into the shop and straight over to her. Ethan is trying to place where he’s seen the man before, but then the bartisa calls out his order and his pager is buzzing and he’s shoving down the disappointed feeling in his chest when he sees the young man’s head dip down to whisper in the woman’s ear.

He takes his coffee and goes, thinking of her twice more that day, and hopes that he’ll see her again.

+ + +

The third time he sees her is in the ER.

There’s a traffic jam of stretchers in the receiving bay, filled with the hypochondriacs or the psych evals or the people who called a closed doctor’s office, only to be told by the secretary’s voicemail to call 911 or visit the ER if any of their (usually minor) problems persist. Several paramedics are holding the wall, as if helping out in any way would inconvenience them.

Ethan is helping a nurse transfer in the fourth victim of a six-car pile-up when that ponytail catches his eye.

Down the hall, the young woman is leaned over a stretcher, one hand on an older man’s shoulder to keep pressure on a bandaged wound, while the other rests on his arm. She says something to the man, whose worried frown ticks up into a half-smile as he nods. Standing on the opposite side of the stretcher is the same young man from the coffee shop, who Ethan now recognizes as Rafael, one of their regular paramedics.

The nurse takes over the accident patient and Ethan returns to the line, shuttling the new patients in and signing off for the intakes. It takes him six minutes to get to Rafael and his new partner, who immediately launches into her patient’s status.

“Henry here took a fall, he’s got a five-inch gash along his clavicle.”

Ethan takes the copy of the report she hands him and assists with transferring Henry over to a bed. His gaze flickers down to her uniform where, pinned above her heart, a nametag reads S. McTavish. Before he can think of a way to find out her first name, a code blue sounds from on down the hall.

Rafael and McTavish are long gone by the time Ethan steps back out into the receiving bay, where another nurse has joined to help the first, leaving him to resume his duties.

It isn’t until hours later that he remembers the copy of the report he handed off to the nurses station. Rifling through the intake folder, he retrieves the document and is pleased to discover her first name at the top, written out in neat print: Sloane.

+ + +

As if the universe has designated him a break, he starts to see her everywhere.

Aside from the daily drop-bys in Edenbrook’s ER, he runs into her at the market one Thursday, and then the liquor store that same afternoon. Their interactions are short -- awkward in that way that barely-colleague ones are -- though he manages to make her laugh at his terrible joke in the wine aisle, so he considers the whole trip a success. He runs into her again at Carson Beach, where he runs Jenner so the Boxer-mutt mix will release some of that pent-up energy she’s infamous for. That breathless feeling hits him again when he sees her pass by on the HarborWalk, then circle back around and jog towards them across the sand, her orange sneakers kicking up little clouds behind her.

“Doctor Ramsey, hi!” she greets, flicking back the long rope her hair is braided into. Her skin glistens with sweat from her mid-morning run.

“Good morning, Miss McTavish,” he returns, keeping his eyes pointedly on the flush staining her cheeks and not letting it drift downwards to the shorts she wears that look as if they were sculpted on. He wouldn’t know, of course, as he certainly wasn’t checking out her backside when she jogged past earlier.

“And who might this be?” Sloane is already kneeling, so he doesn’t get a chance to stop her before Jenner knocks her down into the sand.

“Jenner, off!”

His dog perks her head up at the command, then resumes her wet kisses across Sloane’s neck. From underneath the mound of wet dog comes laughter, which eases some of his anxiety.

“Oh, she’s just a big ol’ girl, aren’t cha? Aren’t cha?” Sloane shoulders Jenner off her so she can sit up, ruffling her dark fur where it’s coated in sand. Ethan tosses a frisbee down towards the water and uses the distraction to help her back onto her feet.

“I’m sorry, she usually isn’t--” he cuts himself off with a sigh. Sloane follows his gaze and starts chuckling at his dog, who has abandoned the frisbee and is now trying to chase down a clump of seaweed in the water. “Actually, she’s a real pain in the ass. But I am sorry she knocked you over. I’m out here to tire her out so she’ll behave.”

Sloane flaps a hand at him, quieting his apology.

“Don’t worry, my dog Relay is the same way.”

Ethan watches his own dog give up on the seaweed and wade back onto the shore, trying to think up a response. “I’m from South Carolina,” she continues to explain. “About an hour outside of Hilton Head, so I take him to the beach as much as I can. Except for when I went to college in Columbia.”

“What did you study?”

“Pre-med. And then I went to Northwestern for med school, but that didn’t work out. So, I thought I’d try Boston out for a while, see how the north coast will treat me.”

He wants to ask how she went from studying medicine in the Windy City to responding to heart attacks on the east coast, but can’t come up with a way to do so that would be polite.

“How are you liking Boston so far?” he asks instead.

Her gaze leaves the stretch of blue water in front of them to meet his own, her mouth rounding into a smile. Standing this close underneath the bright sun, he can see the freckles that dot her nose. They fan out in small strokes across her cheeks.

“It’s interesting.”

“Just ‘interesting’?” he teases, shifting his stance in the warm sand, which brings him a few inches closer. Sloane doesn’t move away, though. Instead, her shoulders roll in a lazy shrug as her smile widens.

“Jury’s still out on a final verdict. For now, interesting.”

“Well, if you need any recommendations, let me know. Though,” he gestures to the beach surrounding them, “I can see you already know some of the sweet spots.”

“Thanks, Ramsey. I might just do that.”

“Of course. And it’s -- you can call me Ethan.”

“Okay, Ethan. Then you can call me Sloane. Deal?”

“Deal.”

+ + +

He doesn’t see Sloane again until the next Thursday, and even then their moments together are a few, too-brief moments in the ER.

The Fourth of July weekend keeps both of them up to their eyeballs in emergencies. He’s starting to see why Doctor Mirani always insists on taking the next week off. Just when he thinks he’s seen it all, someone manages to stick a firework in a new orifice.

When his shift is reaching its eleventh-hour, the receiving bay mysteriously empties, and the waiting room starts to clear out. It is, of course, when one of the interns from diagnostics uses the Q-word, which sends a shockwave of groans through all the staff. True to the nature of the universe, calls from emergency dispatch flood in about a ten-car pile-up in the tunnel. Ethan pushes off the nurses station to prepare for the oncoming storm when Kendra, his charge nurse, hangs up the phone.

“Dispatch is sending us a few that Mass Kenmore couldn’t take.”

Ethan scoffs, biting his tongue from making a rude comment about the rival hospital.

“What’s on the menu, then?” he asks, reaching over the desk for his coffee.

“A tractor-trailer hit an ambulance,” Kendra relays with a frown. “They’re sending over the two medics and the driver to us.”

The coffee in his mouth suddenly feels like lacquer, thick and cloying in his throat as he swallows.

“Did they say what company the ambulance was with?”

Kendra shoots him a curious look at the question, obviously wanting to know why he cares, but she’s been working alongside him almost as long as he’s been at Edenbrook. She can tell when he’s going to keep mum, especially when it comes to gossip.

“No,” she finally says, “sorry.”

The pile-up victims arrive first, with their herniated discs and second-degree facial avulsions and grade-three contusions -- enough to keep him busy, hopping from bed to bed to oversee the interns as they fumble about.

Then he’s back at the nurses station to book the avulsion into the next-available OR, while also sending a queasy-looking intern to the bathroom and performing another sweep of the immediate area for any familiar paramedics, when a voice sounds over his left shoulder.

“You’re a regular Mark Greene, huh?”

The anxiety in his chest ebbs away. Relief rises and crests across his shoulders, which ease down when he turns to see Sloane, her hands tucked into the pockets of her EMS jacket, leaning against the counter next to him.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

Her mouth opens to contradict him, then abruptly closes as she runs a critical eye over his form. He resists the urge to straighten under the sudden scrutiny.

“I pegged you as a man who prefers the classics, as opposed to HIPPA-violation hook-up primetime, but,” her shoulders bounce in a quick shrug, “we all have our guilty pleasures.”

Ethan clears his throat. Then, for good measure, clears it again.

“I can assure you that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, come on -- you can’t tell me you’ve never watched a single episode of ER or Grey’s. There’s nothing more entertaining than tearing a show like that apart.”

A nurse interrupts to get his signature on a report, giving him a chance to steer the conversation away from his watch history of medical dramas.

“Can I ask why you’re loitering in my ER in the first place?” Following the motion of her elbow, Ethan finally notices Rafael sitting in the corner. One of his interns is suturing up a wound on her partner’s waist, while several of the other interns stand around and ogle the young man’s physical attributes. They scurry off to the far corners of the department when he reminds them that drooling is not a part of their job description.

“Superman got a little banged up earlier,” Sloane explains, concern flitting across her face. “One of the walls buckled in when we were retrieving the other two medics from their rig. It’s like the thing was held together by spot welds and promises.”

Although ambulance construction isn’t his expertise, he is rather gifted in the art of observation. Which is how he knows that Rafael wasn’t the only one injured on the job, if the way Sloane is favoring her right side is any indication.

“Have you been seen to?” he asks, biting back the urge to roll his eyes when she seems surprised at the question.

“Oh, no -- it’s just a scratch, don’t worry.”

She wavers under his gaze, the one he uses to quietly bully patients into telling the truth. Within a minute, she’s hopping up onto an empty bed. The wince when she moves to take off her jacket tells him that his instincts were correct. Just below the cut of her sleeve is a four-inch laceration that she’s covered with two loops of gauze and a scrap of medical tape.

He busies himself by tending to the wound, trying to ignore the heat of her body and the little hitches of her breathing when he applies the antiseptic. This close, he can smell the coffee on her breath and the minty scent of her lip balm. His mind drifts to how such a combination would taste on his own lips, before he shoves the thought deep, deep down. When he glances up, though, he sees a similar hunger dancing through her eyes. Something base and egotistical uncurls from his chest at the sight.

“I could’ve done all this myself, you know,” she teases, watching as he fastens a piece of tape across her new bandage.

“Yes, I saw your handiwork,” he reminds her with a playful scoff. “Is that how they’re teaching students to bandage wounds at Northwestern?”

Sloane laughs at the gentle barb and slips back into her jacket.

“It’s what they teach to the ones who drop out, I guess.” She’s grinning as she says it, but her gaze drops to the floor for a brief moment, the movement telling him there must be a story there. Now isn’t the time for it, though he suddenly wishes that it were, if only to spend a few more minutes with her.

And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, he reminds himself as he leads her out into the hall. “I’m surprised you remembered,” she says.

“Just… paying attention.”

+ + +

Late September in Boston is his favorite. When the heat of summer has peeled away and the promise of blistering cold is still some distance away, when all of the summer tourists have flown back home and the autumn ones haven’t yet arrived.

When the rain is more than just relief from the stagnant warmth, such as it is on this morning. The pavement is slick and dark with it, giving Ethan something to focus his attention on as he approaches the last intersection before home. Given the weather and people’s affinity to avoid it, he’s only seen a handful of runners out this morning, so he’s surprised when he spots someone already standing at the corner. Their figure is draped in a dark jacket, their hood up against the rain. It’s only because of the orange sneakers and the hound dog at their side that he knows it’s Sloane.

“Good morning.”

She whirls around at the sound of his voice. He enjoys watching the surprise on her face shift to joy, as she moves her hood back to take him in.

“And here I thought that Relay and I were the only ones crazy enough to be out in this mess.” Sloane gestures to the Bluetick hound at her side, who is busy sniffing Jenner’s backside.

“No, I thought I’d start my day off by getting the both of us drenched so my apartment smells like wet dog the rest of the day.” His sarcastic remark gets a huff of laughter out of her, which makes him want to grin like an idiot.

He doesn’t, but only just barely.

The light changes and they jog across to the opposite corner. “Well,” he begins, trying to think of some way to continue talking to her (but without offering to follow her home, which would come across either sexist or creepy). “I hope you--”

“Do you want to get breakfast?” she asks. “I know a great place off Amherst that opens in about--” she raises her fist into the air so the jacket’s sleeve will slide back enough for her to peek at her watch, which he shouldn’t find endearing, but he does. “--ten minutes.”

“Do they allow dogs?”

“They have a covered patio.”

“I’m not sure if that would protect us from the rain.”

“It’ll let up.”

Ethan glances pointedly at where the sun is struggling to break through the overcast sky. He thinks of the day ahead he’s already planned, about the laundry that needs to be done and the counters that need cleaned and the fridge that needs a purge. Then he looks back at his side where Sloane stands, who seems unable to resist ribbing him gently as she waits for an answer. “Come on, you’ll enjoy being spontaneous for once in your life. I promise.”

Sloane is right on two counts. The first is that the place does serve great food. The second is that the rain does let up about twenty minutes after they arrive, allowing them to watch as the city around them wakes up. Lights in the law offices next door switch on; cars clog up the avenues and block the intersections; people in business attire head off to work, passing people in delivery uniforms who have already been on the clock for several hours.

“Why did you become a paramedic?” he asks, genuinely curious to know something more personal than general shop talk or the way she takes her coffee (both topics which they covered already).

Sloane’s eyes narrow as she chews on a piece of toast, thinking over her answer.

“I like helping people.”

“I’m not some layman, so I’m not going to accept such a boring answer,” he tells her, and enjoys the little twitch of her lips as she gives into a grin.

“Good, because I’m going to tell you the real reason. Or, well, the major one.” Taking a sip of her coffee, she continues, “I like the uncertainty of it. I could go on a call and help an old woman back into her bed, or I can go on a call and talk a man down from the brink, or I can go on a call and help the rescue squad cut open a burning car and pull a person from certain death.”

“You like the unknown,” he surmises.

“Exactly!” she nods, gesturing with her fork in agreement. “I arrive to situations where everything has gone to hell, and I’m like the eye of the storm, keeping everything cool and calm and copacetic. It’s like an adrenaline rush.”

“You would be a good ER physician.”

She shrugs at the comment, though a flash of something passes across her face, so fleeting that he can’t put a name to it.

“I don’t know about that -- I like being out in the field. And with my crappy luck, if I did become a doctor, I’d wind up being placed at Mass Kenmore.” She makes a face at the idea. “Then I’d have to deal with the raccoons.”

“Raccoons?” he questions.

Her fork pauses on its way to her mouth.

“Oh, my god!” she hisses, leaning towards him across the table. “How do you not know about the raccoons? It’s, like, an infestation over there. One of them even got into our rig once when Raf was driving and got under the pedals. We would’ve ended up on the other side of the 93-North ramp and in the river if I hadn’t pulled the e-brake.”

“In the middle of the highway?”

“There’s no shoulder on the ramp, I had no choice!” She’s giggling over the rim of her coffee cup as she defends her actions, using the cup and his silverware when he requests a recreation of the scene.

She was right on a third count, Ethan realizes, as he watches her tale unfold, interrupting occasionally to ask for clarification.

He is, in fact, enjoying the spontaneity of saying yes.

+ + +

“You’re like my little Georgia peach.”

“I’m not from Georgia.”

“Oh, baby, say something else to me.”

“Touch me again and I will strap you to this stretcher.”

“That a promise, Peach?”

Ethan finishes checking over the fractured tibia in the fast track bay and ducks out into the hallway, having heard enough of the conversation.

“What seems to be the problem here?” he asks. Both Sloane and a man on the stretcher next to her look up at his arrival.

“I’m waiting on a bed to open up,” she explains, her jaw clenched tight.

“I hit my head,” the man moans pathetically, lifting a hand to touch his bandaged forehead.

“That’s because you drank too much and ran headfirst into a parked car, Junior.”

“Oh, so you do know my name?” Junior leers up at her, abandoning his injured head to reach for Sloane again. “Say it again for me, Peachy.”

Ethan decides it’s well past time for him to step in, doing so before Junior can get close enough to grab her.

“Sir, I’m going to need you to keep your hands to yourself.” Ignoring the man’s drunken babbling, Ethan glances around for a resident to dump the man onto. When none appear in sight, he beckons a male nurse over to help assist with the transfer.

“It must be my lucky day,” Junior crows as they wheel him down the hallway. “Two McDreamys all to myself.”

Resigning himself to the harassment he’ll be dealing with for the next hour, Ethan helps the nurse get him transferred into a bed. It’s another ten minutes before he can escape to return the stretcher to Sloane, who flashes him a grateful smile. Her hand brushes against his as she takes the stretcher from him and he convinces himself that the tingling sensation across his skin must be from the carpal tunnel he’s suddenly developed.

“Thanks again for the save, McDreamy.” With a wink, she’s off and gone, disappearing through the doors of the ambulance bay.

Across the hall, Kendra looks up at him from the nurses station and raises an eyebrow. He orders her back to work, scoffing when all she does is smirk in response.

+ + +

He thinks the knock at his door is something else at first.

Four thumps against wood drift over to where he lies, slumped on the sofa. It’s his noisy neighbors, he’s sure. The music he put on returns to its full volume once the racket ceases, allowing him to sink back into himself.

The thumps sound again, somehow harsher this time. The noise gets Jenner’s attention, who trots over to the front door and sniffs. Whoever is on the other side causes her to race back over and bark excitedly at him.

“Who is it, then, Lassie?” Ethan shoves himself up out of the hole he’s burrowed into and crosses the room.

That it’s Sloane standing on the other side of the threshold is a surprise (one of two that he’s received today, though this one is infinitely better than the other). “What are you doing here?”

“I thought you might need this.” In her hand is a bottle of liquor that, upon his closer inspection as he takes the bottle from her, is his favorite brand of scotch. “Everyone is going to send flowers, but I thought I’d bring over something you’d actually use.”

He doesn’t ask how she found out; the staff in the emergency department were well-known for their inability to keep mum on anything. The tragic diagnosis of his mentor and best friend definitely would have been the daily fodder. “Kendra gave me your address,” she explains, having somehow read his mind. Her now-empty hands wring together, then disappear into her pockets.

Ethan backs up, swinging the door wider to wave her inside. She stops just inside the entryway and succumbs to Jenner’s demand for belly rubs. He can feel her eyes on him as he goes to the kitchen to pour them each a glass. “Are you listening to cello covers of The Smiths?” she asks.

“If I knew who they were, then yes. But no, this is just an instrumental collection I selected at random.”

“Well, at least it isn’t Patsy Cline.”

“Good thing that you weren’t here an hour ago, then.”

He enjoys hearing her little huff of laughter as she comes to stand next to him in the kitchen. Handing her the other glass, they sip in companionable silence for a while. The sky outside his loft mellows to a brilliant orange, the clouds piped in pinks and purples. Sloane moves to the tall windows to take in the view; the light traces the features of her profile, outlining her in gold. It isn’t just the liquor in his stomach that suddenly warms him to the core.

“Your place is really nice.” After giving the open space an assessing spin, Sloane turns back to face him. “I’m glad to see that it actually looks lived-in.”

She moves to the bank of bookcases along the far wall, where photographs are symmetrically-spaced across the shelves. Ethan follows to study the pictures with her. There are a few from childhood, most with his older sister Allison, the two of them shoved next to each other in front of various American landmarks, their matching shirts stamped with cheesy phrases like South Dakota ROCKS! and Yellowstone National Park: Where the Wild Things Are!

She picks up the one of them pointing back at Mount Rushmore with bored-looking faces. Ethan remembers his mother insisting on the pose while they whined about how hot it was. Just as he remembers lying in their motel room that night, listening to his parents argue about cheating out in the parking lot. He’d been too young to understand, but being the older and wiser sibling, Allison had turned on their little box TV and let Johnny Carson drown them out.

“When I was little, I thought the mountains were naturally formed like that,” Sloane admits with a self-deprecating grin.

“That… explains some things.” He chuckles when she whacks him in the arm with the picture frame, before she sets it back onto the shelf and eyes another one. It’s a photo of Harper, Chris, and him at a dean’s dinner party, all of them in the fanciest attire they could swing on a medical student’s budget. They’re all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to make their mark in medicine.

Ethan wonders what it says about him that he’s kept this photo up on his shelf, despite the fact that both of the people in it are technically his exes -- Harper being the longest and most recent, and Chris being a one-night stand that multiplied into several more before ending abruptly. He wants to believe that it shows he can remain good friends with his previous partners -- but it’s probably a testament to his lack of other friends in his life, he realizes.

Though she’s not an Edenbrook employee, Sloane knows enough about the hospital through the gossip mill (that always seems to start in his department and then work its way through the rest of the facility) that she recognizes both faces.

“You went to school with the chief of medicine and the chief of nursing?” Her eyebrows dart up at his answering nod. “Wow, is there a fast-track placement at Columbia that I can get in on?”

Ethan snorts over the rim of his glass.

“Sure, if you can become one of the dean’s kids, they’ll make you chief innovation officer.”

“I’m sensing that you’re not just making up an example here.”

“Nepotism is afoot at every hospital, but it runs rampant at Edenbrook.”

As if shelving away the cheery turn the conversation has taken, she places the photograph back. His throat tightens at the next one down. Sloane is staring at it as well, biting at her lip, as if torn on whether or not she wants to expose the elephant in the room. “You’ve sufficiently liquored me up,” he reminds her. “Ask away.”

“That’s not why I brought--”

He waves a hand at her, cutting off her defense; he knows what she wants to know, what everyone asked him all day long at the hospital ever since the meeting this morning.

“Ask.”

Still, she hesitates -- but before he can demand again, she finally speaks.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Jesus, Sloane, just get to it.”

“That was my question,” she snaps back.

Realization washes over him. He forgets, sometimes, that she’s not one of them. She’s an outsider, looking in. She’s not interested in adding coal to the gossip mill to keep it churning; she’s not eager to know how long Naveen has or who’s going to take the now-vacant chief of emergency services position, or any of those pointless details.

She’s worried about him. It’s been so long since someone has that it takes him a moment for it to sink in.

“Oh.” He clears his throat, then clears it again, thinking it over. Does he want to talk about his mentor and best friend and the two months he was given to live? Does he want to talk about how everyone will expect him to accept the empty seat Naveen will leave? Does he even want to give up the long, grueling hours and getting his hands dirty and the adrenaline rush of saving a patient’s life -- all so he can sit behind a desk and nod at people? “No, not really,” he admits, surprising himself with the answer.

Sloane nods once and turns from the photo of Naveen and him, moving over to the barely-used, big-screen television.

“Are you savvy enough to have Netflix on this, or are we gonna have to haul out the VHS player that I definitely know you have stored away somewhere?”

Brushing dust from the photograph, he prepares to respond to her smartass remark with one of his own, when she makes a weird, strangled gasping noise that has him spinning around.

To see her holding a box set of ER season one, betrayal carved into the set of her jaw. “You have the entire series on DVD and you let me stand there that day and make a fool of myself with my excellent references?”

“You called me a regular Mark Greene,” he defends, “and I said I had no idea what you were talking about.”

Sloane rolls her eyes as she drops down onto the couch. She reaches for one of the four remotes that seem to come with every piece of technology he buys and, without him needing to explain, turns off the music and connects to the DVD player.

“What, I suppose you think you’re Doug Ross?”

“Clooney’s a good looking man.” He settles down onto the couch next to her, though he gives her enough space to not make her feel crowded. “I wouldn’t be opposed to such a comparison.”

“You realize the only way to settle this is with a marathon.”

“I’ve got nothing but time.”

It’s the quiet, he realizes, that must’ve woken him up. The television screen is dark, having shut off due to inactivity. With the only light spilling in from the kitchen, it takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the living room. Scattered across the coffee table is the evidence of their impromptu watch party: a half-eaten bowl of popcorn. a quarter of a pepperoni pizza, and two empty glasses.

Curled up next to him is Jenner, who blinks awake to watch him collect the dishes as quietly as he can. Because curled up next to Jenner is Sloane, who has her face nestled between the cushion and a blanket he’d found for her when the Christmas episode, combined with his surround sound, made her cold.

“Stay,” he whispers at Jenner. She wags her tail as he gets up, but obeys the command.

“I should go home,” comes Sloane’s voice, muffled against the cushion she was snoring on seconds prior. There’s that feeling again, like his heart is suddenly too big for his chest cavity to hold, when her body contradicts her words by snuggling even deeper into the blanket.

“You can stay,” he murmurs, reaching out and tucking a piece of her hair back behind her ear. “I’ll wake you up early so you can get home and get ready before your shift.”

“Gotta day off,” she tells the cushion, a yawn finishing out the slurred sentence.

“Then we can go get breakfast at that place off Amherst again. Deal?”

The quiet of his living room stretches on as he waits for an answer. When none comes, he straightens and starts to head for the kitchen, sure that she’s fallen back asleep.

And then, so soft that he almost misses it for running the water: “Deal.”

+ + +

Annually, Boston EMS hosts a gala to raise funds for the upcoming fiscal year.

As one of the leading hospitals in the city, Edenbrook always receives an invitation to attend. And thus far, as the emergency department attending, Ethan has always declined the RSVP, as he can’t imagine anything more mind-numbingly boring than being stuffed into the overcrowded ballroom of the downtown Marriott with the city’s elite.

So, it’s no surprise that when Harper receives the invitation that she throws it into the trash without ever consulting with him. Honestly, he doesn’t blame her at all. It does make the whole situation rather awkward, though, when he asks her to dig it out of her trashcan so he can send in his response.

It doesn’t take him long once he arrives at the function to find Sloane.

She’s surrounded by her station, obvious even from a distance away due to the way they interact with each other. Ethan takes his time, though, circling the ballroom and letting himself be dragged into tedious conversations with the mayor and the police chief and every other person he didn’t come here to see. It had been their agreement, Harper’s and his, since she had rifled through her trash for the invitation after all.

By the time he’s done with his due diligence, Sloane and her company have moved over to the long bank of windows that overlook the wharf. He takes a moment to appreciate her figure in the dress she wears, the cut of the neckline dipping just low enough to catch his attention. Her gaze flickers up to scan the room and Ethan gets the pleasure of watching her spot him. A brilliant smile spreads across her face as she waves him over, unlooping her arm through her co-worker’s to reach for him and drag him into their circle.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming!” she chides, her elbow playfully nudging his side.

“It’s not typically my kind of scene.” It’s the truth, though it’s more of a deflection from the real truth, which is that he moved his schedule around and dry-cleaned his suit just to come here and see her. He hasn’t had enough drinks to spill that secret.

“Yeah, I have to say I’m pretty surprised to see you here, Doctor Ramsey.” Rafael gestures to the throngs of guests that surround them.

“Well,” one of the women shrugs, “I’m sure this is what the ER on New Year’s looks like.”

“The people here have more clothing on than our typical New Year’s patient, but sure.”

The group laughs at his poor attempt at humor, while Sloane shakes her head at him, though he can see her lips twitching from holding back a grin. He is soon introduced to the rest of the station: the training EMT Sienna, the station supervisor Elijah, and two of the firefighters Bryce and Jackie.

Though Sloane always seems to have the ability to merge into any environment, Ethan is glad he gets to see her amongst her people, still in her element despite the champagne and fancy attire. Her witty attitude and infectious demeanor are like magnets, drawing in people from other stations into their circle.

He can’t help but notice, though, that she keeps him close to her, either with a hand on his back or by looping her arm through his. Delight at her touch simmers low in his stomach over the course of the evening, a feeling he can’t blame on the alcohol this time.

After the live auction is over and the dessert plates have been cleared away, the guests start to slowly trickle out. Their table is one of the first to leave, deciding to continue the party at a little hole-in-the-wall bar down on the wharf. It’s how Ethan comes to be standing on a rickety pier, dressed to the nines, sipping on a draft beer at ten p.m., well past his usual bedtime.

There’s a brush of warmth against his arm. He looks down to see Sloane leaning against the railing beside him, squinting out at the dark water.

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. Anything to help our city’s finest.”

She gives a soft snort over the rim of her drink.

“You’re impossible.”

“You like impossible.”

“You’re right.” She’s smiling as she says it, leaning into his arm. He moves his hand from the small of her back and wraps his arm around her shoulders, bringing her into his chest. She lets out a contented sigh.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she hums.

“Why did you drop out of med school? From what I see on a daily basis, you’d have your pick of residencies.”

For a long moment, there’s only the muffled pop tunes bleeding through the bar and the rhythmic churn of water against the pier and none of those things are her response. He fears that he’s finally stumbled upon the one topic that had warning signs all over it not to approach, and that he barreled right through every one of them.

“My sister got sick,” she eventually says. “She went to the doctor on a Tuesday and she was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma by the next Wednesday. Her girlfriend split soon after and the only family we have to speak of can’t be trusted any farther than you can throw them.” She sucks in a breath, her fingers clenching around the drink she holds. “So, I moved back home and took care of her. But loan holders don’t care about why you dropped out, they want their monthly-minimum -- and with no decent-paying residency to lean on, I had to figure out something. I ended up hiring a caregiver to be with Sydney in the afternoon and evenings, so I could go work my retail job and then go to night classes to get my EMT certification.

“I spent a year working for the local EMS and learned how to be adaptable to any situation. My partner taught me how to drive a rig at sixty miles-an-hour while taking hairpin turns on county roads. I helped deliver babies at both Texaco stations in town, fought brush fires with the volunteer fire department, waded into the river to rescue an idiot teenager who decided to try out drifting during Hurricane Matthew. I’d gone into the job to keep a foot in the door within the medical field, but suddenly…”

“...you loved it,” Ethan finishes for her. Beside him, she takes a sip of her drink and nods.

“Exactly. Then, in the last week of January 2017, my sister died. And a week after her funeral, after all the extended family stopped coming by and pretending to care, I’m sitting in her living room on the floor, and I’m organizing her finances to start the process of selling her house. I get to this envelope that just has ‘Read this’ written across it. So, I mean, I opened it, of course -- and there’s a letter from Sydney to me that she’d written probably a month prior to her death. In it, she tells me that she’d saved up money during all those years I was away at school for us to go on a trip together.

“But with her cancer treatment going nowhere, that was no longer an option. She wrote about how my work stories made her laugh, about how obvious it was that I loved what I did, but that I didn’t deserve to be stuck in our hometown for the rest of my life, carrying her dead weight around. Her words, mind you -- her dry humor would rival even yours. And then she went on about how she didn’t want me to be fucked over by quitting school for her, how she wanted me to continue my education, and that she wanted me to use our trip money to go back to school. So, I called up a realtor, spent three months keeping the house from looking like anyone lived in it, sold the place, and within the next week I was living in a duplex out in Lower Roxbury and enrolled in a paramedic course at Northeastern.”

Ethan lets the story settle, lets the noises of the evening fill up what little space remains between them.

“Thank you for telling me,” he eventually says. Pressed against his side as she is, it doesn’t take much for Sloane to dig her elbow into his ribcage.

“Okay, I told you my story. Tit for tat, as they say.”

“No one actually says that.”

“C’mon, I know stalling when I hear it. Tell me something I don’t know.”

Wracking his brain for something to say, he spits out the first thing that comes to mind: “I wanted to be a diagnostician.” Sloane perks up at the statement, shifting to look up at him. “Before, you know, during my early days of medical school. I had it all planned out, signed up for all the seminars to attend so I could rub elbows, narrowed down my list of where I would spend my residency. All before I started my first year.”

Dragging in a breath, he continues, “And then one day during my first year, I’m waiting for the subway, and this man falls onto the tracks. At first, no one moves. We’re all stunned into place, watching, as if we’re waiting on him to jump back up onto the platform by himself. Someone finally moves, and then a crowd runs to the edge and they’re all yelling for help and for police and for a doctor. It’s stupid, but the word ‘doctor’ finally spurred me into action. I jump down there with two other people. The man was impaled on a section of broken track, so we not only have to get him off the tracks, but I’ve also got to make sure he doesn’t bleed out in the process. There’s no time to worry over the puncture wound while we’re all in the path of a soon-to-be oncoming train, though, so we simply had to pull him off the metal. It was… intense. We carry him over to the stairs and get him laid out on the ground, where I can finally take a look at him.”

“How bad?”

“The metal had sliced through his fourth intercostal.” Ethan brushes his fingers across the same spot on her back. “So, not only am I dealing with a chest cavity wound, but as I’m talking to the guy and trying to get information out of him, I can hear his breath getting shorter and shorter.”

“Pneumothorax?”

“Exactly,” he nods. “And all I have on me is a backpack full of textbooks. So, I borrow this woman’s pocket knife and another woman’s bicycle pump to create a makeshift chest tube. By the time I got it up and running, the paramedics arrived and carted him off.”

“I have a question,” Sloane interrupts.

“Hmm?”

“You said you borrowed the bike pump… the woman really wanted it back after all that?” Ethan feels her shoulders shake with contained laughter as he scoffs at her terrible joke. “Okay, okay, sorry -- back to the story. So, is that what made you change your field?”

“It seems juvenile, looking back, for one moment like that to matter so much--”

“No, it makes complete sense!” she insists, tipping her head back and closing her eyes as she tries to think of how she wants to convey her point. “It’s like… you sit in classrooms all day and you poke at cadavers and you can name every muscle in the body, but it’s nothing compared to the real thing. You’re a conductor and the patient’s life is this symphony you get to control. That rush -- it makes you take leaps you wouldn’t normally take.”

Her eyes open in time to spot the look of contemplation on his face. There’s something else, though, in the set of his jaw, in the ragged breath he takes in.

“Or risks that are worth taking,” he says. His other hand drops from the railing as he turns into her, gathering her even closer. Sloane moves readily, easily into the circle of his arms. “Like this.”

He leans down and she stretches up, meeting for a kiss that goes on and on -- until there is only the sound of the surf, steady underneath their feet.

“Yeah,” she agrees, and Ethan can feel the words against his lips. “Exactly like that.”

+ + +

“Make it harder.”

“Hmm.”

“Levator scapulae.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Trapezius… supraspinatus… rhomboid major… come on, this is Anatomy 1010 stuff.”

“I’m beginning to think that we should have agreed to ‘if Sloane complains about my seduction technique, she forfeits the competition.’”

“If you have to say the words ‘seduction technique’ out loud, then it’s probably not working anyway.” The words are barely out of her mouth before she’s squealing with laughter as Ethan digs his fingers into her ribs, tickling her there. “Inter… intercos -- intercoastal.”

The mattress dips as he shifts, dropping down to skim his lips across the skin covering the muscle she labeled. So far, she’s gotten all of them correct -- which means he’ll have to make this game of theirs a little more difficult. Shifting again, he centers his weight onto his left hand and distracts her with a lazy kiss against her lower back. He smirks at her bored sigh. “Latissimus dorsi.”

“Mmm, no, I want you to think… deeper.” His lips touch the spot again, his tongue dipping out to taste the skin there, warm and salty sweet. Tracing the outside of her thigh with his other hand, pleasure clutches at him when he sees the muscles in her leg twitch as his fingers stroke further inward, closer and closer.

“Iliocostalis?” Maybe it’s his imagination, but some of the confidence has left her tone, replaced by that low, breathy voice she uses -- the one that could get him to move mountains, if only his work schedule would allow it.

“Very good,” he murmurs, his fingers dragging two heavy passes across her inner thigh, where her abductor muscle tenses at his attention. She squirms against his bed, spreading her legs a little wider, silently urging for his touch to come a little closer. Unable to resist any longer, Ethan sinks two fingers into her. He groans as she clenches around him. Shameless little gasps fall from her mouth as he slides in a third finger, her hips gently rocking against his bed as she begs.

His name on her lips could be an aphrodisiac, could be sought after like the maca root, could convince men and women alike to traverse 3,000 feet into the mountains to seek out. It’s his luck, then, that she’s chosen to let him have the taste of her.

He curls down over her to nip at the skin of her waist.

“Longissi -- no, fuck -- serratus posterior inferi--”

All at once, Ethan pulls away. Self-satisfaction floods through him as Sloane groans in frustration, rolling underneath him so that she can glare directly at him.

“You know the rules,” he tells her with an easy shrug, as if he’s done with their game (as if he isn’t hard as a rock, staring down at her, pissed-off and naked in his sheets). He’s expecting her to do quite a number of things, all towards the goal of getting her way. What he isn’t expecting is for her to wrap her legs around his waist and use all of that hidden strength she possesses to tug him down on top of her, where she proceeds to kiss along his jaw and nip at his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“You tried your seduction technique,” she says. “Now I’m trying out mine.”

He feels every inch of her smile as she drags a hand across his chest, down over his hip, and around the base of his cock. Arousal is a hot poker to his sternum, drowning everything else out. His awareness tunnels until it’s only her (and her touch and her breath on his skin as she chuckles and the slick slide of her thighs against his hips and it’s all too much and not enough at the same time).

“I think it’s working,” he chokes out, talking about too many other things that he can’t put names on yet.

“Hmm… you know what?” she grins, beating him to the answer. “I think so, too.”

+ + +

It all starts when the waiting area empties out. A rare sight on a rainy Friday afternoon, when car accidents and ankle sprains typically fill the lobby to the brim. Such a rarity, indeed, that the interns collect at the double doors to take in the scene.

Ethan clears his throat, enjoying the way they all spin around in a panic at the noise.

“What’s say you all find something more productive to do with your time than stare out at the parking lot -- unless you’ve decided to abandon your medical careers and become meteorologists?”

Marisa, one of the more vocal interns, grabs a handful of her breast and tilts her head.

“There’s a thirty percent chance that it’s already raining.”

Some of the group laughs, while others glare. Ethan doesn’t bother asking about the pop culture reference and shoos them all away with threats of inventorying the supply closets if they don’t find patients to care for.

Sidling up next to him, the pediatric specialist stares out at the rainy day. Tucked into her elbow is the clipboard she’s never seen without. The interns all think it’s full of patient charts and motivational quotes. Ethan wonders what they would think of Ines Delarosa if they ever found out that hidden between the hand-outs on SIDS and the importance of handwashing is the newspaper’s sports section. Because, aside from being the state’s leading pediatric emergency physician, Ines is also a die-hard Bruins fan -- she’s even got the season glass seats to prove it (and a ridiculous amount of memorabilia, which he only knows about because he graciously attends her Halloween party every year).

“It is odd to see it so s-word,” she says, dodging the wrath of the ER gods by avoiding the word.

“If it keeps up, maybe you can get off early and snag a good seat at the game.”

Ines chuckles and shrugs her shoulders.

“A girl can dream.”

He turns from the doors to see that the interns are following his commands when Ines makes a concerned noise. Glancing back out the window, he spots the flashing lights of two cop cars as they streak down the street, followed quickly by a third and a fourth. After the eleventh he quits counting. “There’s a whole squadron heading east,” Ines calls out to the room. “Anybody know anything?”

“I’ll check Twitter,” Kendra suggests, her fingers flying across the keyboard. Both doctors watch as the screen loads, reflected in her horn-rimmed glasses. Ethan’s stomach tightens as her dark eyes go wide behind the lenses. “Oh, shit.”

It takes seven minutes for the first victim to arrive. From then on, the ambulance bay resembles a floodgate, filling up with concussions and internal bleeding and broken bones. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation, with staff from every other department coming to assist. Even Chris and Harper come down to help -- and it’s almost like med school all over again with the three of them working together, side-by-side. Any awkward relations between them are buried deep in the wave of such a disaster.

Ethan spends the two minutes he can spare explaining the card system to the interns before handing each of them a stack. As he races from one bed to another to oversee the critical cases and get them transferred into the next available OR, he notes the lack of black cards. He can’t help but hope that it’s a good sign, and that the accident wasn’t as catastrophic as it could have been.

But with each new patient’s stuttering recount of the disaster, he finds that hope slowly dwindling. A partial tunnel collapse, they say, repeating what the news anchors have been relaying on the screens in the break room, where they’ve set up a makeshift triage for the less critical. One patient tells him about the crunching noise of the impact, while another one cries over the terrified screams of those trapped in between the layers of rubble.

It isn’t until the third hour (or fifth or sixth, he isn’t sure; time is a construct that he only becomes aware of when he has to call a time of death) that he finally gets an opportunity to talk to Sloane. He’s caught glimpses of her before now, rushing in and out of the double doors. This close, he can see the dust and grime that coats her jacket, the reflective strips splattered with black sludge. Streaks of the substance are smeared through her hair and down onto her neck.

“Hey,” he reaches out, cupping her cheek in his hand and drawing her eyes up from the transfer report she’s scribbling on at the nurses station. “How are you holding up?”

She bites at her chapped bottom lip, dragging in a breath as she thinks over a response.

“It’s… bad,” she tells him. “Out there.”

“It’s amazing, though,” one of the interns pipes up from where they’re hovering nearby, “that so few people have such serious injuries.”

Sloane meets the remark with silence and Ethan knows there must be countless victims that she had to overlook in order to get to those that would have a chance of survival. Placing her hand over his, she turns her head and presses a quick kiss to his palm.

“I’ve gotta get back out there.” She gives his hand a squeeze before she pulls away, back into the rush of bodies and out the door. Sloane McTavish, once more unto the breach, he thinks as he watches her disappear.

By the mid-afternoon, the ER’s lobby is no longer just a home for the injured. Loved ones come in droves, in fast-moving packs across the parking lot and through the entrance to clog up the reception desk. They demand to know if their brother or partner or best friend are safe within the hospital, their panic bouncing between one another and magnifying when the staff can’t give them the answers they need.

From inside the curtained-off cubicle where he’s working on a patient, Ethan can hear Harper giving a speech to the crowd. It’s sympathetic, but not coddling; assertive, but not aggressive. Her ability to sway a large group of panicked patients into understanding the reality of the hospital’s situation within two minutes is why she excels at being the chief (and why Ethan would never be able to do what she does -- he would’ve been mauled the minute he opened his mouth).

“You need any help?”

His head snaps up to see Sloane hovering at the gap in the curtain. Maybe it’s the fluorescent lighting, but she looks paler than last he saw her. Her knuckles are white where she grips the curtain’s edge, he also notes. “Raf is restocking our rig,” she continues. “He said for me to take a quick five and grab something to drink.”

“Take five means to sit down and get some rest,” Ethan points out.

“If I sit down, I’m gonna fall asleep.” She takes a long drink from the styrofoam cup in her other hand and grimaces. He can’t help but worry about how much coffee she’s ingested -- enough that there are fine tremors in her hands, her body running on caffeine and cortisol.

Finishing off the suture, he calls for a nurse to start the discharge process and guides Sloane over to an empty seating area.

“Sit down, honey. I’m going to get you something to--”

Her muffled cry of pain cuts him off. Ethan drops down onto one knee in front of her and cups her chin, forcing her glassy eyes to meet his. “Hey, hey, what’s wrong? What hurts?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head. “I’m fine, I--”

“Don’t give me that bullshit. What hurts?” He reaches for the zipper on her jacket when she snags his wrist and pushes him away.

“I told you: I’m fine. It’s just a scratch.”

He frowns at her hurried assurances.

“Forgive me, but I’ve heard that one before. I didn’t buy it then, either. Let me at least check you out.” His authoritative tone seems to sway her. She drops his wrist and inches forward in the chair; her pained wince as she does so worries him further. He’s got her zipper halfway down when a voice calls out from behind them.

“Slo, you ready to roll?”

Before he can stop her, she’s yanking her zipper back up and shoving past him to join her partner.

“Yeah, I’m all set.”

Ethan gets to his feet and prepares to coax her into getting checked out when Rafael glances between the two of them and smirks.

“Aren’t there supply closets for this kind of thing? If you need to get a leg over, partner, I can go grab a snack real qui--”

Sloane knocks her fist into Rafael’s arm, ignoring his fake cry of alarm as she turns and heads for the double doors.

“She’s injured,” Ethan tells him. “Keep an eye on her.”

Rafael quickly sobers, his grin falling away. He nods once before jogging back down the hallway and through the exit.

The rescue squad has reached the third section of the tunnel, Kendra tells him at some point in the early evening (or he thinks, at least; he hasn’t had the time to look out a window and actually take in the position of the sun in several hours). The opening brings a new flood of victims, their injuries more critical, given their extended time underground without aid.

Most of his interns are holding up surprisingly well, given the sheer influx of patients and the higher amount of critical codes. Ethan’s found only a handful of them having a pity party in the on-call room. His brain is too fogged to stumble his way through an original speech, so the one he gives is ripped straight from Doctor Greene. None of them seem to notice, though, solidifying Sloane’s claim that his interns are all fans of Hugh Laurie’s medical drama instead.

His thoughts turn once more to his girlfriend as he leaves an intern to wipe away their tears and moves back out into the hallway. The few times he’s seen her he’s been too busy with a patient to get close enough to check on her. Reaching into his pocket for his phone, he’s about to resort to texting Rafael again to get a status when he spots her across the room.

She’s standing at the nurses station and staring down at a report. The pen in her hand moves back and forth in short strokes across the page, too sloppy to be anything legible. Even from where he stands, he can see the choppy rise and fall of her chest. Hurrying past a cluster of waiting gurneys, he pushes his way through the hallway traffic to reach her side. He calls her name as he rounds the counter. The lack of reaction in her drives that stake of worry down farther into his chest. Gripping her shoulder, he gives her a little shake.

“Sloane, hey, look at me,” he urges.

His breath catches in his throat when she complies; her pale face is clammy, her lips tinged blue. Blinking heavily up at him in confusion, she tries to take a step back. His instinct already has him shouting for a bed. He’s moving even before she can collapse, catching her before she hits the floor. He loops an arm under her knees and another around her back, fighting back the wave of panic when her head lolls to the side.

Kendra rushes over with a bed; they wheel her into the closest open room, a team of nurses racing in behind them.

“’m fine,” Sloane mutters as Ethan jerks her zipper down. “Jus need a new… bandage--”

“Fuck,” Kendra swears.

Looking down at the bloodied mess of her shirt, Ethan can’t help but agree with the sentiment. He tugs the fabric up to expose a blood-soaked bandage, secured only by a few strips of medical tape. Peeling back the bandage, he sucks in a breath through his teeth at the jagged laceration across her lower abdomen. The one she clearly tried to pack with gauze and walk off.

“Jus patch me up an--”

“Goddammit, lay back down!” he orders as Sloane tries to sit up. “You’re not fit to do anything but try to save your own life for once. You’re in hypovolemic shock.”

“If I was, be dead already,” she argues, her words slurring together.

Kendra produces a pair of scissors and they cut off her uniform as Ethan orders for a blood transfusion, as well as a CT scan to rule out internal bleeding.

“BPs at eighty-nine, heart rate is 126,” Kendra reads out. “She’s in tachycardia.”

Fury at her disregard for her own safety roils in Ethan’s gut, compounding on the anger he already feels towards himself for letting her go earlier. Layered beneath everything is fear, thick and cold and viscous as it eats away at him.

He spends the next hour going through the motions of testing and eliminating any possibilities of further injuries. Once they get her downgraded from stage three and stabilized, Ethan allows her to give in to sleep and steps out to check on the rest of his department. Finding everyone at their posts (and no one sobbing in the on-call room), he returns to Sloane’s room.

Where he’s surprised to find her awake, albeit groggy.

“Hey,” she greets, her voice almost lost underneath the steady beeps of the monitor.

Ethan steps further into the room and shuts the door behind him, snuffing out the hospital’s incessant noise. Settling down into the chair by her bed, he reaches out to take her offered hand and brings it to his lips.

“I need you to explain to me what the hell you were thinking.”

She sucks in a breath, holding it for a long moment before letting it out. He raises his head, clutching her hand to his cheek as he watches her mull over her answer.

“I was in the first section of the tunnel,” she begins. “The one we’d already cleared. I was on my way to help Raf board someone when I heard this noise. Like an animal wailing, you know, really high-pitched and drawn out. It’s closer to me than him, so I get down on my hands and knees and I’m crawling through the wreckage and I’m calling out and I can -- I can tell it’s a kid because he starts to talk, and he’s asking for his mom, and finally I spot him and he’s… he’s just a little tiny thing.”

She pauses to catch her breath. Ethan turns his head and presses a long kiss against her knuckles. “He’s pinned underneath his mom, who we… had to move past earlier... and he’s tucked up underneath a seat. I don’t know how we missed him before, but I know I’ve got to get him out of there; he’s soaked in blood and I can’t tell if it’s his own or his mom’s, and there’s no time to try to figure it out. I finally get him out and he’s got a gash above his ear -- deep enough that I know I’ve got to hurry. And… that was it. I was going too fast, wasn’t watching all of my steps, and I’ve got him in my arms when I feel myself start to slip, but I’ve got him so I can’t stop myself, so I tucked him close to my hip and rolled into the fall and... landed onto a broken railing.”

“That you slapped a bandage over and ignored,” Ethan finishes for her. “Without letting anyone know and refusing to let me check--”

Sloane shakes her head; tears track down over her pale cheeks.

“You don’t -- Ethan, there were so many people down there, trapped and screaming and… and we were hauling out buckets of debris to get to them and sometimes, by the time we got to them, they wouldn’t be screaming anymore and I knew I couldn’t stop and sit that out, I couldn’t--”

“You’re lucky you only needed stitches and a blood transfusion. If you had gone on any longer, you would have progressed to stage four hypovolemic shock. You could have fallen into a coma from blood loss,” he hisses out, the anger from earlier returning with a vengeance. “Only a rookie would pull a stunt like this.”

She meets his narrowed gaze and it’s like she can see past his front, past the frustration; without moving, without speaking, she peels back those jagged layers to see the worry and guilt that festers below.

“This is what we do,” she murmurs. “Sometimes we forgo our own safety for the sake of others.” Tugging on his hand, she urges him to sit beside her on the bed where she can run a comforting hand through his hair and down his arm, reassuring him of her presence.

“I know,” he whispers, leaning down to kiss her forehead, then the bridge of her nose, and then her lips. All of the pressure in his head evaporates at her touch, at reassuring himself that she’s okay. “But next time, let me do it. I am closer to the ER, after all.”

Sloane lets out an exasperated chuckle, rolling her eyes at his lame joke.

“You’re lucky I love you.”

“I know,” he says, that soft smile of his making an appearance -- the one only she gets to see. “Get some sleep. I’ll be right outside if you need anything.”

Standing up, he reaches above her head and switches off the strip light. The room dims, lit only by the muted hallway lights that leak through the blinds. Leaning down, he gives her a longer, sweeter kiss, trying to pour all of his relief into it. “I love you, too,” he tells her as he tucks the blanket in around her.

“Wake me when your shift ends.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

+ + +

He approaches the light with that tight feeling in his chest; his body’s assurance of a job well-done. Covered in a fine sheen of sweat from the summer heat, he yanks at the collar of his T-shirt and wafts it against his chest, groaning at the feel of air moving against his skin.

“Are you prepping for the marathon?” he asks between ragged breaths. “Is that why you were going so fast?”

“Wasn’t going any faster than usual,” Sloane replies with a shrug. Leaving her side, Relay trots over to sniff at Jenner and then at him, nudging his pocket with interest, where the tennis ball they toss around in the Common hides.

“Well, either you’re lying, or I’m starting to show my old age.”

“You’re not old,” she scoffs. “You’re thirty-eight.” Turning towards her, Ethan recognizes the look on her face; he immediately becomes invested in whatever she’s about to say next. “Here, I’ve got an idea: I’ll race you. If you beat me, then you’ll get a treat.”

Both dogs and he perk up at the term. “Deal?”

“Deal.”

The light changes.

They take off, jogging across the intersection and up onto the opposite sidewalk.

Where they both turn left for home.

+ + +

AN: I did some routine googling for the medical information in this, but not nearly enough as I probably should have. Take it with a grain of salt. *Fixed as of 6/2/21: changed Sloane’s dog name from Haint to Relay. Haint is a term for ghosts or evil spirits, which I learned originated from Gullah culture in GA and SC, so I feel it was appropriation for me to use it with an MC who is white / is not part of that culture. This fic also contains a real-life AU in the fact that Boston EMS does not work on the same structure as Chicago or NYC, where some ambulances reside within certain quarters at a dedicated fire station -- however, in this they do because everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.

#ethan x mc #ethan ramsey x mc #choices #open heart #open heart fic #f: what if the closest we get to the moment is now #Kaila writes things #we get to play 'will this massive wall of text show up in the tag or not?'#picture it: me; 2019; desperately wishing tumblr had the same rich text format editing that AO3 does

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withastolenlantern · 5 years ago

Text

The sun set slowly over the western horizon towards the Mexican coast as the helicopter carried them across the swells, a bright orange glow in the distance that caused the waves to glisten and sparkle in a hypnotic rhythm in time with the whirring of the rotors above. Chatham sat dejected, her feet dangling out the side port where a machine-gun position had once existed. They’d chased the hovercraft as far as they could, but the copter had been built for transport, not speed, even when it was new, and they'd of course removed all the weaponry. The old bird kept them close for nearly forty kilometers, the autopilot bobbing and weaving around sporadic small-arms fire, but the large turbofans powering the hovercraft eventually outpaced them as the helicopter’s low fuel alarm had chimed.

Whoever they were, they disappeared into the Caribbean twilight like so many pirates before them. The sea that spanned before them had formed the early foundation of the old British Empire, its islands once abustle with privateers and naval frigates alike. Thousands of ships had sailed these waters trading in sugar and gold and slaves, bringing untold wealth to the nascent imperium; the sloops and galleons had long-ago been replaced by drone barges and the slaves with autofabs. Things had come full circle, now, and it seemed fitting that the reincarnated royal union might begin its decline here as well.

She instructed the autopilot to turn and head for the Jamaican coast, where they landed at a joint Union and US naval air station. The obsolete helo purred like an enormous kitten as the rotors spun down and she dismounted the deck of the aircraft onto still-hot tarmac in the fading light of the equatorial sun. Santomas followed, his head ducked low under the slowing whine of the helicopter, as if unsure of a safe distance from the blades. Davis’s mobile rang as they crossed the air field, and he walked a distance to take the call outside the din of the aircraft.

Across the landing pad she watched what appeared to be American Marines in exosuits running in PT formation; the base supported both Commonwealth and US operations in the Caribbean, but since the formation of the Union, the "Special Relationship" had become strained, especially since the Canadians had rejected a US-led proposal for a greater North American Congress of Nations. The Canadian parliament cited their status as a former Crown Dominion as a major factor in rejecting the invitation, but the influence of the US and it's defacto Mexican puppet-state's continued adherence to a "might makes right" socio-economic policy was evident. She passed several of the Union infantry garrison standing to the west end of the airfield, stoically but obviously observing their American counterparts' exercises with derision.

Among the gawkers was the young flight leader who’d lent Chatham the Merlin. She stopped beside him and handed over the authenticator fob.

“Yanks are up to something again,” he remarked. “They’ve been drilling like this for days, full recon gear.”

“Drugs, you think?” she responded idly. With the Americans and Mexicans it was always either drugs or immigrants. It wasn’t entirely surprising, she’d always thought. Central and South America had always been somewhat under-developed, and the shifting climate and rising seas had only exacerbated the situation. The US land border with its southern neighbor was enormous, and largely desert, which made securing it incredibly difficult. Her native South Africa had a similar geographic disadvantage, but while they still embraced the Rainbow Nation ethos, the Americans had responded to their modern economic challenges by ignoring their largely immigrant history and doubling-down on nationalist sentiments and geographic isolationism.

“Most likely,” the young man said with a shrug. “What’s your deal, then? Command just said to expect some civvies and to have the helo fueled when you arrived. Never got to ask.”

“HeRMES,” the detective said, flashing her credentials from her mobile.

“Didn’t think they gave coppers flying lessons.”

“No, but the SBS does,” she replied with a wry smile.

“Curiouser and curiouser. And what’s with the nerd?” he asked, pointing toward Santomas who she now saw was now sprinting toward them across the tarmac.

“Technical consultant,” Chatham said, doing a poor job of hiding a smirk. She could only imagine her own reaction, back then, to such a scene: an obvious civilian running across the airbase, caked in sweat, with such reckless abandon.

Santomas skidded to a halt next to her, his face red and drenched in perspiration from the heat and his recent exertion. He tried to speak, then thought better of it and swallowed several heavy gulps of air. “That was the boss,” he panted. “He was pissed.”

“I’d assume so,” she said with a snort.

“He’s in Singapore until next week but he wants a full report when he gets back. Wants me back in the lab figuring out how the hell somebody’s getting execution access to the fabs. ‘Right bloody now’ I believe were the exact words,” Davis explained.

“Never a dull moment I suppose,” she said, turning to the officer. She offered a crisp salute in thanks. “Squadron Leader.”

“Don’t I know it, mum,” he said, returning the gesture.

They left the cadre of servicemen and walked across the airfield to one of the distant hangars. One of the Consortium’s commercial aircraft was parked under a rusting corrugated aluminum roof; it had ferried them down to the Caribbean and would carry them back up to Wales. How the Earl had gotten permission to park a private jet on an active Commonwealth military installation was beyond the detective, but she presumed that it had something to do with wealth and its privileges.

They boarded the jet without fanfare, and Davis keyed in his credentials and submitted the flight plan. Chatham settled into one of the plush chairs midway through the cabin and opened a terminal to begin her situation report. Before she knew it the autopilot had spooled up the turbines and they were aloft into the rapidly darkening sky, chasing the sunset as it crawled its way east. She looked out through one of the windows and saw Jamaica, still green and verdant even in the twilight, quickly disappear, just another speck amidst the breakers, swallowed by the massive sea.

They flew in silence most of the way, Chatham working on her report and Davis just sitting quietly across the cabin. He nursed a small glass of whiskey from the Earl’s bar in the rear, mainly swirling it against the sides of the frosted crystal, staring off into space.

“You’ve been atypically quiet, Mister Santomas,” she said looking up from the terminal.

“I’ve, uh… I’ve never been shot at before. Never killed anybody either. I think that’s catching up with me a little bit,” he said, continuing to stare at the floor.

“Best not to make a habit of either, I’ve found,” Chatham responded.

“Puts things in perspective a little,” the engineer confessed. “What if it had been me, falling lifeless through that hatch?”

The detective put down the terminal and leaned forward toward him. She’d been through this existential crisis before, many years ago in a bivouac in some coastal Indian city she couldn’t remember. Earlier that day she’d fired her weapon for the first time in anger, shooting a suicide bomber out of mid-air as he leaped over rubble and sprinted toward her squad. Afterward, she stood over the body, silent, staring at the hole in the insurgent’s chest. It was bigger than she had expected, somehow, and when she’d closed her eyes that night it was all she could see; a gaping, oozing portal where a person used to be, and it threatened to pull her in and consume her whole.

“But it wasn’t you,” she said.

“Tell me one thing I’ve done that matters,” he challenged.

“I mean, I’m...” she started to argue.

“Its fine,” he said, waving the detective off. “It’s not you. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve heard it all. I’m reliable. I get things done. I’m ‘good at my function’.” He made finger quotes as he listed off descriptors. “But those are the qualities you look for in a washing machine, not a person.”

Chatham tried to interrupt, but he continued. “When I’m gone, it won’t matter. In the course of human history, I don’t even rate a footnote. Fuck, the shareholders won’t even notice, and I’ve done nothing but make them money. No… no they’ll probably be happy because they can replace me with someone cheaper,” he scoffed, turning his eyes to the floor. “I haven’t accomplished anything with my miserable existence that’s worth a damn.”

The detective sat quietly, unsure of what to say. She knew from her own experience that whatever arguments she might present to the contrary would fall on deaf ears. When one fell in to these depths, no rhetorical ropes could pull you out until you’d resolved to make the climb. Her companion continued to fume, obviously if quietly. “You’re probably not… wrong,” she hazarded. “In the grand scheme of things, I don’t know that any of us really matter. Not as individuals, anyway. I mean, I have a Military Cross and I keep it in a fucking sock drawer. When I’m dead, they’ll etch a fancy symbol on my tombstone, and that’ll be the last anyone thinks of me.”

He looked up at her, his gaze deep and penitent. “This is all a fucking show, you know,” he said, gesturing around the laboratory. “It’s a sham, like me. HenRI is more than capable of running everything in here, at least to the Board’s liking. They put a body down here because it ‘humanizes’ the Consortium, makes the investors feel like they’re doing business with a human enterprise, and not just a machine. When Diaz passed away, they thought about letting HenRI run all of Operations. It’s not like we really do any meaningful R&D anymore; there’s no point when they’re shutting down most of the fabs. But the Earl knew better, and he was nervous about giving a virtual intelligence that much control. He wanted someone… pliable. Someone he could trot out to glad-hand and speak the customers’ language, but wouldn’t make waves. I’m no more than HenRI’s secretarial functions in flesh and bone.”

“I don’t believe that, even if you do,” she replied.

“Diaz killed himself, you know.”

“What?” Chatam said, taken aback.

Santomas shook his head in the affirmative, pantomiming a finger gun. “Forty-five to the temple, a no-doubter. Two floors up from here, in his office. He printed the gun himself, in one of the dev lab fabs that were off the network. I found the code on the server a couple days later.”

“Christ,” the detective swore.

“Janitorial drone found him one night, 3 AM, slumped over his desk. Only threw up the flag because of all the blood. HenRI notified me, and I had to break the news to Jaime, his partner. The Consortium bought his silence, of course; he took the payout and their kid and moved to some island in the Caribbean, or whatever’s left of it. Haven’t heard from him since,” he explained.

“Did he leave a note?” she asked.

“Not as such. It’s… it’s probably my fault, if anything,” Santomas said, starting to choke up. “I know Jaime hated it here in Wales and they were drifting apart at the end; looking back, I think I was the closest thing Yangervis had left resembling a friend. His parents fled cartel violence in Colombia when he was five, and they landed in Texas. They had trouble making ends meet in the US. His dad was killed robbing a convenience store; his mother sued the state and the settlement was how he was able to afford his initial studies at A&M. He started the autofabs, in my opinion anyway, as a way to relieve some of that economic anxiety for other families so they didn’t have go through what he did. We were so successful at first, but then Black Tuesday happened, and I think he blamed himself for all the layoffs that followed.

Looking back, I keep wondering if there weren’t signs I should have recognized. He used to gripe all the time about expanding capabilities and finding ways to streamline distributions to do more for the growing poor. I just… I never realized how far down that particular rabbit hole he’d gone. We had a memorial here, and then a week later the Earl offered me his job. I should’ve said no, but I’m too much of a coward.” The engineer wiped a single tear from his cheek with his shirt-sleeve.

Chatham leaned forward and patted his leg gently.“You saved my life today,” the detective replied. “That’s what you did that matters. There was no cowardice in that.”

#long post #these passages have probably been posted before #but at the time they were mostly just exercises and now i've found an organic fit for them #or whatever this whole thing is terrible #the world ocean

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years ago

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Colleen: So Laura, thanks for joining us today, on the "Got Science?" podcast.

Laura: I'm so glad to be here, Colleen.

Colleen: Excellent. So I wanna start right off the bat with North Korea because that's what's in the news these days. They are ramping up their missile launching capabilities, substantially, and this has put a lot of focus on our Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Can you give us just a brief lay of the land to start in terms of the different types of defense systems we have?

Laura: So the United States is in a very fortunate geographical position. We have vast oceans to the east and west and friendly neighbors to the north and south. So we don't spend a lot of time thinking about short-range missile threats because we don't, you know, we have a pretty friendly neighborhood. So when you're thinking about nuclear and ballistic missiles, you know, targeted against the United States itself, we're thinking about intercontinental ballistic missiles, meaning they have to go, 10,000 kilometers at least to get here. So those are the highest, fastest, farthest missiles.

So the Ground-Based Midcourse Missile Defense, the GMD system that you mentioned is the sole system that's meant to defend against threats like that. So that consists of 44 interceptors, all but 4 of those are in Alaska. The rest of them are in California at Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Santa Barbara, and those are meant to knock down a missile that's headed our way. So there are other missile defense systems that you might have heard about and those are meant to defend against shorter-range missile threats. So things that don't go quite that far, and they're used, they call them theater missile defenses or regional. So we have the Aegis ship-based missile defense system, so those are based on Navy ships that move to the area of concern. We've got those in Europe and we have those in East Asia, for example.

And then there is the THAAD missile defense system, which is a shorter range than Aegis mostly and that's an army system that gets airlifted over to wherever you're worried about and they put it down, and they put down radars and interceptors. So that was recently deployed to South Korea, in the south and there's one in Guam, and then there are, you know, even shorter range than that Patriot missile defense systems which people have probably been hearing about for a long time, those were important during the Gulf War. So those are for shorter-range missiles. So there's a range of them but they do different things. So, you know, you could think missiles that don't go as far, also, don't need to go as fast. So that's just easier problem to solve. But by the time you get into intercontinental ballistic missiles, they're going really fast. So it's a super challenging problem.

Colleen: Describe to me what midcourse defense system is.

Laura: Sure, okay. So an ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile looks like a big space launch vehicle, basically. If you ever watched a launch on TV, you see, something on a launch pad and it's…this big, you know, flames and powerful engines because they need to get this going really fast to get to go as far as it needs to go. So it has this big powerful launch that's called "the boost phase." So that time of active launching lasts, like, at most around five minutes. Okay, so that gets the missile going really fast. And then it's basically...the word ballistic, just basically means it's in freefall.

Once you get it going fast, it's not guided. It's not like an airplane that uses aerodynamics to make changes or to fly, it's simply just going with the speed it got revved up to. So that cruising part, that ballistic flight, that's the midcourse. So most of that travel to go from, for example, North Korea to the United States or somewhere far like that, most of that happens up in the vacuum of space, you know, well above the International Space Station. All right, so up where the satellites are. And so that's the vacuum of space and then it spends a very short time coming back through the atmosphere on the other end, and so more like a minute or two. So most of the time, its traveling is in the midcourse.

Colleen: So that's where our GMD is trying to knock this thing out or explode it?

Laura: Right. So it lasts the longest so that it seems like, that's the first place you start trying to defend. The tricky thing about midcourse and this is, not just tricky, this is a showstopper, is that you're traveling in the vacuum of space and so there's no atmosphere to slow light objects down more than heavy objects. You know, like, if you're standing at the top of the building and you dropped an anvil and a feather, everyone's intuition tells them which one's gonna land first because there's more air resistance per mass, right? So it doesn't work the same way.

And so to distinguish a light balloon that looks a lot like a warhead from the actual warhead, you can't use the atmospheric slowdown to tell you which one is which. You need other clues, you need sensors like radars and infrared sensors to try to gather your clues and figure out which is which, and that's actually a very difficult basic physics problem. And the adversary has lots of tools at his or her disposal to try to trick you, we call those countermeasures. So these decoys that I mentioned like fake warheads, if you can't distinguish between the light fake warhead and the real warhead, you're gonna have to target both of them.

And if your light fake warhead, you know, they don't cost too much to put on top of your rocket because of light, you can put dozens of them and make it really hard for the defense to find out which is the right target. That's an issue that's been well-known for decades and really has not been solved in any substantial way. So the success of a midcourse system really rides on the fact that you just hope that your adversary can't do it. You hope your adversary hasn't figured out how to make these balloons, or good countermeasures, or, you know, little heaters, or coolers or things to change the observed temperature of your objects, you just have to hope that they haven't done a good job with that.

Colleen: So what do you say to the person who says, "Well, just shoot, you know, a dozen...?"

Laura: Interceptors?

Colleen: Interceptors, yes. "So just shoot a dozen interceptors and get all of the decoys and the real one."

Laura: Well, sure. I would say that the GMD interceptors are, like...I think they're, like, $70 million each and you are always gonna be on the wrong side of that cost curve and that is something you hear over and over from the Pentagon, "We are in the wrong side of the cost curve with this system." They acknowledge that that's a problem. It's clearly understood by lots of people in the Pentagon that you're not gonna get out ahead of these decoys by building more interceptors, it's simply too difficult and too expensive. To make a successful system you either gonna have to hope that your adversary is really clumsy and hasn't figured out how to do this or that you have figured out some clever way with your sensors to defeat this countermeasure issue, and it's really difficult to do.

The intelligence community's assessment, you know, almost 20 years ago, was that any country that has the technical capability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile has a technical capability to build these kinds of countermeasures which should fool a missile system. Right, it's unsolved, right?

Colleen: So we keep pouring money into it. We know it doesn't work and it's there, what do we do with it? Stop funding it and...? What are the alternatives?

Laura: That's a great question, right? You know, that was the...I think the George W. Bush administration's made is that if we just get in the ground, it's gonna be hard to rethink it and so people will only want to just go ahead and that was, you know, in the early 2000s. The approach was, "We have no time to do all this engineering and to do more testing research and development, we need to get it in the ground as soon as possible because this threat is happening."

Colleen: Right. And that's at the point in time where the administration decided that they didn't need to go through the rigorous checks and balances of the scientific process.

Laura: Right. So over decades of building military systems, you know, Congress and the Pentagon, they came up with a system of, it sounds so boring, right? Procurement or research and development. But basically, a system colloquially called "Fly Before You Buy" which is basically, how do you build something so that it works like you think it should. It solves the problem you want it to and then it does it in a cost-effective way. So it's just like basics, like, "This is the problem we have. Here's how we're gonna solve it. Here's the research and development. Here's the early stuff."

You get out the kinks, and when you think that you've solved those problems you can build some, try it out in realistic conditions to make sure you didn't miss anything, like, it doesn't work in the rain, or we haven't solved the countermeasures problem, or, you know, it shakes too much and, you know, we can't count on the guidance because it vibrates too much. You work all of those kinks out, and then you buy it, and then you put it into the field. Right? That's the, sort of, the way you would build something that you wanted to work well.

But it was essentially, like, "We can't wait for that process. We're gonna take it out of that system, that basically almost every other thing in the Pentagon has to go through and just build this missile defense system, you know, as fast as possible." So, essentially, it took the technology that existed, stopped the engineering cycles and just built stuff and put it into the ground, it's sort of fast and furious and that's what we have with the GMD, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense.

So what we ended up having is a bunch of stuff that, as you tested it, it's like, "Whoa, okay. Boy, we missed something here." You know, some of the tests were just basic quality control problems and, you know, a wire had not apparently been attached well enough. But then there are other problems that weren't design problems that they needed to figure out. I understand how you would be confused by the fact that we've built a system, spent tens of billions of dollar, it exists, and yet essentially, it's like a prototype system. It never went through the rigors engineering and that's reflected basically in its test record which is really poor.

Colleen: It's also misleading the public. Because it exists and I would assume that...many, many people would assume that it works or it works well enough and you get conflicting information now from the Trump administration about its success rate.

Laura: Right. So it exists, right? So you think it should work. We spent lots of money and we are continuing to and we're proposing to spend many more billions of dollars on it. So, again, we think it should work, not only the Trump administration but stretching back through the Obama administration and the George W. Bush administration, government military administration officials saying, "This system protects us." Well, right now, really against all evidence, there had been, sort of, no tests that demonstrated that it worked, right? So you're, sort of, taking it on faith.

And maybe, you know, maybe that was satisfying and in some sense to some people, at that point but as the North Korean missile program advanced, I think more people are turning a critical eye and saying, "Okay, so let's see how...can you back that up with real evidence. Does the system really work like that?" And you look at the test program. And one of the beautiful things we have in this country is transparency about a lot, and it's very difficult to hide a missile defense test. They're big, loud, hard to hide type of thing, you know, big rocket launches. So you know when they happen and you know whether they worked or not. So we know a lot about the system and how its performed and, you know, that doesn't square with the claims that it protects American people right now.

[Break: We’ll be back in a minute with the second half of our interview]

Colleen: So let's think about this scenario, you're having dinner with some friends, they're super smart, and you're saying that you don't think spending billions of dollars for a missile defense system that doesn't work is the way to go. And whenever you bring this up, the automatic response is, "Well, if we don't keep working on it or have something like that, you know, we're sitting ducks." So how do you answer that question?

Laura: Yeah. Well, like, I'm pretty sympathetic to that and a lot of what you'll hear, you know, a lot of the automatic reaction is something's better than nothing, even if it's terrible, something is better than nothing. And that sounds, kind of, right, but I don't think it's actually right and here's why. So missile defense isn't like, "It works in a vacuum of space, but it doesn't work in a..." it's not in a strategic or political vacuum. So all your decisions that you make, in general, need to be based on a clear assessment of how it works.

For example, let's say you have a missile defense system that doesn't work very well, like we don't but you think it does. You might be inclined to take more risks in your foreign policy and brinksmanship and, you know, you think you have a shield, you go poke the bear, but your shield actually isn't great, right? So you might not have gone to poke the bear in the first place if you knew your shield didn't work so well. I mean, having a shield is better than not, but best of all is not to go poke a bear, right?

So you don't want a system to distort your decision-making because you think it works better than it does or you might not have as much domestic pressure to find creative diplomatic solutions to a hard problem like the North Korean problem because you, kind of, deflate that pressure because you can say, "Well, we got a missile defense. We're working on this, we don't need to do this hard work of diplomacy because we've got a missile defense."

But if you have things that make you make worse decisions overall and really...like, a missile defense, even if we did a great job on the GMD, even if it worked much better than it does, it still would not ever work 100%. It still would be overwhelmed. It's still in an attack of the way a real adversary would attack. I mean, maybe if North Korea were like, "Yeah we're gonna send one or two bare simple missiles, no countermeasures, really easy, just a couple." You know, maybe the system would have a fair chance of that, but when would North Korea think about doing something like that. I mean North Korea would assuredly no longer exist if it sent any nuclear-armed missiles towards the United States. Whether or not we intercepted them or not, they would have to assume that they would…

Colleen: Perish.

Laura: ...perish. Yes, exactly, right. So maybe it works in this small situation, but that's not the likely situation. If North Korea had decided, I just don't see how it would be likely that North Korea would take the decision to attack the United States. I think it's very unlikely. But if so it would do it, you know, throw everything at us as possible to make it successful. So in that case, you know, the GMD system is not likely to catch everything. So when you're thinking about, "Where do I put my resources? How do I spend my time? How do I spend my political capital? How do I spend my energy?" Really, the problem is, "How do we make sure these missiles are never launched in the first place, right? That has to be your focus. So if missile defense becomes a distraction from that, that's where I see that something may not be better than nothing.

You know, well, I don't think North Korea is gonna have...has an intention to launch intentionally, thoughtfully, nuclear-armed missiles towards the United States, but it's more likely that we'll stumble into a crisis. We'll stumble into because we've got, you know, a fairly impulsive head of state in the United States and we don't have good relationship with North Korea. We don't have good communications that could reliably ratchet crises down or misunderstandings, you say, "Is this what you're intending? This is how we see the problems."

We're not doing that basic to work together that you need to do to make sure you don't accidentally get into a nuclear conflict. So that, and when we're talking about where our energy and our time is and when we're talking about diplomacy engagement, we have to do that part just to make sure that we lower the risk of accidentally doing this.

Colleen: And it's that the turnaround time is so short, you hardly have any time to figure out if...if a real crisis happens, you don't want to have to make that horrible decision in 10 or 20 minutes.

Laura: Well that is the way we’ve set up nuclear weapons and nuclear missiles. Is that they can be used very quickly and on demand, rather than for example taking nuclear weapons off the missiles and only putting them on later after deliberation.

Colleen: Well, it felt just last week with the alert in Hawaii that terrified people. For me, that struck a chord because I remember growing up, I was at the, sort of, the tail end of duck and cover where, you know, a nuclear warhead is coming in and that was a terrifying time. I remember as a kid being very scared about nuclear war and that...I can't imagine how people felt getting that text message. I mean, what do you do? Where do you go? You know, and I don't know on the alert if it said it was a nuclear weapon or...I don't know. Could you tell from the alert if it was or you'd just assume that?

Laura: That's a good question, actually. I don't know the details about that. I think it was, "Take cover." But, you know, it's a different...you know, there are a lot of people who didn't grow up during the Cold War now and who didn't watch wargames and who don't...so it's a different right there. Their life experience has been different. So this may be, sort of, shocking, "Wait, what? I thought we, sort of, sorted with this nuclear weapons stuff out like decades ago." It sounds a little old-fashioned but it's still with us. We still have these. These are still shaping the way we live in this world and in a not positive way. So, I think, people are more aware of it than they have been.

Colleen: Maybe that will be a good thing, maybe it will raise awareness. One other thing that we didn't really touch on but we're talking about, North Korea, and the U.S., and our missile defense system, but this is all in the much larger context of other big countries with nuclear weapons and just how complicated it is. If we make this one move to beef up our security that might look like we're threatening another larger country, maybe we're threatening China now.

Laura: Right. So going back to your friend at the dinner party who is like, "Why wouldn't we wanna have this?" There is yet another piece and you've landed on it which is the potential for missile defense to increase the threats that you see against you. So, you know, sometimes people say, "Oh, it's gonna dissuade countries from building missiles, in the first place, because they're gonna see this impenetrable wall and be like, "I'm not gonna bother." We don't really see any evidence of that, you know, the GMD system has been on an accelerated schedule since 2001 and that coincides with the North Korean. You know, they clearly didn't look at this and say, "We shouldn't bother."

So that's one thing it does, but the other thing is even though it's demonstrated to not work very well in the United States, we're not saying, like, "But here's the horizon. This is when it works like this and it can tackle this threat, that's when we're done." So countries like Russia and China who are thinking about their own nuclear pasture and thinking about, "How do we keep a deterrence balance with the U.S.," they look at the missile defense and say, "How do we incorporate this into our decision-making?"

And we can see that this provides an incentive for them to build more or more sophisticated types of nuclear weapons that overcome missile defenses, maybe not this particular system but where they think the U.S. might be going. So what that does is increase the threats that we see against us rather than trying to find a way to draw down these hugely destructive nuclear weapons as an incentive to increase their sophistication and their numbers. So we'll be paying a price for having a missile defense system.

You will pay that and also in the long-term future where you're hoping that countries reduce the number of nuclear weapons, you know, that will be a factor. So you have to balance what you think you're getting out of it with the price you have to pay in terms of, you know, the fooling yourselves into a more dangerous foreign policy or seeing more nuclear weapons aimed against you and you have to try to overcome your missile defenses, all sorts of things. You have to balance against what you've decided to build.

Colleen: Well, if there was one thing that you could make people understand about weapons and missile defense, if you could just put this thought into the minds of people, what would you want?

Laura: Yeah. I guess what I would say is that the way you should be thinking about missile defense is not that it solves this problem and it doesn't even do a great job of making it less hard to solve. You're still gonna have to do the hard work of diplomacy to find a real solution and real security for all actors. And in fact, if you're not careful, you might fool yourself into thinking it does something more for you than it does, and it might actually be harmful, you know, counter-intuitively. It might end up making your world more dangerous.

My colleague says it this way, "Missile defense often sounds better after 30 seconds than it does after 3 minutes." It's really appealing to think that we could build something technologically to make ourselves invulnerable. I see the appeal of that, but missile defense doesn't do that. It doesn't solve your problem for you. And in fact, it might be a red herring and pull you off the hard task which is dealing with the root of the problem. So it doesn't save your bacon, you need to fix the problems diplomatically.

Colleen: Well, Laura, thanks for joining us today. I hope you have some ways to have fun and not think about this dreary subject that you live every day.

Laura: Yeah. You know, always making yin with a yang.

Colleen: Yes, indeed.

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trelliumdandrepressedemotions · 7 years ago

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One thing I feel like a lot of American’s don’t understand is how this hard-line attitude has lead to this mess in North Korea. Here’s the deal, waaaay back before Bush, basically what happened was in 1994 Clinton negotiated in the Agreed Framework that if North Korea stopped using it’s nuclear power the US would give them Oil, phase out economic sanctions and send light water reactors. However Clinton’s big failure here was he simply required the Yongbyon Nuclear Power Plant be turned off, not dismantled. Both sides stuck to these obligations until 1996, when Congress started to slow down funds for the US side of the deal, which lead to North Korea turning their nuclear power plant back on in 1998, something it could do for relatively low cost because of Clinton’s failure to ensure the plant was dismantled.

In 2003 Bush formally gave the axe to the Agreed Framework, and North Korea admitted to having possession of Nuclear weapons for the first time since they joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985. These lead to the Six-Party Talks (named for because the US, Russia, China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea all took part) Bush, in a vain attempt to learn from Clinton’s mistakes attempted a ‘dismantle first, talk later policy’. Which might be great except that this meant these Six Part Talks dragged on for years, as in, most of his presidency. North Korea had a successful nuclear test in 2006, and officially withdrew from the talks in 2009. Bush’s policy also failed because he underestimated the stability of the regime and by the time the Six Party Talks began America was waging war in the middle east and North Korea was not it’s primary focus.

Obama encouraged talks with North Korea initially but quickly changed to a strategic patience policy much like Bush had, however during his presidency we did get the Leap Day Agreement, which lasted a whopping three weeks before North Korea launched a satellite and caused the treaty to collapse. South Korea on the other hand was much happier with Obama’s policy of trying to get China to exert pressure on North Korea, only guess what? That didn’t work either because it’s really not in China’s best interest to unhinge their nuclear neighbor.

Unfortunately now that North Korea is capable of putting a nuclear war head on a missile (something we knew they’d be capable of doing in 10 years way back 10 years ago) Strategic patience is all we’ve got left. 25 years ago it would’ve been much much easier to put pressure on North Korea to denuclearize first and accept help later, but we’re past that now. We need to look at the bigger picture because South Korea, China, Japan and Russia can and will all get pulled into this very quickly if we give them ‘fire and fury’. North Korea’s policy has and always will be regime survival, the won’t do anything if they don’t feel the regime is threatened, sure they’ll poke and prod, but believe me, if anyone makes a move to turn the regime to ‘fire and fury’ it’s going to end with the destruction of an entire portion of the world. Sure the US might come out on top but we run the risk of destroying 4 different countries, and 2 of them have been our allies for over 60 years. And South Korea isn’t a war torn country anymore, it hasn’t been for a long time and the US needs to get better at realizing this and letting it have a much larger say in talks which will drastically affect it and all the Korean people.

#north korea #south korea #leave my country alone

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rowandbkg499-blog · 5 years ago

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The thing is, this isn't only a 2-sided discussion about CBD and THC. Ethan Russo, M.D., a cannabis professional who wrote Taming THC: potential cannabis synergy and phytocannabinoid-terpenoid entourage results,” in the Uk Journal of Pharmacology completely map away how cannabis compounds influence each other's mechanisms.

The rich gold mines at Sofala (now a port of Mozambique) attracted the Portuguese to the East Coast of Africa. They utilized intermarriage with the Africans as a means of gaining favor and pressing into the interior of Africa. In turn, the Africans steadily lost their anti-Christian hostilities and provided in to being changed into Christianity. And therefore Christianity was introduced in to the Congo before 1491. The Mani Sogno was the 1st Congo nobleman to embrace the Christian faith. The Moslems, getting into the Congo from the East Coastline, prevailed upon the Africans to resist being converted to Christianity, informing them that Christianity was a subtle method used by the Portuguese to dominate their country. This warning notwithstanding, Christianity continued to spread in the Congo.

Pro: Topicals aren't absorbed into the entire body, as other styles can be. That could make them safer-which could be important if you use CBD on a normal basis-considering how small is known about the long-term security of CBD and various other cannabis products.

Additionally, if you haven't previously been eating a whole lot of fiber, even a single serving could cause digestive distress if your body simply isn't used to it. In order to avoid these unwanted effects, increase your intake gradually over time and stick to an individual serving, unless you know your body can handle more.

#cbd blüten

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consciousowl · 7 years ago

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The Gift of Anger

In all the world’s literature, secular or sacred, conflict is the most essential element, usually ignited by anger. Without conflict you quite simply have no story. Thus, all the great epics, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and India’s Ramayana and Mahabharata, revolve around continuing conflict, involving danger and death, accompanied by fear and anger.

And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves,and the changers of money sitting:

And when he had made a scourge of small cords,

he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen;

and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables;

And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence;

make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.

And his disciples remembered that it was written,The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.

Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John

Conflict is even essential in comedy, where it may not always become violent. Anger is an indispensible component, typically based upon misunderstandings that eventually get sorted out. When the fairy tales assure us that the heroic couple lives “happily ever after,” they usually leave out anger management. As Joseph Campbell, who dearly loved his younger wife, Jean Erdman, put it, “Marriage is an ordeal!”

Why We Get Angry

If the truth be told, anger simply happens. Watch little children together, even at play. They will have disputes and start pushing or even biting each other.

We, as adults, go about it more smoothly. We hide or suppress our anger; whereas children quickly forgive and make up. Anger just happens, but we almost always attribute it to someone or something.

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We all have expectations, as we are rational creatures with acute imaginations. We quickly get a sense of entitlement and start insisting on certain outcomes based on past experience. When they are blocked, we get frustrated and flare up. We are not content with the basics of food, water, shelter and clothing. We require so much more.

Western religions point to our “sin” nature, our innate tendency to rebel against our Creator. From an Eastern perspective, our false sense of self makes us insist that we are confined within this bag of skin and bones, rather than realizing that we are the whole of life, the whole of creation.

Anger as a Blessing

We all admire, and often emulate, fictional characters who keep their cool under all circumstances, such as the many incarnations of James Bond. James has the aplomb to make love to a beautiful counter-agent just before being thrown out of a fast-moving airplane. These make-believe characters seem so professional, powerful and totally together.

Yet anger can actually be a positive force in the face of systematic exploitation, or as Pope Francis I put it, “structural evil.” We disempower ourselves when we pretend that it is all cool when the very ground is falling out from under us.

If our species had been without the fight or flight response, we would never have made it out of the trees. This is the automatic response of fear or anger where we decide to take on the lioness, or run for our lives right back up the tree.

Few Americans were thrilled with the results of the 2016 Presidential election. It seemed nobody got what they really wanted, and the candidates with heart got eliminated in the primaries. The attendant shock and dismay of the public led many Americans to actively protest and seek to change the political system in more fundamental ways than had ever been contemplated. This would not be possible if everyone maintained a “grin-and-bear it” attitude.

How Anger Utterly Transformed Three of the Greatest Men

When we think of saints and sages, let alone avatars, bodhisattvas and messiahs, we think of infinitely pure beings who have transcended their egos, given up all attachments and do nothing but radiate bliss 24-hours a day. Jesus is the “meek and mild” shepherd, Gandhi is the playful grandfather who gives candy to children and Mandela is the ultimate diplomat who brings black and white people together in a World Cup love fest.

It wasn’t always that way!

1. Jesus of Nazareth

Before Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple, he had called the Pharisees, the most visibly religious members of His society “whitewashed tombs that look beautiful on the outside, but are inwardly filled with dead men’s bones.” A powerful young man in the prime of His life, Jesus spoke in metaphors and was gifted in shocking people out of their complacency. He was anything but thrilled with the status quo.

2. Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s grandson, Dr. Arun Gandhi, recently wrote a book, The Gift of Anger, based on the early guidance of the Mahatma, when Arun came to Gandhi’s ashram as a child. When Arun would get angry, Gandhi did not try to punish him, but to encourage him to channel his anger in a positive way, just as Gandhi did as a young man when thrown out of the train in South Africa solely on the basis of the color of his skin. Don’t fight the people, fight the oppressive system. Love the perpetrators; hate the system, itself.

3. Nelson Mandela

Madiba Mandela started out life as a tribal chieftain with a good education, prepared to play a positive role in society. However, he couldn’t accept the arbitrary nature of Apartheid, and the indignity that Black Africans suffered in a deeply segregated South Africa. Mandela got involved in the terrorist wing of the African National Congress and was convicted of a car bomb that killed 19 people. For that, Mandela was sentenced for 27 years to an offshore prison breaking stones. Mandela gradually faced his dark side, and developed compassion for the ruling Afrikaans as people. He finally realized the evil was with the system, itself, that ultimately served neither whites nor blacks.

Forgiveness the Flip Side of Anger

Forgiveness is the capstone of Christianity, as Christ taught his students in the Sermon on the Mount to forgive their enemies. Anger is part of life, but we are to let go of our anger before the sun sets and reconcile ourselves with our offender. This wasn’t simply an empty platitude on Christ’s part. When He was tried in the Sanhedrin, He refused to defend Himself. Even on the cross, He prayed that His Father would forgive the very Pharisees who mocked Him “for they know not what they do.”

It is no sin to get upset and angry. It is, however, self-defeating to nurture it and cherish a grudge. Modern medical and psychiatric studies reveal how an unwillingness to forgive is behind many dysfunctions and diseases, such as cancer. Sustained anger is its own “reward,” it devours the body! Consider anger much like pain. It alerts you to needed changes, but it is counterproductive when it persists.

It is no sin to get upset and angry. It is, however, self-defeating to nurture it and cherish a grudge.

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When Christ forgave his enemies, He revealed a powerful insight: They literally didn’t know what they were doing. We are all at various stages of being conscious, and when we are totally unconscious, we end up doing stupid and hurtful things.

Punishing these people for that is inappropriate. We are to have compassion, and see ourselves in them. We would say and do the very same things at their level of consciousness.

Communication Always the Way Out

With anger management, communication is the foundation, especially in intimate relationships. We literally don’t hear each other. When we pretend to listen, we too often compare and contrast and interpret what she says, rather letting her speak for herself. In addition, we often interrupt her or even talk over her.

Werner Erhard revealed the power of sharing withholds. Conflict most often starts out of what is NOT said, what we are unwilling to share with our partner. This typically results in smoldering resentment. Werner taught people in his seminars to HAVE their anger, rather than BE their anger.

If you get your head out of the way, you will find that your upset is often gone in a flash.

Over the years, I have tested out Werner’s insights and realized that he was totally on the mark when he disclosed that love is a function of communication. As he put it, when you have said it all, both the good and the bad, you will find that what you have really been withholding is: I LOVE YOU! Deep listening is the most fulfilling possible price to pay for the love that is just waiting inside you.

Never Put a Person Out of Your Heart

Baba Ram Dass served as a missionary from the East to an entire generation of Westerners, having dropped out as a professor at Harvard through his preoccupation with psychedellics. He traveled to India in search of the truth and stumbled upon Maharaji (Neem Karoli Baba), a spiritual master with very advanced psychic ability and siddhis (inner powers). Ram Dass fell in love with Maharaji when spoke about Ram Dass’s mother.

While Ram Das went through his initiation at the foothills of the Himalayas, Maharaji happened to do something that deeply offended Ram Dass’s standards of right and wrong. Maharaji had harshly fired one of his assistants for making what Ram Dass felt were very minor mistakes. If Maharaji were really the enlightened man everyone says he was, he would never do such a thing.

When Ram Dass eventually confronted his master, he received no apology. Ram Dass then and there had to choose between upholding his standards over a trivial incident, or forgiving the person he loved most in the entire world. It was no contest. Then Maharaji called Ram Dass over to his private quarters with good humor and admonished him that, yes, he can get angry, but never put a person out of his heart.

We can have anger AND love. One doesn’t necessarily cancel out the other.

Far More Loving Than You Ever Imagined

The most important person I have ever met, the woman I have been in love with for nearly 20 years, has often argued with me, and I with her. I can’t count all the times that we have been angry about one thing or another. Looking back it couldn’t matter less. We love each other very deeply. This love has grown over the years. We live within a context where you can love one another and still get angry.

We have gotten a whole lot more skillful with our anger. I am beginning to learn that she is almost always right, and I am getting more than a little tired of my own stupidity. So, I would say that we are making progress.

But what about the truly difficult people, such as President Donald Trump? Where does anger management apply to someone like him? Whether I voted for him or not, he is still the American President. I can hate what he does, and yet still love him. As Voltaire put it, “I may not agree with a word you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it!”

We can actually be thankful for the difficult people of every persuasion. They stretch us spiritually and take us to the edge of enlightenment and sainthood. Christ made no conditions on forgiveness. Why should we? We can continually bless people every morning and evening and realize that the divine love that emerges from this exercise is the most powerful force in the entire Universe.

We can even forgive our own folly along the way. The final gift will be to realize that WHO WE ALL REALLY ARE, our very essence, is ABSOLUTE LOVE.

The Gift of Anger appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.

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tarilyn27-blog · 8 years ago

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Standing on the sidewalk doesn’t work

I got into an argument today, after hearing that the official white house website, less than 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump, shut down the following pages: LGBT, Equal Pay, Women in STEM, Health Care, and Civil Rights. They also disabled petitions from WeThePeople, one of the largest petition sites we have. I pointed out that five states have already passed laws attempting to criminalize and/or discourage disruptive protests. My opponent informed me that such people should be thrown in jail for disrupting her daily life with their grievances. I could not believe my ears. First of all, the issues that are being protested are worthy goals - preserving our civil rights and our environment. Second of all, non-disruptive protest can be effective sometimes, but with as far gone as we are right now, standing on the sidewalk with our signs isn’t going to work. We need to block roadways, to strike, to disrupt everyone’s precious routine. If you let them take away that right, then next they’re going to take away our right to stand on the sidewalk. And they will slowly but surely begin to chip away at our liberties until we have none left and we wonder what has happened to them. We have a right to demand redress from those in power, and to raise our voices when they are not being heard. We have a responsibility to all of humanity to make sure that we stand up for what is right, no matter what. We will fight, and yes, we will disrupt your silly little routines to preserve our planet and our rights. You think our fight is petty, you think it’s whiners and crybabies who don’t know what the real world is, pick up a goddamned history book and educate yourself.

Some examples:

As one of the four mounted heralds of the Suffrage Parade on March 3, 1913, lawyer Inez Milholland Boissevain led a procession of more than 5,000 marchers down Washington D.C.'s Pennsylvania Avenue. The National American Woman Suffrage Association raised more than $14,000 to fund the event that became one of the most important moments in the struggle to grant women the right to vote — a right that was finally achieved seven years later.

As a nascent union, the United Auto Workers, formed in 1935, had a lot to fight for. During the Depression, General Motors executives started shifting work loads to plants with non-union members, crippling the UAW. So in December 1936, workers held a sit-in at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan. Within two weeks, about 135,000 men were striking in 35 cities across the nation. Although the sit-ins were followed by riots, the images of bands playing on assembly lines and men sleeping near shuttered machines recall the serene strength behind the movement that solidified one of North America's largest unions.

Even though African Americans constituted some 70% of total bus ridership in Montgomery, Ala., Rosa Parks still had trouble keeping her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. It was against the law for her to refuse to give up her seat to a white man, and her subsequent arrest incited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One year later, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that made segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks was known thereafter as the "mother of the civil-rights movement."

After the death of pro-democracy leader Hu Yaobang in mid-1989, students began gathering in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to mourn his passing. Over the course of seven weeks, people from all walks of life joined the group to protest for greater freedom. The Chinese government deployed military tanks on June 4 to squelch the growing demonstration and randomly shot into the crowds, killing more than 200 people. One lone, defiant man walked onto the road and stood directly in front of the line of tanks, weaving from side to side to block the tanks and even climbing on top of the first tank at one point in an attempt to get inside. The man's identity remains a mystery. Some say he was killed; others believe him to be in hiding in Taiwan.

494 B.C. -- The plebeians of Rome withdrew from the city and refused to work for days in order to correct grievances they had against the Roman consuls.

1765-1775 A.D. -- The American colonists mounted three major nonviolent resistance campaigns against British rule (against the Stamp Acts of 1765, the Townsend Acts of 1767, and the Coercive Acts of 1774) resulting in de facto independence for nine colonies by 1775.

1850-1867 -- Hungarian nationalists, led by Francis Deak, engaged in nonviolent resistance to Austrian rule, eventually regaining self-governance for Hungary as part of an Austro-Hungarian federation.

1905-1906 -- In Russia, peasants, workers, students, and the intelligentsia engaged in major strikes and other forms of nonviolent action, forcing the Czar to accept the creation of an elected legislature.

1917 -- The February 1917 Russian Revolution, despite some limited violence, was also predominantly nonviolent and led to the collapse of the czarist system.

1913-1919 -- Nonviolent demonstrations for woman's suffrage in the United States led to the passage and ratification of the Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.

1920 -- An attempted coup d'etat, led by Wolfgang Kapp against the Weimar Republic of Germany failed when the population went on a general strike, refusing to give its consent and cooperation to the new government.

1923 -- Despite severe repression, Germans resisted the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, making the occupation so costly politically and economically that the French and Belgian forces finally withdrew.

1920s-1947 -- The Indian independence movement led by Mohandas Gandhi is one of the best known examples of nonviolent struggle.

1933-45 -- Throughout World War II, there were a series of small and usually isolated groups that used nonviolent techniques against the Nazis successfully. These groups include the White Rose and the Rosenstrasse Resistance.

1940-43 -- During World War II, after the invasion of the Wehrmacht, the Danish government adopted a policy of official cooperation (and unofficial obstruction) which they called "negotiation under protest." Embraced by many Danes, the unofficial resistance included slow production, emphatic celebration of Danish culture and history, and bureaucratic quagmires.

1940-45 -- During World War II, Norwegian civil disobedience included preventing the Nazification of Norway's educational system, distributing of illegal newspapers, and maintaining social distance(an "ice front") from the German soldiers.

1940-45 -- Nonviolent action to save Jews from the Holocaust in Berlin, Bulgaria, Denmark, Le Chambon, France and elsewhere.

1944 -- Two Central American dictators, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez (El Salvador) and Jorge Ubico (Guatemala), were ousted as a result of nonviolent civilian insurrections.

1953 -- A wave of strikes in Soviet prison labor camps led to improvements in living conditions of political prisoners.

1955-1968 -- Using a variety of nonviolent methods, including bus boycotts, economic boycotts, massive demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides, the U.S. civil rights movement won passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

1968-69 -- Nonviolent resistance to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia enabled the Dubcek regime to stay in power for eight months, far longer than would have been possible with military resistance.

1970s and 80s -- The anti-nuclear power movements in the US had campaigns against the start-up of various nuclear power plants across the US, including Diablo Canyon in Central California.

1986-94 -- US activists resist the forced relocation of over 10,000 traditional Navajo people living in Northeastern Arizona, using the Genocide Demands, where they called for the prosecution of all those responsible for the relocation for the crime of genocide.

1986 -- The Philippines "people power" movement brought down the oppressive Marcos dictatorship.

1989 -- The nonviolent struggles to end the Communist dictatorships in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and in East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1991.

1989 -- The Solidarity struggle in Poland, which began in 1980 with strikes to support the demand of a legal free trade union, and concluded in 1989 with the end of the Polish Communist regime.

1989 -- Nonviolent struggles led to the end of the Communist dictatorships in Czechoslovakia in 1989 and in East Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1991.

1990 -- The nonviolent protests and mass resistance against the Apartheid policies in South Africa, including a massive international divestment movement, especially between 1950 and 1990, brings Apartheid down in 1990. Nelson Mandela, African National Congress leader, is elected President of South Africa in 1994 after spending 27 years in prison for sedition.

1991 -- The noncooperation and defiance defeated the Soviet “hard-line” coup d'état in Moscow.

1996 -- The movement to oust Serbia dictator Slobodan Milosevic, which began in November 1996 with Serbs conducting daily parades and protests in Belgrade and other cities. At that time, however, Serb democrats lacked a strategy to press on the struggle and failed to launch a campaign to bring down the Milosovic dictatorship. In early October 2000, the Otpor (Resistance) movement and other democrats rose up again against Milosevic in a carefully planned nonviolent struggle.

1999 to Present -- Popular protests of corporate power & globalization begin with Seattle WTO protest in Seattle, 1999. This is what set the trend for the Occupy movement which is still alive.

2001 -- The “People Power Two” campaign, ousts Filipino President Estrada in early 2001.

2004-05 -- The Ukranian people take back their democracy with the Orange revolution.

2010 to Present -- Arab Spring nonviolent uprisings result in the ouster of dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt and ongoing struggles in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.

And if you’re curious how Trumps rise to power parallels that of Adolf Hitler and the rise of fascism in Germany, please see the following links:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/01/comparing-fascism-donald-trump-historians-trumpism

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/paul-krugman-uncovers-chilling-parallels-among-trump-fascism-and-fall-roman-republic

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-scholar-of-fascism-sees-a-lot-thats-familiar-with-trump

any more questions?

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writemarcus · 8 years ago

Link

Howard Fineman :Global Editorial Director, The Huffington Post

This piece is part of a series on Obama’s legacy that The Huffington Post has been publishing over the past week.

WASHINGTON ― When I first met Barack Obama, in January 2005, he had just arrived in the U.S. Senate. He was 43 years old, but looked 33. A Sinatra-like black suit hung loosely over his lanky frame, and he flashed an enormous smile that lit up the Capitol hallways.

He had “president” written all over him and everyone in the place knew it, most of all ― and quite evidently ― Obama himself. He was a class act, and he knew that, too, and was determined to maintain his dignity. That sounds like a small thing but it was and is not, in a society full of noise, stupidity and accusation.

His had risen fast, but not via lots of elections or by passing lots of legislation, or detailed agendas and platforms. He had done it through eloquent language largely about himself.

His story and lively presence were his own proof of the healing virtues of American struggle and hope. He told all of this in a precocious autobiography published in 1995, and in an electrifying speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Now, newly elected and arriving from Illinois, he was a magnet for senators and even reporters, who sidled up to him for photo ops.

I was one of them. “I know who you are,” he said genially. “I read you, I watch you. Come on over to the office once I get things set up.”

Later, I did. His sunny Hart Building office vividly displayed the unique, ambitious and fantastically salable persona he had on offer to the Democratic Party and the country: paintings and portraits of Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois cornfield and degrees from Columbia and Harvard on the resume.

He was full of energy, optimism, ideas ― and hope ― in the gloom of the post-9/11 presidency of George W. Bush.

“We have to bring the country together,” he said at one point. “Not red America, or blue America, but America.”

The loud implication: I can do that because I am that beyond-division America. And it was not only plausible but real. He had the temperament to make it happen.

At that very moment, I knew, Obama’s office was the hub of his nascent 2008 presidential campaign, with press secretary Robert Gibbs hard at work from behind lowered blinds and media guru David Axelrod back in Chicago working the phones.

“This is the One,” Axelrod, whom I had known for decades, told me on the phone time after time.

At least as far as winning the presidency, Axelrod turned out to be right.

Now we know how well the Obama Answer worked. The bottom line: moderately well in domestic affairs, less well in the world, in a presidency that is likely to be regarded more as transitional than transformative, and that feels oddly more like the end of an era than the beginning of the one he promised.

The Obama Ledger

First the good news.

Obama’s Mr. Cool persona calmed the roiling markets in 2008, even before he took office. Like a good emergency room surgeon, he did what he had to do stop the bleeding, even if that meant violating perceived Democratic Party orthodoxy.

He gave the big money center banks what they needed. He boldly shored up the auto industry, rightly calculating that, if they failed, they would take the Midwest with them. (No good deed goes unpunished in politics, as the 2016 election showed.) He pushed for as much of a throw-it-against-the-wall stimulus package as he could push through Congress — again, rightly figuring that federal cash was more important than precision. Time was of the essence, and he acted.

Eight years later, all of that is a distant memory. The economic vital signs are strong overall: housing starts, unemployment rates, etc. Widening income and wealth inequality is a global phenomenon, but the American economy as a whole is in decent shape ― and “No Drama Obama” deserves the credit. Even Obamacare, as controversial as it is, has had a stimulative effect by putting money in low-income hands.

The Obama Administration was accused of being too easy on greedy big banks, but it was remarkably free of traditional corruption scandal, even if Republicans tried to make an issue of a few funky energy loans shoveled out as stimulus. Obama ran a clean operation.

Personally, in “This Town,” Obama and his family were seen as rather aloof, keep-to-themselves types. But the reasons in good measure have to do with devotion to family. They liked and needed to be with each other, and who could blame them?

In the face of unimaginable provocation, Obama and his family have acted with grace and class every moment of every day in public. Being president is hard enough; being the first African-American president is a monumental task of social tightrope walking. Obama’s step has been as surefooted as a mountain goat virtually every step of the way along. He slipped at times, but never fell.

The Obamas are devoted parents, and their children have stayed out of trouble as they have grown from little kids to near-adults. This is no small achievement.

The Obamas’ devotion to the arts, to healthy living, to intellectual life in Washington and the country, are worth noting, too ― easy to dismiss as trivial, but only by those who don’t realize just how valuable the role-modeling of a president and first lady can be.

The Obamas have lived a truly multicultural and multiracial public life in Washington, and in the world ― finally (and logically) opening doors to Cuba after 60 years, traveling extensively in Africa. Controversially, Obama even reached out to Iran, not out of naivete, but in hopes of reconnecting with what was once a great civilization and bringing it back into the world conversation.

A tech nerd by nature, Obama largely has left Silicon Valley alone to do what it does. He rode the rise of Facebook to the presidency, and his own experimentation with other forms of social and digital media have been good for what America does best: communicate.

The Drone President

But there is another side to the Obama ledger.

For one, he has enhanced and perfected a theory of distant cyber war that separates the American people from the consequences ― and even the sight of ― the hell we are creating and dealing with elsewhere.

Obama has been the Drone President, cutting back on troop deployments in favor of ultra-targeted drone killings on distant battlefields. Cool can become callous in such circumstances, and there is something chillingly clinical about it all.

He has cracked down in unprecedented ways on leaks in this same time ― but leaks in this new cyber era are the inevitable consequence of the secret, invisible way he has chosen to wage our wars. How else but through WikiLeaks and others is the public to know?

Yet, at the same time, it’s hard to know if the U.S. is winning the cyber wars raging with China, Russia and others. Judging from what happened in the U.S. election, it doesn’t seem like it. Obama’s administration has seemed too easy to penetrate.

In foreign affairs, Obama started with astronomical hope. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 11 days after taking office. He won it that October, four months after he delivered a speech in Cairo advocating outreach to the world of Islam. It seems never to have occurred to him to politely turn it down until he had accomplished something concrete. His acceptance said more than he realized.

And indeed as he leaves office today it is hard to argue that the world in general ― or the Middle East in particular ― are any closer to peace. In fact, the tectonic plates of international affairs are shifting at an accelerating and dangerous pace, and he seems at the mercy of events, not in any way in control of them.

Despite a supposed “pivot” to Asia, China is aggressively asserting itself in the region, including the South China Sea. Russia largely ignored and defied Obama’s modest efforts to rein in Vladimir Putin for grabbing Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine ― and Putin now has President Donald Trump to sanctify it all. NATO and Europe are living in fear of Russian expansionism and threats. And, if anything, Israel and the Palestinians are farther apart than ever on any kind of regional solution. Turkey is rapidly becoming a theocracy, and the theocracy that already exists in the region, in Iran, has not ended its ambition for Cyrus-like dominion just because it signed a nuclear non-proliferation deal.

Leaving Washington Divided

As for the other unbridgeable region in the world ― Washington, D.C. ― it is more divided than ever. It’s redder than ever, and bluer than ever, but not much in between.

Obama’s caution and dignified self-regard, however worthy as a way of carrying himself in public, made him precisely the wrong character to deal with the denizens of the Congressional Casbah.

He wasn’t much of a serious legislator during his relatively brief time in the Illinois state legislature ― the place bored him. He was a stone skipping across the lake during his four years in the U.S. Senate. More important, he was no fan of ― and not good at ― the naked horse trading of deal-making. He was closer in spirit to Woodrow Wilson, professor and teacher, than he was to, say, Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman.

From literally the first minute of his presidency, Republicans and conservatives declared their intent to stick fistfuls of spokes into the wheels of the Obama presidency. The proud Obama tried his hand at deal-making with them; they flatly refused. Worse, they were contemptuous and dismissive ― and there is nothing that Barack Obama despises more than to be disrespected.

His response was to firebomb Congress from afar (“YOU have a drink with Mitch McConnell,” he said drily), and pressuring the only people he had the power to pressure, Democrats, via his foul-mouthed chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel. He also relied on professional Democratic arm-twisters of a Congress that was, at the start of the Obama presidency, entirely in Democratic hands.

Everything from the stimulus package to Obamacare was passed on straight party-line votes ― as though America ran on an English-style parliamentary system, rather than the cross-cutting give-and-take of a presidential and congressional one.

The result was the Tea Party explosion of 2010 and the diminishment of the Democratic Party ever since. He leaves behind a party weak, divided and confused at the end of his presidency. But he never really cared about the party. He was above all that.

Obamacare has by some measures been a great success. If you spend a lot of money expanding Medicaid and offering subsidies for insurance, you are going to add a lot of people to the health care rolls. But the tax hikes to pay for it all are only now being fully phased in ― that was on purpose ― and Obama has set it up so that Republicans will have to cut benefits or agree to those hikes.

It was a clever, technocratic and political strategy, sold inside the Beltway by a new wave of policy nerds who could follow Obama’s strange mix of GOP theory (marketplaces) and LBJ-style government “progrums.” But the final result ignored two things: the GOP’s willingness to cut benefits and their furious opposition to any new taxes.

Since he was relying solely on Democrats anyway, perhaps Obama should have tried to sell a more sweeping reform, as suggested by the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Perhaps he should have landed with both feet on the banks after bailing them out

Probably yes, but that was never who Obama was. He didn’t want to risk losing it all on any one hand of poker. His dignity had to remain intact. And to the extent he was an ideologue at all, it wasn’t on policy matters such as these. In fact, he wasn’t a hell-for-leather progressive at all; he cared less about ideas (though he was one of the most intellectually adept presidents ever). He cared about winning, and in the end, he won far less than he thought we would.

That’s why his presidency has the feel of the end of an era ― the era of relatively accommodating, market-oriented Clintonism that took over the Democratic Party in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s election after the Ronald Reagan years.

Obama said he admired Reagan, but his presidency looks a lot more like that of George H.W. Bush who, in one of those cinematic symmetries of history, lies ill in a Houston hospital bed.

Some kind of movement of the 99 percent is going to follow Obama now, and Obama won’t be leading it.

The End Of The Road

In his final speech and press conference, he said that he is depending on a rising generation of Americans ― more tolerant, more varied in background ― to carry America to the next step in social and economic progress.

But in the meantime he is leaving behind in the White House a man who has taken Obama’s own personal/personality approach to politics and tripled down on it in a dangerous way.

Donald Trump’s approach to politics makes Obama’s seem modest in both senses of the word. Trump doesn’t need a Shep Fairey poster; he has buildings everywhere with his name emblazoned on them, and a Twitter stream that never stops. He doesn’t need professorial rationality; he has the big brag.

Had he been able to run for a third term, Obama said, he would have won ― a highly debatable notion, but one that springs from his massive self-confidence.

Calm and collected to the end, Obama talked like a wise dad at his last press conference. He said he told his daughters not to fret about Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton last fall. “The only thing that’s the end of the world is the end of the world,” he told them.

“We’re going to be OK,” he assured America and the world.

The somber, almost world-weary man I saw on the stage in the White House press room, now looking older than his years, was a far cry from the meteor I saw flash across the Senate sky 12 years earlier.

But it was good to see Barack Obama finish the job as he had begun: as a class act, on a stage that he owned, with a story about himself that was worth telling.

#barack obama #u.s. news #u.s. presidential elections #republican politics #senate

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lionheartwithnoking · 7 years ago

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(in response to y'all post) As someone who comes from a semi-southern area, I understand not wanting to be associated with the south. There's just a lot more outwardly redneck, racist, homophobes. People drive around on big trucks with Confederate flags and have no problem calling things "gay" or using the term "f**" "r****d" or "n****" It's a really negative stereotype but also it gets proven right still.

I get it, I really do. There isn’t any place in the south where you will be not looked at weird or questioned if you’re holding hands with the same sex.. Y’all is used by everyone here though, it isn’t specific to any type of oppression (for real though correct me if I’m wrong because I want to be educated), so I find it disheartening that someone correlates y’all to some horrible person with horrible beliefs and mentalities.. It sucks ‘cuz, like, the person (who posted) is using it as a gender-neutral term, but doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea about them because of how they talk? Because talking in a certain way gives off a certain vibe?? Using a certain vocabulary automatically makes you fit into this little bubble??? (Agh, I know I need to slow my roll here.) (But I get mad about this stuff because I have been told something about using “y’all” in a different situation.) It’s ironic, is all.

To be honest though, I forget that the east coast is half “south”. I guess I’m more west central?? Texas?? Houston-San Antonio/Austin area? These places are super democrat.

(Also, more people who are “less educated” use that term. At least in my experience as a “less educated” poc female surrounded by rich white people at my univeristy. It is never used in professional areas(some exceptions).)

Bold area from earlier: Yeah so when I was at debate nationals in Chicago, some assholes from fucking New York City started making fun of my baby first year for having a weird vocabulary, which wasn’t weird for me because she spoke exactly like me. Same school, same background, poor and shit, poc females. They asked her if she was gonna’ talk like that in our Public Forum debate, ‘cuz if she was, then it was going to be an easy win since she sounded so uneducated. The only word she was using was fucking “y’all” my dude. I’m not kidding. I was president at the time. Surprisingly, I almost got into multiple fights because of the bigotry I ran into every time I went to a competition that year. I found out that I shouldn’t talk the way I did, the way I do, when around people who have a higher advantage than me. So like, I can’t say y’all if I want to sound educated and I can’t say y’all if I don’t want to sound like some bigoted asshat. It’s annoying ‘cuz I’d have to speak “properly”. Sure, I can easily just adjust, but no fuck that because it makes sense to use y’all.

When I say “y’all”, the only thing I want people to notice is that I say “Y’all”. That yeah, I’m from the south, but that don’t mean that I’m an asshat though, do it? Like dang bro. I can’t even speak anymore lest someone get defensve about me bein’ from the south or some shit.

(Side note: Texas is a problem, like our legislation is so rigged lol so even though there is a purple-y trend going on in popularity votes we only ever see the red. Gerrymandering is all over us, look at the districts for congress omg it looks like a kid drew the border).

Also I love you I am not upset or anything lol I just like discourse and want to see what people think and thank you for talking to me!

I do agree with you, btw. Lots of people don’t want to be associated with the South. I just think I should show people that there are people here that are not meanies and are fighting that stereotype everyday.

More acknowledgement, more help.

#I hope I didn't come off as a rude ass #I'm sorry!!#I'm just a salty Texan #Ignore me #I love that you responded to me #I super duper appreciate it #ahh #I feel...#I feel like I was yelling at you #I swear it's how I talk #to people #all the time #I'm an asshole #kms #Ima leave now

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benjaminikuta · 8 years ago

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A Bastardization of George Washington’s Farewell Address

Sup.

Elections are coming up, and it’s time to figure out who we wanna give the keys to. I figure it might clear things up if I take a sec to explain why I’m not running.

Now, I care about the future, don’t get me wrong, and thanks for your trust so far. I just think me quitting is a good idea on all counts.

I’ve been president twice now, and I didn’t want to do it either time. I tried to quit the first time, but the country was in trouble and every single person around me begged me to stay on.

I’m glad to say we’re pretty much in the clear now and I can get out of here without getting screamed at or letting things fall apart completely.

I told you when I started what I thought of the job. All I’m gonna say is that I did my best to set up the government right, but the more I do this the more I realize how dumb I am, and so maybe it’s okay if I let someone else take over.

Before I go I’ve gotta thank y’all, for the awards and honors and stuff but more importantly for your supporting my projects to try to make everything right, even if they didn’t always turn out quite as well as I hoped. Remember, it’s hard to tell how things will turn out when people get all fired up, so thanks for sticking by me even when everything was going to hell. Y’all get the credit for anything good that came out of it, and by God you’d better keep taking good care of the Constitution and the lives of the folks who live here. As long as you do, we’ll be a pretty kickass country and the other guys will start noticing us.

I should shut up, but I care about you guys, so there’s some more stuff to cover. I’ve been doing some thinking and I’ve got a few things to say. You know I ain’t biased ’cause all I want is to leave, so you might wanna listen up.

Now, you all love freedom enough that no one thing here is too important.

You’re all happy that the government’s so together and unified on everything (and you should be — it’s why everything’s so good), but it ain’t always gonna be this way. All sorts of folks from both here and elsewhere are gonna try to divide it, make you lose faith in it, so please don’t sell this whole America thing short. Make it your top priority and don’t ever get in a mindset where you can let ANYTHING divide you.

You’ve gotta be Americans before all else. You’re for the most part the same religion and culture, and you’ve got the same goals, and you’ve only got what you do because you all worked together.

But even though this sounds good, when it comes to crunch time it’s easy to forget that in favor of stuff that seems more immediately important than sticking together.

The North and the South, as equals, help each other. The South gets machines and junk from the North, the North gets crops from the South. Also, the South’s got some nice boats which go out and fetch stuff we need from time to time. You’ve got a similar situation with the East and the West. The East supplies the West with what it needs, and the West gets a market for its crap as well as — once we get a navy in gear — protection on the Atlantic side. There’s really no way they could safely do what they’re doing without the folks to the East.

So, we all need each other and we’re all stronger when we’re together. Being a family also means we can get along a little better, unlike certain countries I might name who aren’t so well unified. This makes us stronger and protects our freedom, and if you wanna keep protecting it you’d better get along.

It should be obvious here that we should all try to keep ourselves together. Sure, it’s a big country, and we’re not sure if we can keep it all together, but what the hell? Let’s give it a shot and find out. It’d be stupid to call it off because we’re not sure if it’ll work. Since it’s obvious how much we have to gain from keeping ourselves together, we can safely say that anyone who tries to divide us, anywhere, hates America.

Let’s think about where those splits might come from. The big one is geography. North and South, Atlantic and West, people are gonna try to emphasize the differences. They’re gonna lie about what the other side wants, and they’ll try to make you hate each other when you should all be brothers. You saw just a bit ago how some folks were trying to stir up suspicion out West that we were trying to pull one over on them with the whole Mississippi thing, but you saw how thanks to Congress dealing with Spain and England they got everything they wanted in the end. So maybe they won’t be so quick to talk about jumping ship next time.

Government’s important, and it’s not always easy to stay together. You’ve figured this out, and that’s why you ditched the last idea and came up with this Constitution. We went over it all carefully, big and small, and it’s definitely something we can trust (we can even amend it if necessary!). Give it some credit, and if you disagree, change it — don’t just disobey. Otherwise it just screws things up.

Getting in the way of the law for the sake of power plays similarly screws things up. Playing that game creates groups just looking out for themselves, turning crazy splinter groups into a powerful force. Let this get too bad and you’ll probably have the country tossed back and forth wildly as the various parties with their pet issues fight for power, rather than nice, consensual, unified government.

Parties are probably gonna look like they’re helping with one popular issue or another, so you’re gonna want support them, but I bet the guys in charge of them will just turn out to be power-hungry assholes who want to run everything.

To keep things going nicely, quit fighting with the government and be careful with letting folk amend the Constitution to weaken it. Just, in general, give it all time and see how it works out before being quick to judge. It’s a big country and we can’t keep everyone safe without a little centralization.

I just said that parties are no good, particularly regional ones. But lemme go a step further and say ALL parties are a bad idea.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty much human nature to gather into little factions like this. It’s worst in the freeest countries, and they suffer because of it.

Control goes back and forth between one party and another, and they just get more and more pissed, and we’ve seen that get really bad in the past. But it also leads to terrible, controlling government and general suckage. This gets the people more angry, they get behind one party leader or another, and that guy just takes that support and does whatever he wants, screwing up the country.

I’m not talking about anyone in particular here, but this isn’t necessarially too far off, and it’s always gonna be a threat, so keep an eye out.

This division distracts us, enfeebles the government, it gets everyone riled up with jealousy and false alarms, it pits us against each other, and eventually creates riots and stuff. It also opens the door to other countries getting a hand in our system, since they can reach in through the party structure, and then we just become their puppets.

Now, there’s the idea that the parties are important to defend freedom and put the government in its place. That might even be true sometimes; when you’ve got a real Nazi in charge, you can afford to rally behind a party, but you shouldn’t like it, and you should dump it ASAP. And there’s always gonna be a feeling of opposition to whatever the government is, so be sure you know what you’re doing before getting all partisan, and be very careful to know when to drop it so you don’t just make the problem worse.

Also, make very sure that you keep all your politicians in their place. There’s this tendency to let all the power shift into one office, which inevitably creates tyranny (just look at human nature and how much we love power). If you just divide up the power, and get everyone to watch everyone else, we’ve seen both in the past and right here at home that things will work out pretty well. And if you think the powers aren’t laid out right, just go ahead and amend the Constitution. But be careful, because that’s an easy way to destroy everything. Make sure you’re not switching to something that, no matter how good it is for now, sucks in the long term.

Now, religion and morality are vital here, and it’s silly to say that patriotism could ever be more important than those. Politicians need to be pious and respectful folk; it would take forever to list all the ways that being a good politician is tied to being moral and religious. All you need to do is ask — without religion, how can we trust anyone who swears an oath? And be awfully careful before suggesting that we can be moral without religion. There’s a lot of philosophical junk out there, but the bottom line is we can’t possibly suggest that we can keep our morals as a country without religion.

So, virtue is the root of Government. So anyone who screws with the basis of the government is obviously a bad guy.

Make education of everyone a high priority, because the government will only be as smart as the average people are.

Public credit’s important too. Don’t run up debts during peacetime so you can afford to draw on them when there’s a problem — and then pay them back ASAP. This is the job of the politicians, but the people need to keep them in line. And remember, to pay debts you need cash, and you have to get the cash from somewhere, and there’s no way to do that which people will like. It’s a tough issue with no easy answer, so try to have a good attitude and pay up when necessary.

Try to stay at peace with everyone. Religion and basic decency both say to do this, so it should be a no-brainer. It might even turn out that God arranged it so if we’re nice to everyone, we’re better off in the end. Wouldn’t that be sweet? It sucks, though, that we tend to be jerks sometimes.

It’ll help a lot if you can avoid permanent rivalries and permanent alliances. Just try to get along with everyone when you can. Otherwise, you’re a slave to your policy, which may take you somewhere bad when the situation changes. Constantly being enemies with a particular country makes you stupid and reactive, and can even lead you to war when you really don’t need to. The government gets all involved in this, and one way or another it turns out badly. Permanent alliances are bad too, because they makes you give stuff up when you shouldn’t, cause jealousy, and divide loyalties of your own citizens, often with pretty bad results.

The idea of this kind of alliance should scare any real American because it lets foreign countries meddle with us. And remember, if a weak little nation (us) gets too attached to a big strong nation (anyone else) you know we’ll be stuck in that arrangement forever.

Now, foreign meddling is one of the worst threats around, and you should be constantly paranoid about it. But be careful to be fair and sensible about it, otherwise you’ll get so focused on one country or another that you slip into alliances with other countries. And then, like I said, you turn into tools.

The most important thing about commercial trade is to avoid getting politically tangled. We’ve obviously gotta keep the promises we’ve made, but in the future let’s try not to make new ones.

Europe has a whole lot of issues that don’t mean a thing to us. So they’re gonna be fighting, and we need to make sure not to get involved with the folks on either side. We might make some nasty enemies we don’t need to.

Since we’re out here across the Atlantic, we get to do our own thing. And if we just keep it together for a little while, we might be strong enough to stand up for ourselves. And if we’re tough enough, other countries won’t want to start anything, so the choice of whether to go to war or keep the peace will be up to us.

And why give up this great situation? Why give up our country just so we can live in someone else’s? Seriously — why get involved in Europe’s squabbles?

So, we’ve gotta avoid permanent alliances. We can’t break the promises we’ve already made — the government has to be honest just like anyone — but we don’t need to make more and we don’t need to actively make the current ones longer.

(Now, as long as we’re fighting a defensive war, alliances are okay in emergencies.)

In the same way that we should be politically friendly and stay on good and fair terms with everyone, we should be fair and open financially too. Just let everything go as it will without being biased. Let natural trade routes open up, and don’t try to mess around with the whole thing one way or another. Just keep and enforce the laws on trade and traders, and keep them flexible enough to change as the situation changes — always keeping an eye out for those foreign meddling. Never get used to paying one country or another, and never get used to expecting them to pay you.

I like you all. We’re friends. I’m not gonna hope that you’ll actually remember all this for long, but I can hope that every now and then people will look back on what I said and use it to calm down a crazy political party, remind us not to get tied up with other countries, or to try to expose phoney patriots. That’s the only payment I need — the hope that in return for my looking after you, you’ll look after yourselves.

You can look at my record. In my years in charge I’ve done my best to follow all the ideas laid out in this message.

Oh, and about the war still going on in Europe right now — check out what I said on 4/22/1793. It’s the outline of my principles on the subject, which I have followed as closely as I possibly could.

I gave it a lot of thought, decided that we could stay neutral, and then took reasonable steps to make sure that’s what happened.

You know, if you just look at basic common decency it should be pretty obvious what a good idea neutrality is.

As to the reasons it’s a good idea, you can probably come up with plenty on your own. For me, the main thing has been that we’re a pretty new country, just trying to get settled, and we don’t wanna interrupt that with war right away.

Now, I can’t think of anything I knowingly screwed up over the last eight years. But I’m sure I’ve made mistakes, and I pray that God helps to repair any harm they caused. And I hope that you’re understanding about them. I’ve spent 45 years working really hard for this country, and I hope that you won’t be too hard on my incompetences once I’m gone.

Speaking of being gone, I am really looking forward to this retirement. And I’m especially looking forward to retiring to live in a peaceful, free country of good laws under a good government — a government which is a good reward for our shared hardship, work, and love.

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newstechreviews · 4 years ago

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Rep. John Lewis, the longtime Georgia Congressman and icon of the Civil Rights movement, died after a battle with pancreatic cancer, the Associated Press reported late Friday. He was 80.

His death represents the end of an era, not only for Congress but for the country as a whole. A survivor of Alabama’s “Bloody Sunday” massacre in 1965 and a protegé of Martin Luther King Jr. who would ultimately inspire Barack Obama to enter public office, Lewis was one of the last living leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. A member of Congress for more than thirty years, he channeled all he had learned from his fight for equality as a young man into empowering youth and minority communities and encouraging activism. After the election of President Donald Trump he became, in his mid 70s, a self-defined active leader of the resistance movement, boycotting the 2017 inauguration and delivering an impassioned speech on the need to impeach the President last October.

“He was known as one of the most dedicated, principled, courageous Civil Rights activists of all,” Clayborne Carson, a historian and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, told TIME. “There were a lot of people who I apply those adjectives to, but I think he exemplified them as well or better than anyone else.”

Lewis’ death came months after he was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in December 2019, which his office said was discovered during a routine medical visit. “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement announcing his diagnosis. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.” Although he soon began treatments in Washington, he did not shirk his duties, both to Congress and the fight for equality. In March 2020 he returned twice to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where he reiterated the importance of voting—a right for which he had almost been killed fighting for half a century ago. “We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before,” Lewis told a cheering crowd. “I’m gonna continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before.”

Those sentiments illuminate how, in a sense, Lewis’ life is a microcosm—albeit an extraordinary one—of the evolution and struggles of African Americans in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States. Born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama to the son of sharecroppers, he came of age in the heart of a region where legalized racial inequities deemed him a second-class citizen from birth.

But the treatment he received only imbued him with a sense of determination to change things, an outlook largely shaped by observing the activism of his idol: Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis first met King in 1958 as an eighteen-year-old. Frustrated by his education in segregated schools, he had applied to all-white Troy University but had not heard back. He sought the advice of King in a letter, who promptly booked him a ticket to Montgomery to discuss his plight and whether he should push for admission to Troy University in an attempt to integrate his hometown’s institution. He had been inspired by King’s activism leading the Montgomery bus boycott, which took place less than 60 miles away from Troy, and frequently listened to King’s sermons that were broadcast on the radio for inspiration.

“I had grown up in rural Alabama very, very poor. I saw signs that said White and Colored…And I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, “Why? Why is that?” And they’d say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in trouble. Don’t get in the way.” But that day, listening to Dr. King, it gave me the sense that things could change,” Lewis wrote in LIFE Martin Luther King Jr.: 50 Years Later, a tribute to King half a century after his 1968 assassination.

Path to Civil Rights

Despite King’s assurances of support if he were to take legal action against the University, Lewis did not move forward because his parents were concerned it would endanger them. Instead, he went to Tennessee for college, graduating from American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1961 and later receiving a bachelor’s from Fisk University in 1967. Both universities were almost entirely African American.

During his time in the seminary Lewis began attending lectures on non-violent protests by James Lawson, a Civil Rights leader who was at the time a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. Inspired by Lawson, he started participating in sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, which began shortly after the famed sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was during these sit-ins that Lewis was first arrested.

In 1961, Lewis also joined the group of inaugural freedom riders traveling from the East Coast to the South while challenging interstate segregation. He was arrested in Birmingham and beaten at a bus stop in Montgomery, but neither event deterred his future involvement in the movement. Within two years, he had ascended to the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, chairing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helmed the movement’s student activism. He went on to become the youngest person to speak at the March on Washington in 1963. “How long can we be patient?” a young Lewis told the throng of thousands gathered in the nation’s capitol. “We want our freedom, and we want it now.”

Speaking to TIME in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the March, Lewis recalled how he was struck by the significance of the moment at the time. “I stood up and I said to myself, ‘This is it,’ ” he recalled. “I looked straight out and I started speaking.”

In March of 1965, in the midst of his tenure chairing the SNCC, Lewis was beaten by law enforcement while on the front lines of the 50-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to push for voting rights, in an infamous episode that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” King had planned to stay in Atlanta because aides feared for his safety, TIME reported in a cover story at the time. So Lewis and Hosea Williams, another civil rights activist, led the hundreds of marchers trying to reach the Edmund Pettus bridge. “We’re not going to jump,” Lewis later remembered telling Williams. “We’re not going back. We’re going to move forward.” And that’s what we did.”

They were quickly greeted by law enforcement officers, some on horseback, others holding clubs, all ordering them to halt. “Turn around and go back to your church!” State Police Major Cloud shouted into a bullhorn. ‘You’ve got two minutes to disperse!”

The marchers stayed put, and the troopers unleashed tear gas and starting beating them. Lewis sustained a fractured skull and was hospitalized. “I thought I was going to die on that bridge. I thought I saw death,” he recalled 50 years after the march, speaking at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, which had sheltered him after the violence. “I don’t recall how we got back across that bridge, back to this church…but I refused to die.”

Despite his injuries, Lewis joined King and the other activists who resumed the march two weeks later to Montgomery. The National Guard accompanied them to ensure their safety. Less than five months later, then-President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, banning racial discrimination from voting practices.

Lewis stepped down as SNCC chair in 1966, but he would go on to help legislate the change he championed. As Director of the Voter Education project from 1971 until 1977, he registered four million minorities to voter rolls until then-President Jimmy Carter appointed him Associate Director of the Federal Volunteer Agency ACTION.

Legendary Lawmaker

His advocacy for equal rights ultimately led him to the political arena, where he spent the final chapter of his life. After running unsuccessfully as the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s fifth district in 1977, he was elected to serve on the City Council in Atlanta. In 1986, he prevailed in his quest to serve as Congressman, defeating former State Representative—and fellow civil rights activist—Julian Bond in the runoff for the Democratic primary, and subsequently prevailing in the general election. He held this role until his death.

Known as “the conscience of Congress,” Lewis was respected, if not revered, by members on both sides of the aisle, a rare feat in today’s polarized environment. It was not uncommon for freshmen lawmakers of all stripes to be star-struck as they met Lewis for the first time.

The leadership skills Lewis learned at the height of the Civil Rights Movement lent themselves well to his roles in the Capitol. At the time of his death, he was the senior Chief Deputy Whip for the Democratic Party, and a member of the House Ways & Means Committee. In 2016, in the aftermath of a shooting at an Orlando night club that left 49 dead, he led his colleagues in a 25-hour sit-in to force Republicans, who controlled the chamber at the time, to vote on gun control after lawmakers had been dismissed. “The American people are demanding action,” he said at the time. “Do we have the raw courage to make at least a down payment on ending gun violence in America?”

Lewis’ leadership also displayed itself prominently off the floor. For years, he accompanied politicians from both sides of the aisle to Selma to ensure the power of “Bloody Sunday” would remain in the public’s memory. And when Lewis spoke, his colleagues usually listened — even if his views and choices diverged from their own. In 2008, when Barack Obama’s candidacy was still a long shot, Lewis announced he was switching his endorsement and backing the Illinois Senator over Hillary Clinton. The move was seen as crucial to cementing Obama’s support among African American members of Congress, who would be key to his victory over Clinton.

Lewis reflected on the significance of Obama’s presidency in an interview with TIME before the 2009 inauguration. “When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought—I never dreamed—of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected President of the United States,” he said.

In 2010, Obama awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Lewis was married for 44 years to Lillian Miles, who died in 2012. They have one son, John Miles.

Throughout his life and career, Lewis remained steadfast in his dedication to Civil Rights—and wrote eloquently about his worldview in an op-ed for TIME in 2018.

“I heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say on many occasions, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ I still believe we will get there,” he wrote in a quote he repeated while speaking out after the death of George Floyd. “We will redeem the soul of America, and in doing so we will inspire people around the world to stand up and speak out.”

#Blogger

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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Rep. John Lewis, the longtime Georgia Congressman and icon of the Civil Rights movement, died after a battle with pancreatic cancer, it was confirmed late Friday. He was 80.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Lewis’s death in a statement, saying, “Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, the Conscience of the Congress.

“John Lewis was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation – from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years.”

William Lovelace—Express/Getty ImagesJohn Lewis (second from left) joins American civil-rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King in a march from Selma, Ala., to the state capital in Montgomery on March 30, 1965.

Path to Civil Rights

Legendary Lawmaker

In 2010, Obama awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation’s highest civilian honor.

Doug Mills—The New York Times/ReduxBarack Obama, Amelia Boynton, right, Rep. John Lewis and the President’s family lead a march toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 2015, 50 years after “Bloody Sunday.”

Lewis was married for 44 years to Lillian Miles, who died in 2012. They have one son, John Miles.

Throughout his life and career, Lewis remained steadfast in his dedication to Civil Rights—and wrote eloquently about his worldview in an op-ed for TIME in 2018.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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smithya93-blog · 5 years ago

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Bird Brained- Chapter 7

Maze was cold.

Had he dreamt a live of luxury inside the Capitol's palace walls? He sat up, but his hands sank into the snow around him. It was spring, wasn't it? An open expanse of wintery tundra surrounded him. The chilly wind beat at him as he struggled to stand. The tundra was lit in an eery midnight glow, as if the sun had turned purple overnight. Where was he?

He began to walk, trudging through the uneven ground in what he hoped was south. He couldn't actually see the sun, where the light was coming from. Before him rose a steep structure, like a pyramid but with six sides. Maze couldn't remember the name for that, hexagon? It didn't matter, he approached it regardless of its geometric makeup hoping to get out of the freezing air.

He heard movement, the sound of feet marching.

Behind him figures moved on the horizon. Thousands, millions maybe if he had the time to count. Spanning miles, they lumbered along in single mindedness. The scene sent a wave of fear through him. He was defenseless, nowhere to hide and the hord was gaining on him quickly.

He ran.

As fast as his feet would carry him he ran south. His breath freezing in his lungs, the newly human legs unused to the strain of such movement. He needed to keep going, but he wasn't getting anywhere. The Hoard approached him closer and closed in by the second. He needed to get past that structure, toward the shadowy Divide on the horizon before him. He was so far away, the peaks barely rising over the frozen land. The sound of his blood beat in his ears. He would never reach it.

His vision went white.

The morning hit Maze like a ton of bricks. He had decided against sleeping in his nest and woke suffocated by bedsheets. Right couldn't hold onto being human in his sleep.

It was much too early for anyone else in the castle to be up. But after that dream, he didn't really want to go back to sleep anyway. He went to the showers. Opening the door revealed he was not alone, a cloud of steam blocking his vision.

"Morning." His voice was croaky and his eyes filled with sleep as he greeted his compatriot.

Maze could make out the figure of Ruit, despite having completely pressed himself against the shower wall with only a view of his backside. The shorter man was hiding his face wrapping his arms around himself. He glanced over at Maze with a look of almost fear in his eyes.

"You okay man"

"Please come back later."

"It's a communal shower.."

"I know but please" his voice cracked like he might cry.

"Are you okay... like for real?"

"I don't want to be seen naked"

"I am also naked it's not like I don't know what's going on down there."

"You actually don't so please leave."

This was unexpected. Watching Ruit interact with Lonan and Lekan he found him to be stubborn, brash and proud. But in this moment he looked.. for lack of a better word defenseless. He rewrapped the towel around his waist.

"I'll wait outside. Stop anyone else from coming in." the other man seemed to relax a little at the gesture.

"I would appreciate it."

Maze took his leave and waited until Ruit emerged. He paused beside Maze having gotten fully dressed inside the steaming room. "Don't say anything about this to anyone else."

"Why would I?"

"To compromise me"

"Compromise you? What does that even mean?" He cocked his head looking Ruit over, his short cropped hair was pushed up and messy from the shower and his clothes were cockeyed having been pulled on in the warm damp room.

"I'm.. It's complicated"

"Spell it out for me?"

Ruit scoffed and stormed off. That was an interesting exchange. He showered and got himself ready for the day without thinking about it again until he returned to his room. Ruit was rifling through his empty dressers. "You have no belongings?"

"What the hell.. Why would I?"

"I need blackmail"

"What is your problem"

He paced the room back and forth for a moment seeming to fight with himself.

"You want me to spell it out for you?"

"I don't particularly care either way..." he grabbed the clothes that had been brought for him and started to get dressed.

Ruit turned his back to Maze in embarrassment. "However, you seem to be uncomfortable and fighting some weird internal battle.. so if you want to talk about it.."

"I wasn't.. born a man" His fists were clenched staring at his feet.

Oh.. OH well now he felt like a jerk. He continued getting dressed quickly waiting in case Ruit wanted to say anything more. When he remained silent he clapped the other man on the shoulder.

"Just let me know if you need a shower guard."

"Eye for an eye."

"What?"

"Tell me a secret about you so we're even."

"What are you ten?"

"No I'm cautious"

He shook his head. This kid was unbelievable.

"Okay... um... I didn't leave the regalia to find myself.. I ran away."

Ruit turned around "Were you scared?"

Maze felt that was an opportunity to bond with the feelings Ruit was displaying so he nodded.

"I still am, about a lot of things.. but I've decided to stop running."

Ruit seemed satisfied by that response.

"That's kind of humiliating"

"Yeah, so it would suck if that got out"

"You guard the shower and I'll guard how much of a pussy you are"

"Bold words coming from you."

Ruit laughed smacking his shoulder and headed out to the balcony. "Thanks."

"Whatever"

He jumped down to his own terrace using the bedsheet rope he had climbed up with. The kid could have used the door, but he was quite stubborn.

At dinner that night Ruit took the seat beside Maze eating silently.

Maze was growing fond of court. Hanging onto Lekans shoulder as they debated points on how the region should or shouldn't be run. The Guards and Ulyss weren't around to baby or smother Lekan. The prince was in his element here. Arthula had given Lekan the reins to hold court today while she spent her attention on other matters. Matters that she had been incredibly cryptic about.

"I disagree with this motion." a congressman stood addressing Lekan informally "The idea that taxes should be staggered based on income alone is preposterous. The upper class already have far too many taxes to deal with as it is, layering on more based on their income would surely knock down funding to charitable causes."

Lekan looked up at the man bemused. "Oh? You think so, I believe that siphoning a portion of funds from the uber wealthy will help to steady the economy. Lower income families are noted to spend more often than the wealthy."

"The wealthy are spending their money on taxes, for their homes, and accoutrements.. Things of high value that bring culture and pride to our region.. Not five pieces for groceries here and there" The man laughed "It is foolish to think that-"

"But they don't bat an eye at buying groceries." Lekan interrupted the man holding up his hand. "The upper class spend their money on frivolous things because they don't have to worry about feeding their families. Why would it make sense to tax people who don't have the money for it?"

"Well their taxes go to paying for their healthcare and education. It's not like they don't have the opportunity to make more money, if the tree grows fruit too sweet it will eventually rot."

"Maybe, but these are people, not apples. And I don't believe it is right to tax people more than is appropriate for their level of income." "The wealthy have worked hard for their money" The man was starting to shout. "Why would you steal from them what they have worked so hard for?" "Inheritance requires no work." Lekan sighed.

"If an estate draws in no income then they would run out of funds!" "Sounds like a rotten apple to me" a few members of congress chuckled at the princes remark.

"You are mistaken young man." The congressman leaned over the table belittling the soon to be king with his mother out of the room. "These people come from generations of hard working individuals who wanted the rest of their line-"

"That's enough Gorem, I hear your concerns but it sounds like a selfish desire to hold onto money that could be distributed to public works and fund the growth of our kingdom." He sat back. "It would do you some good to live off of the wage of a common farmer or shopkeep, you know."

"As I stated before, the people have ample access to means to improve their lives." The man was getting angrier, his chubby face blossoming red with his intent. "Laying heavier taxes on the rich would ruin the economy, without their trade with the east and south we as a country could fall under!" "I fail to see how purchasing a hand painted portrait of yourself contributes to our economy, especially if you belittle the artist into working for less than their worth." Lekan folded his arms. "I know of your background in case you forgot."

The man sputtered at the direct insult. "What would you know of that! You are a child. Your inability to hear reason will be your downfall."

Maze preferred to keep himself quiet during court, but this guy was crossing a line. He squawked a warning. Standing up on Lekans shoulder and squawking again.

"Disgusting bird."

Lekan remained stony faced reaching up to cover his beak, silencing him. "My crow is not easily riled up like this, I don't think he agrees with you" a few more muffled chuckles arose from the congress.

Gorem huffed "Well if we are all taking advice from birds now we might as well follow the desert vulture and pick off corpses." He slammed his fist on the table.

Lekan ruffled Mazes chest feathers trying to get himself to relax. "I fail to hear any reason in your argument aside from self interest." Lekan tapped the arm of the chair as the man fumed. "Twenty pieces means more to a lower class citizen than you. If you both have to pay the price of twenty pieces in taxes, you will be fine. Your income will be stable, and you can still afford your paintings and accoutrements. A regular civilian may have to forgo a meal or medication." "The upper class deserve to be treated as such!"

"We need to feed people, and see they are taken care of. The people come first."

"And what do we do when everyone in the kingdom just gives up knowing their precious king will be happy to hand feed them for the rest of their lives. Where is the restraint!"

"Allowing people to prosper in their given interests is what brings about progressive action and gives people the desire to work where they like.. Instead of following a trail of money to excess or exhaustion." Lekan stood to his full height. Not his usual smaller that he was humbling posture. His full magnificent height "I would rather my people live comfortably within their means and be able to afford to live the way they choose than-"

"YOU FOOL you are not even king and yet you sit here and spoil your region to ruin. You are still a child not yet fit to be a ruler." He fumed leering down at Lekan. "You think that giving the people everything on a platter will fix their problems?"

"I want people to have the funds and resources to fix their problems. They will contribute if you give them a society worth contributing to!"

"A society where excelling financially is frowned upon because you are taxed in excess! Unbelievable your smothering charity will-" One of the Congresswomen reached out to try and quell the angry speaker. He retaliated with a curt slap to her hand.

That was the last straw for Lekan. "You may disrespect me to make yourself feel better, but you do NOT under any circumstances disrespect your fellows. I want you out of this courtroom and a replacement from your city appointed immediately."

The man swerved to retaliate but found himself face to face with the screaming crow.

"{GET OUT}" oh that one came out easy. "{GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT}"

The startled man backpedaled over his chair and onto the floor. He departed the room as quickly as his feet could carry him.

"Court is dismissed" Lekan left the room before the congress had finished bowing out.

It wasn't often Lekan needed to blow off some steam but he found himself in the fencing hall before long, practicing parries, thrusts and forms. The crow had taken off after seeing that the fight had died down and the threat had alleviated.

He felt disgusted with himself for getting so heated over the debate. This is why he hated congress, most were decent and held pleasant argument conceding when their point was overruled, some were just.. so aggressive. He wasn't object to new ideas and changes to law by any means but he held unwavering values that his people came first.

As he practiced his forms he tried to think of something else. The other pressing matter that was becoming annoyingly important. This business with Ulyss was starting to take over his life. He personally wanted to find someone special. Someone who meant more to him than anything else in the world. Their recent date lead them into the city to watch the lights festival. A considerate and emotional date. His face grew warm at the memory of Ulyss moving in at the crescendo of the festival, and the soft kiss they shared under the light of the fireworks. It hadn't been his first but it was certainly memorable.

Unfortunately Ulyss was not memorable. There wasn't anything in him that felt a particular way about the other man. He wanted the beautiful romance his father and mother had. Someone who brought him reprieve from tense moments like these and broke up his monotonous daily life.

He sat on the worn mats of the gym taking a break, had he ever even met anyone that made him feel that way? Was he idolizing this idea of the perfect man too much. What if he found someone and they were just using him for a step up in the world, as Ulyss was clearly aiming for.

Maze came to mind.. he hadn't stopped thinking about that elusive stranger since his sudden arrival into his life. He seemed to be hard to track down. Never in his chambers, always in some other part of the castle but never lounging. Its like he took sprints around the halls to see how quickly he could vanish from room to room. Maze was a complete mystery to him. He was ever intrigued by the mans jovil and sarcastic demeanor. It had to have been him that night he was attacked, whether it was a hallucination or something else. His presence seemed to swim in the back of his mind at all times.

"Sparring alone is kind of pointless isn't it?"

He spun around to see the devil himself perched in the doorway. Lekan was glad to see that someone had been bringing him new clothes. His long black shirt dipping down to show, at length, his chest. It seemed to be way too big for him, but it was almost endearing. He noticed the bandages wrapping the man's chest were gone. Lupit was doing a good job in patching him up at least.

Maze noticed the gaze "Your sister lent me something of yours to wear.. she insisted it after she saw my feather cloak for the third time." He laughed "She's entertaining"

"You've been making friends with my family?" He pushed the thought of Maze wearing his old clothes from his mind quickly.

Maze shrugged "Didn't intend on it. She sort of pushed her help onto me." He picked up a spare saber from the holder to the side of the ring.

"Would you like a partner who only knows how to fight with a longsword?"

"You... use a longsword"

Maze nodded. "I find them funny."

"Why?"

"they're like regular swords but big."

"how is that funny?"

"I don't know.. why did they feel the need to make a sword size in between regular and broad."

Lekan laughed. " But your arm is broken?"

"Well it's a good thing I'm a lefty and fencing only requires one hand."

Lekan shrugged and got into position. "Should I explain the rules?"

"Please."

They spared for a while, Maze making an excellent fool of himself and losing many times. He was impressed by the giants power but mostly with the speed and precision in which he was able to control himself. He would be a terror on the battlefield.

When Maze finally called uncle he was dripping with sweat. "Wow, who would have thought a giant like you would be so fearsome in the ring."

Lekan laughed "Is it that surprising?"

Maze shrugged "You interact with things like the slightest gust of wind might break them. But here your like.. some kind of.." he paused trying to think of the right word.

Lekan had taken a seat beside him casually pulling his hair down to retie the bun. Maze watched the moment starstruck. His nimble fingers untangling the curls and corralling the falling bronze strands away from his dark glistening skin. The way his focus remained locked onto Maze even after sparring, those summer eyes so reminiscent of the valley spilling out at the feet of the Great Divide. The simple everyday moment felt like he was being given the opportunity to watch a god walk across water.

Maze was not good at fencing, at all. He was too forward rushing and didn't take any time to think about his actions. Just goal oriented on scoring the point, and yet Lekan found the engagement enjoyable. Maze responded well to criticism and by the end of the match he might have been considered an armature fencer. Even with a broken arm. The man took a seat on the floor commenting on Lekans ferocity in the ring.

Lekan knew his demeanor changed when he was in a match. He just felt less compelled to be gentle. It was the one time he could really let loose. He sat beside Maze listening to him as he spoke. His voice sounded as if he had used it loudly and gruffly most of his life. Like shouting was his primary source of communication. Despite that, the sound was oddly pleasant to listen to. The way birds singing in the morning could be taken to be annoying but also charming and beautiful. He had this way of speaking with bland humor that Lekan found incredibly appealing. He wanted to hear what Maze thought of the word. How his outlook on life left him in such a position of apparent apathy and sense of futility.

"You interact with things like the slightest gust of wind might break them. But here your like.. some kind of.." he paused for a moment seeming to scrutinize Lekan intensely before sighing out.

"Like a god"

Oh. That wasn't a new one but, it sounded so much better coming from his lips. Lekan laughed it off feeling the heat in his cheeks rising. "Oh.. I don't know about that."

Maze shrugged, "It's my compliment you don't get to decide how accurate it is."

Lekan waved his hand.

"I'm serious."

The prince went quiet playing with the blunted tip of his saber. "What do you think you've found here.. In this castle." Maze didn't know him. That was too high a compliment for him. He really didn't deserve that kind of-

"I've found someone who.. makes me want to abandon my apathetic sensibilities."

Okay now Maze was just talking out of his ass. There's no way Lekan would believe that.. but it wasn't a lie. "I might.. not know much about you yet, but I listen. To the people around you, to your family. To you." He shrugged, "I.. want to know everything about you" so he could stop pretending that he didn't already.

Lekan nodded "Okay.. I can believe that.. but I do believe you are idolizing me.. I am not.." he shook his head. "Nevermind.." he stood stretching. "This was fun.."

"Tomorrow?" Maze requested eagerly.

"Tomorrow?"

"Will you show me more tomorrow? I enjoyed the impromptu lesson" Maze stood with him ignoring the bead of sweat he watched trail down Lekans chest. The prince laughed nodding.

"Sure tomorrow." Maze beamed and Lekan felt a part of him melt. He hadn't seen that look from the newcomer and it was.. breathtaking.

----

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 5 years ago

Text

“Frontline: The Resurrection of Rev. Moon”

youtube

Frontline starts at 40 seconds

Broadcast January 21, 1992

Eric Nadler, reporter. Written and produced by Rory O’Connor. Rory O’Connor is CEO of Globalvision New Media, producers of MediaChannel.

Report on the Unification Church – now known as The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. The organization was founded the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Since his death in 2012 it has been led by his widow, Hak Ja Han.

___________________________________________

Transcript

Introduction

00:50 Reverend Sun Myung Moon has been spending vast sums of money lately, investing in tourism and industry in North Korea, and trying to buy a university in Bridgeport, Connecticut for $50million. But Moon’s objectives have remained a mystery. Now Frontline has completed a revealing year-long investigation of Moon. “Excuse me” [says a man as he closes a door on a cameraman.] According to a highly placed source in the Unification Church, a top priority mission was to stop this report from airing. Tonight the story of Reverend Moon. Fifteen years ago Moon was best known as a cult leader, but today Moon presides over a financial, political and media empire. Frontline investigates the extent of his power and the ultimate sources of his funding. Paul Weyrich: “Here is what disturbs me; it is the lack of knowledge of who is behind it, where the funding is coming from, and what are their ultimate objectives.

Tonight, The Resurrection Of Reverend Moon

02:20 (Soundtrack) Rally: “USA, USA, USA!” Narrator: On February 9, 1991, in Rapid City, South Dakota, more than a thousand people rallied in support of U.S. troops fighting in the Persian Gulf. Narrator: The rally was sponsored in part by a group of local veterans. Dianne Petersen was the rally’s principal organizer. Petersen: “I’m a vet myself and I have, I had a sister over there and I really just wanted to do something in support of the troops…So I organized what I called the Little Yellow Ribbon Walk… Petersen walking in parade: “It’s great, many more than I expected.” Petersen: “And I was approached by the American Freedom Coalition, who told me they had a rally planned for the same day and wanted to merge with me.” Narrator: The American Freedom Coalition was a group few people in Rapid City had heard of – and one citizen, Marv Kammerer, was curious. Kammerer: “About the same time I noticed a billboard on the east side of Rapid City that said Support Our Troops, Join the Freedom March, and on that same sign was the American Freedom Coalition…You know when people buy billboards, it takes money, and local groups, don’t spend that kind of money … I get to thinking, ‘What is this?’ I ask my Congressmen and Senators and they don’t tell me. They don’t give me the information. So I go to the library and I find some interesting things. The American Freedom Coalition is an extension of the Unification Church Moonies for short.” Mazzio: “And to find out the Unification Church is behind it, that sort of, you know, sort of threw me. Um, I say to myself, ‘What are they trying to gain from this?’ Because everybody’s heard of the Unification Church. We’ve all heard of the Reverend Moon. What’s he got behind it?” Petersen: “I felt a little bit abused because…. I felt I was used, my influence with the veteran’s organizations was probably a little bit used.” Kammerer: “The vets did not know who they were associated with and that is their own damn fault. One has to be very careful when people start waving the flag, finding out really what is behind it and what are their motives. We have a weakness in this country to almost give away the bank, if someone waves a flag high enough and long enough. Especially if he packs a Bible.”

Narrator: The day before the Rapid City rally, the 18th annual Conservative Political Action Conference was underway in Washington. Part cocktail party, part political bazaar, part serious examination of the issues, its sponsors included pillars of the American right, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union. There was also the American Freedom Coalition. Narrator: Robert Grant, president of the American Freedom Coalition, spoke at a conference banquet. In his remarks, Grant announced that the AFC was sponsoring pro-Desert Storm rallies not just in South Dakota, but in all fifty states. Grant: “With Governors and Congressmen and Senators and veterans organizations working together to send a message across the seas to Saddam Hussein and the men and women of Desert Storm.” Rev. Jackie Roberts: “Once again, let’s say God bless America! (People answer ‘God Bless America’) C’mon God bless America!” Narrator: The American Freedom Coalition’s Desert Storm rallies are only the latest effort by Sun Myung Moon to influence American public opinion. Moon’s Unification Movement has long supported the projection of American military power overseas. (Soundtrack) Song: “With a mission to fly and a job to be done. He’s missing his wife, and his children.” Narrator: Moon has also consistently promoted a conservative political agenda in the United States. His efforts have not gone unnoticed at the White House. Douglas Wead was a Special Assistant to President Bush responsible for liaison with conservative groups. Wead: “I’d say right now there are probably two groups among conservative organizations that really have an infrastructure, that have grassroots clout Concerned Women of America would and the American Freedom Coalition would.” Narrator: During the 1988 election, the AFC printed and distributed 30 million pieces of political literature, including these glossy voter scorecards. Wead: “I think the scorecards and some of the independent literature published had an enormous effect. In fact, we had huge notebooks filled with published materials from a wide variety of organizations. The best was probably the AFC’s. It was by far the slickest and the finest produced material. And when that doesn’t cost you anything, and it is not charged against the campaign and is widely distributed to mailing lists across the country, that has a very important impact.” Narrator: The AFC’s activities have prompted renewed questions about Sun Myung Moon’s involvement in American politics. The AFC calls itself a grassroots organization committed to supporting conservative causes. AFC leaders deny that their group is an “appendage” of Moon’s movement, and they are sensitive about the issue. When we asked Robert Grant to discuss AFC ties to Moon, he refused. In a letter to FRONTLINE, Grant stated “I see no point in speaking with you either on camera or off camera.” And when Frontline reporter Eric Nadler visited AFC headquarters, no one would talk. Nadler: We were just hoping that someone could speak to us. Receptionist: Not at this time Nadler: Not at any time, apparently. Receptionist: Thank you. Nadler: Have a nice day Narrator: We had hoped to ask Robert Grant about allegations that the AFC is violating federal law; namely, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Just before World War Two, Congress passed the act, concerned that Japanese and German interests in the U.S. were influencing American public opinion. The act states that any organization involved in political activities and controlled or directed by a foreign principal must register with the Justice Department. It must also report on its activities and provide detailed accounts of its foreign sources of funding. Narrator: Is the American Freedom Coalition a foreign agent? In 1989, Robert Grant wrote in the Washington Post that more than $5 million one third of the AFC’s money came from “business interests of the Unification Church.” Church officials say that their money comes from overseas primarily from Japan. Narrator: Media analyst Brent Bozell is a member of the AFC national policy board. Bozell: “If it were to come out that what the AFC is doing is being done at the direction of Reverend Moon, it would lose its fifty chapters overnight. That allegation has been out there since the day that AFC was formed and it hasn’t stuck because nobody has come up with the smoking gun that he’s done it.” Narrator: But Moon’s influence over the AFC is underscored by this 1988 letter FRONTLINE obtained from a source who once worked within the Moon Organization. AFC President Robert Grant, writing to Reverend Moon, thanks him for investing heavily and “helping to bring the AFC into being.” Grant concludes by telling Moon, “Without your leadership, vision and the support of your devoted followers, the AFC would not exist.” Narrator: The last time most Americans paid attention to Sun Myung Moon was nearly a decade ago. These are the images many still retain of Moon and the “Moonies,” as his followers once called themselves: mass weddings of complete strangers chosen as mates by Moon; flower-peddling in the street; and repeated allegations of mind control and brainwashing. Parent before Congress: “Who can parents turn to when they realize their children have been innocently enslaved by Moon?” Young woman at press conference: “Within one weekend I was totally, my mind was totally coerced into leaving home, into leaving my parents, into dropping out of school, into being, thinking that I was working for God.” Narrator: A federal investigation into Moon’s finances led to a 1982 trial on charges of conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Moon/Pak: “I must tell you that I am innocent.” Narrator: As a convicted felon, Moon was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. During his 13 months in prison, he faded from public consciousness. (Soundtrack) Moon: “Distinguished leaders, religious leaders…” Narrator: But Moon has been quietly gaining strength in the United States ever since. He still hints that he is the Messiah – most recently before five hundred religious leaders in San Francisco in August,1990. Narrator: While Moon remains a controversial spiritual leader, his Church in America has a surprisingly small following, estimated to be no more than five thousand members. Narrator: His Movement, once labelled a cult, is now more accurately described as a conglomerate. From media operations in the nation’s capital… To substantial real estate holdings throughout the United States… And from large commercial fishing operations… To advanced high-tech and computer industries, a Fifth Avenue publishing house, and literally dozens of other businesses, foundations, associations, institutes, and political and cultural groups… Moon and his money have become a force to be reckoned with. Whelan: “All we know is they are spending a great, great deal in this country.” Narrator: James Whelan was the editor and publisher of a Moon-financed newspaper, The Washington Times. Whelan: “Probably more on influence and the obtaining of influence, of power, than of any organization I know of in this country, and that includes the AFL-CIO, that includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that includes General Motors, that includes anybody.” Narrator: How and why did Sun Myung Moon amass such power and influence? The search for answers begins here in Korea, nearly six thousand miles from America’s shores… (Soundtrack) CONGREGATION SINGING Narrator: The Unification faith is a new religion. It traces its origins back to Easter Sunday, 1936, when Jesus Christ supposedly appeared and asked the sixteen-year-old Moon to complete God’s work on Earth. Moon’s evangelical mission eventually landed him in a North Korean labor camp, where he claims he was tortured repeatedly. Moon escaped, and according to Church lore, he marched south for weeks, carrying a wounded follower on his back. In 1951, in this shack made of U.S. Army ration boxes, Moon established his first church. Narrator: After the Korean War ended, several young military officers, including one named Bo Hi Pak, converted to the new Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. As the fifties ended, Moon and his missionaries left Korea to spread their faith. Their earliest success came in Japan. Narrator: There the Church made political alliances and quickly established itself as much more than a religious movement. Junas: “1960 really represents the founding moment of the Moon organization as a political entity…” Narrator: Daniel Junas is the author of Moon Rising, a forthcoming history of the Unification Movement. Junas: “But now grafted onto that you began to have a whole set of political operations, and this is where Moon really developed his theocratic ideology, where politics would be married to religion.” Narrator: 1960 was a pivotal moment in U.S.-Asian relations. The Japanese and American governments signed a treaty allowing the Americans to maintain military bases in Japan and providing the Japanese access to America’s capital and technology. Eisenhower: “The signing today of the treaty of mutual cooperation and security between Japan and the United States is truly a historic occasion.” Narrator: The pact also allowed American forces in Japan to be equipped with nuclear weapons. (Soundtrack) Newsreel Track: “In Japan, left-wing political and labor organizations step up the tempo of their protests against the Japanese-American security pact.” Narrator: Thousands stormed the gates of the Japanese Parliament, enraged at the military concessions to the Americans. Narrator: Japanese business and political leaders moved to quell the unrest, as brigades of right-wing students staged counter-demonstrations. Sun Myung Moon’s Japanese followers soon took to the streets as political activities on behalf of conservative business interests became central to the Unification Movement. Narrator: When Moon’s missionaries came to America in the Sixties, their activities centered on Capitol Hill and college campuses. Junas: “When Moon came to the United States, his organization would play much the same role in American society that it was already playing in Japan and South Korea. During the Vietnam war, Moon worked to build a right-wing student movement as a counterweight to the left-wing student movement that was objecting to American military involvement in Vietnam.” Narrator: And in America, as he had in Japan, Moon began to move among the political elite: From Dwight Eisenhower… to Strom Thurmond… to Richard Nixon… Moon has glad-handed and corresponded with an astonishing array of political figures. Narrator: Moon sought to influence the American political agenda by pouring more than a billion dollars into media. Warder: “Moon looked on the media as almost the nervous system for a global empire.” Narrator: In the 1970’s, Michael Warder became one of the most important Americans in the Unification movement. Warder says he had close contact with Moon for six years. Warder: “Moon was the brain, and the media are to be, or were to be, the communications vehicle for his body politic surrounding the globe.” Narrator: Warder was responsible for managing “News World,” Moon’s daily newspaper in New York City. Warder: “Moon wanted total control of the media, so there would be no independent media with journalistic integrity. It would be a media totally loyal to Moon.” Narrator: In 1977, Minnesota Democrat Donald Fraser launched the so-called “Koreagate” investigation, in part a probe into Moon’s relationship to the Korean CIA and the buying of political influence on Capitol Hill. Using its own media, Moon’s organization struck back, in an all-out effort to discredit Fraser. “Truth Is My Sword” film track: “Mr. Fraser follows a far-leftist political line and is a well-known opponent of the Korean government. For him, Koreagate was a golden opportunity.” Narrator: One of Moon’s media weapons was this film, Truth Is My Sword. Moon’s aide Bo Hi Pak led the charge. (Film Track) Bo Hi Pak: “What if you are an agent of influence for Moscow here on the Hill? If these things are true, then the government of the United States itself is in grave danger. America’s very survival and the security of the free world are at stake.” Warder: “Moon wanted a whole series of articles going after poor Congressman Fraser, who was heading up the congressional investigations there. And so we would assign reporters to try and dig up all the dirt we could find on Congressman Fraser, and of course I would say to Moon, I said, ‘On one hand, we’re supposed to be doing this but on the other hand, we’re competing with the New York Times. And so there’s matters of credibility here.’ And he would, you know, bluster and get angry at these kinds of things and say, ‘Just do what I’m ordering you to do and don’t ask so many questions,’ and that sort of thing. And of course Colonel Pak would reinforce these messages from Moon.” (Film track) Bo Hi Pak: “I can not help but believe that you are being used as instrument of the devil. You, yes you, an instrument of the devil. I said it. Who else would want to destroy man of God but the Devil?” Fraser: “I didn’t appreciate the accusations they were making against me. They were absolutely false. I think they knew they were false.” Narrator: Donald Fraser is now the Mayor of Minneapolis. Fraser: “…and the fact they would make them in a public forum like that I was really totally turned off and disgusted.” (Film track) Pak: “So history might remember Donald Fraser, if it remembers him at all…” Warder: “The Fraser subcommittee investigation in fact in a strange way helped the Movement, because for members it became this cosmic struggle of good against evil, of God against Satan.” (Film track) Pak: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thank you Mister Chairman.” Warder: “From the standpoint of the members, it was Jesus taking on the Roman empire. It was big. It was cosmic.” Narrator: The Fraser Committee’s final report said Moon was the “key figure” in an “international network of organizations engaged in economic and political” activities. The Committee uncovered evidence that the Moon Organization “had systematically violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking, currency, and Foreign Agents Registration Act laws.” It also detailed how the Korean CIA paid Moon to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run a pro-South Korean propaganda effort. Narrator: Michael Hershman was the Fraser Committee’s chief investigator. Hershman: “We determined that their primary interest, at least in the United States at that time, was not religious at all, but was political. It was an attempt to gain power and influence and authority.” Narrator: The Fraser Committee recommended that the White House form a task force to continue to investigate Moon. That never happened. By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, the idea of investigating Sun Myung Moon’s political activities was a dead issue. Narrator: Ronald Reagan’s Presidency was hailed as the beginning of a conservative revolution. Activists from all over the United States came to the nation’s capitol. Narrator: Ironically, with the revolution seemingly won, traditional sources of money for conservative politics such as direct mail fundraising began to dry up. But Moon, a VIP guest at the inauguration, soon became a major funder of Washington’s new conservative establishment. Narrator: Brent Bozell was one of the young Reagan Revolutionaries. Bozell: “When the Moonies entered the political scene in the early Nineteen Eighties…one school of thought said that they were a good organization, and that because of their anti-communist commitment, conservatives ought to work with them. ” Narrator: David Finzer was another conservative activist who came to Washington in the early eighties. Finzer says he took more than four hundred thousand dollars from the Moon organization. He recalls one project the money paid for. Finzer: “When the Left would run an anti-South Africa campaign, we’d run an anti-Soviet campaign. We’d say, ‘Okay, you want to disinvest from South Africa? Fine. Let’s also disinvest from the Soviet Union.’ And it was, it was a successful, it was a pretty successful campaign. We did some neat stuff they’d build shanty towns, we’d build gulags around them…” Narrator: Moon’s most expensive political project was a newspaper, The Washington Times. Whelan: “Washington is the most important single city in the world. If you can achieve influence, if you can achieve visibility, if you can achieve a measure of respect in Washington, then you fairly automatically are going to achieve these things in the rest of the world. There is no better agency, or entity or instrument that I know of for achieving power here or almost anywhere else than a newspaper.” Narrator: The Washington Times had an immediate impact. The President of the United States, seen here with Times President Bo Hi Pak, said it was the first paper he read in the morning. Weyrich: “Moon had money and he was willing to spend it.” Narrator: Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of the Moral Majority, refuses to take Moon’s money. But he hails Moon’s newspaper as an antidote to its liberal competitor, The Washington Post. Weyrich: “The Washington Post became very arrogant and they just decided that they would determine what was news and what wasn’t news and they wouldn’t cover a lot of things that went on. And The Washington Times has forced The Post to cover a lot of things that they wouldn’t cover if The Times wasn’t in existence.” CNN Crossfire Open: “From Washington…” Narrator: Soon Washington Times columnists found even greater exposure on television. CNN Crossfire Open: “On the right, Pat Buchanan…” Bozell: “If The Washington Times did not carry the conservative columnists that they carry like a Pat Buchanan, like a Bill Rusher, like a Mona Charen I wonder if the television community would be aware of them and would tap them to use them in television.” Narrator: By 1984, despite his paper’s growing influence, James Whelan was unhappy. Whelan: “When we started the paper there was never any question that it would in any fashion project the views or the agenda of Sun Myung Moon or the Unification Church all to the contrary. We said, ‘Look, we are going to put a high wall in place. It is going to be a sturdy wall. And it will divide us from you.'” Narrator: But Whelan’s wall of editorial independence was often breached. Whelan: “Moon himself gave direct instructions to the editors…Who in fact calls the shots? Ultimately Moon calls the shots…. Whelan (at press conference): “The Washington Times has become a Moonie newspaper.” Narrator: Whelan resigned. Times spokesmen said the dispute was really over money. Whelan was later replaced by former Newsweek editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, seen here in a Moon-sponsored film. De Borchgrave: “When I was in Europe recently, I was delighted to hear The Washington Times quoted every hour on the hour on the Voice of America and on the BBC two worldwide radio networks that happen to reach hundreds of millions of people.” Narrator: De Borchgrave has consistently denied taking orders from Moon. But the man who ran the editorial pages under de Borchgrave tells a different story William Cheshire. Chesire: “I protested to de Borchgrave. I went up to his office when I saw this happening, I told him this was unethical, improper, unprofessional, and it ought to stop. Also, it was dumb.” Narrator: Cheshire and four others resigned after de Borchgrave ordered an about face on an editorial critical of the South Korean government. Chesire: “I said, ‘Arnaud, we have a problem.’ He said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I said. ‘The problem is you’ve conferred with the owners of this newspaper, come back downstairs and demanded a reversal of editorial policy on their say so.” Narrator: Questions about foreign control of The Washington Times have persisted for years. Other journalists, including Lars Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, have called for a Justice Department investigation to determine if the Times violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Nelson: “The Justice Department doesn’t seem to want to know, and I’ve never gotten a clear answer from them as to why they don’t want to know.” Nadler: “What have they told you?” Nelson: “They’ve said, ‘Hmmm, that’s an interesting point.’ They say, ‘Hmmm, we’ll think about that.’ And they never get back to me.” Chesire: “The real question is why the Justice Department has such an absence of curiosity.” Narrator: Washington Times officials repeatedly refused to comment to Frontline even when we showed up with our camera to press for some answers. Nadler: “I’ve got a film crew here and I’m looking to see if there’s anyone that I can interview at The Washington Times for this story we’re doing.” Narrator: The answer was no, and when we visited another Moon-funded publication, The World and I, the reception grew even colder. Security Guard #1: “Yes sir, you all are on private property, you’ve been told that, you will wait here, the Metropolitan Police will come here.” Security Guard #2: “I’m going to ask you to leave the property.” Nadler: “OK, who are you, sir? Are you with the Metropolitan Police Department or with the security?” SG #2: “I’m with the security department.” Nadler: “Of The Washington Times Corporation?” SG #2: “Of The Washington Times, that’s correct, and I’d like you to leave right now please.” Nadler: “OK, I’ll leave. Why are the police here, by the way?” Narrator: Later, the Times sent this statement, which said that “the complete editorial independence of The Washington Times is well-known, and envied, throughout the newspaper industry.” Narrator: The Times gained respect and influence throughout the Reagan years, lending editorial support to causes favored by the Administration. Reagan: “Freedom fighters will huddle close to their radios hoping to catch word that the administration in America will remain their friend.” Narrator: The contra forces battling the Sandinista government in Nicaragua received editorial support and money from The Washington Times. Here’s how it worked: Narrator: In March 1985, Oliver North wrote this top secret memo proposing the formation of a private foundation called the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund. Narrator: Its purpose was to circumvent a Congressional ban on aid to the Contras. Less than two months later, The Washington Times announced the birth of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund in a front-page editorial. Narrator: Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave insisted he was “surprised” at the coincidence between his paper’s initiative and North’s secret project. The Washington Times contributed the first $100,000 to the Freedom Fund. (Soundtrack) Oliver North: “The worst outcome we could have would be the consolidation of a communist client state in Nicaragua.” Narrator: When Oliver North was questioned by Congress about his role in funding the contras, The American Freedom Coalition rushed to his defense. The AFC produced this video, “Oliver North: Fight for Freedom,” which it broadcast more than 600 times on over 100 television stations. Narrator: The program asked for donations. Tax records reveal that the video raised more than $3.2 million for the AFC. Heston: “It only takes 30 minutes for a missile to get here from the Soviet Union. How far do you think you can get in 30 minutes? Narrator: Another project of the Reagan Administration was the Strategic Defense Initiative SDI, or “Star Wars.” It also received support from The Washington Times and the American Freedom Coalition. “If you really value life, if you want your children and your grandchildren to get out from under the threat of nuclear annihilation, then please, please demonstrate your support for SDI.” Narrator: This pro-Star Wars video was paid for and distributed by the AFC. (Soundtrack) “We can’t stop it? We can’t stop one damn missile? All I can do is watch a million people die, or start blowing up the whole world? They are my only choices?” Graham: “Reverend Moon’s organization has been very supportive of the Strategic Defense Initiative.” Narrator: Former Defense and Central Intelligence official Daniel Graham, who sits on the AFC national policy board, co-produced the video. Graham: “It’s called ‘One Incoming,’ and it includes a scenario that I got Tom Clancy to write for us, and I got Charlton Heston to do the voiceover.” (Soundtrack) Heston: “And for America, our choice will remain nuclear vengeance or nothing until SDI is deployed.” Graham: “It cost a lot of money to produce it $200,000 and Grant said he could raise the $200,000. Now Grant is supported substantially by the Reverend Moon and I’m sure that’s where the money came from to produce that movie.” Narrator: According to Graham, the film has been seen on four hundred television stations. Narrator: Besides paying for his own media, Moon sought to influence other press outlets. One vehicle was the World Media Association. Pak: ” And the founder is Reverend Moon, who is deeply concerned for the world media, particularly in the battle against communism all over the world; who sees that the role of the media is so vital and so important for the salvation of our civilization.” Narrator: The World Media Association sponsors all-expense-paid conferences and junkets for journalists all over the world. As Bo Hi Pak told public station KQED in 1984, the Unification Movement used the association as a weapon for a larger crusade. Pak: “But is a total war. Basically war of ideas. War of mind, the battlefield is the human mind. This is where the battle is fought. So in this war the entire thing will be mobilized, political means, social means, economical means and propagandistic means, and basically trying to take over the other person’s mind. That is what the third world war is all about the war of ideology.” Narrator: While waging its global war of ideas, the Unification Movement was also fighting another battle to overcome the stigma of Moon’s 1982 conviction for tax evasion. To clear his name, Moon launched a campaign termed the “New Birth Project.” Its strategy was to show that Moon’s prosecution was really racial and religious persecution. (Soundtrack) Moon/Pak: “I am here today only because my skin is yellow and my religion is Unification Church.” Durst: “It’s a powerful state trying to break one religion-and what happens to Rev. Moon watch out will happen to many other religious figures.” Pak: “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen!” Narrator: Church leaders charged the media were part of the problem. Durst: “We don’t like it. We don’t like to be abused by any newspaper, we don’t like to be abused by the media and we’re not going to take it.” Narrator: But an adroit use of the media was part of the Unification plan. Moon bought full-page ads in leading newspapers, and sent videotapes explaining his theology to other religious leaders at a cost of more than four million dollars. Press conferences outside Moon’s prison helped spread the word. Rev. Don Sills: “Today we have witnessed a travesty of the judicial system of our United States. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon has been unjustly convicted.” Rev. Joseph Paige: “Reverend Moon, like myself, is a minority here in this country. And we don’t have the popular views of the mainline churches, we are about liberation.” Narrator: The New Birth Project worked, and Moon was “born again” as a martyr to bigotry. After he left prison, he was celebrated by more than 1700 clergy at this “God and Freedom Banquet” in Washington. Durst: “Ironically and perhaps historically there is something similar here to other religious movements from this persecution has come the greatest support and acceptance of the Unification movement. ” Narrator: Part of the New Birth Project employed familiar Moon tactics. In July, 1985, a front organization was formed called the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution. Moon insider David Finzer was asked to join the board. Finzer: “We executed all of the documents, and I understand the corporation was incorporated the very next day. Now that was the last I heard of the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution for about two years.” Narrator: Finzer now claims that he didn’t learn until much later that the Committee to Defend the United States Constitution was a front group. Finzer: “All of the money was spent for publications or advertising or events that supported Reverend Moon. We found a magazine that was put out under the Committee’s name. There was my name listed as one of the directors that I had never seen before. We found a check to the printer for $174,000, printed for that…The real purpose was not, I can tell you what it was not. It was not to support religious liberty. What it was, was to support and sanitize Reverend Moon’s name, to give the appearance of independent support instead of wholly-owned, bought support, to make him some kind of a First Amendment hero.” Narrator: Moon ultimately went to the top in his effort to clear his name seeking a presidential pardon for his crimes. Narrator: The point man was Max Hugel, a former Reagan campaign official and one-time deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in charge of covert operations. Hugel: “It is so important to have a superb intelligence agency.” Narrator: Hugel was forced to leave the agency in the wake of a stock scandal. (Soundtrack) PRESS CONFERENCE: Reporter off camera: “Can you tell us why you’re not choosing to stay on and fight?” Narrator: Hugel later went into business with Jonathan Park, the son of Bo Hi Pak. ATLANTIC VIDEO DEMO REEL: Announcer: “Through two huge sound locks are the best outfitted teleproduction studios in the region.” Narrator: Hugel worked with Park to expand Moon’s electronic media empire, while also brokering contacts between Bo Hi Pak and Vice President George Bush. Narrator: In this April, 1988 memo to Unification Church member Marc Lee, Hugel offers to arrange for Pak to have his picture taken with the Vice President at a cost of $50,000. Hugel also promises to try to get Bush to write to Pak. Two months later, Bush did write to Pak, and told him, “I hope we can meet again soon.” Did they discuss a pardon during their meeting? Neither President Bush nor Bo Hi Pak would comment to FRONTLINE. Narrator: Later in 1988, Hugel also recruited the law firm of one of Ronald Reagan’s best friends to assist in Moon’s pardon effort former Senator Paul Laxalt. (Soundtrack) Ronald Reagan: “The friend who understands you creates you, a wise man once said. Paul created because he always understood and for that I am and shall always be grateful.” Narrator: Laxalt’s law firm was paid $100,000 up front and $50,000 a month to obtain a presidential pardon for Moon. According to billings submitted by the lawyers, Laxalt was directly involved in the pardon effort. This petition for executive clemency was delivered to the Justice Department, accompanied by letters from Senator Orrin Hatch, publisher William Rusher, civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy endorsing the pardon. Narrator: The Washington Times also became involved in the pardon campaign. First, Editor Arnaud de Borchgrave wrote a “letter from the editor.” Cheshire: “It was not really a letter to the editor, it was a letter to President Reagan urging President Reagan to grant Reverend Moon a presidential pardon.” Narrator: Later, the Times ran this article examining Reagan’s record on pardons. After it appeared, Laxalt’s partner, Paul Perito, became alarmed. Perito warned Bo Hi Pak that “if a case can be made…that the Church allegedly controls and dictates the activities of organizations such as The Washington Times…this will affect our credibility and could materially damage our prodigious efforts.” (Soundtrack) Off-Camera Female Reporter: “Any last thoughts for us, President and Mrs. Reagan, on your way out?” Narrator: Ronald Reagan never pardoned Sun Myung Moon. Moon’s pardon application is still pending before the Bush Administration. Max Hugel, Paul Laxalt, and Paul Perito all refused to comment. Ronald Reagan also declined to comment. Narrator: Is the New Birth Project continuing? In June,1991, Inquisition, a new, purportedly independent investigation of Moon’s 1982 tax fraud prosecution, was released by a Washington publisher, Regnery-Gateway. Its author, Carlton Sherwood, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who once worked for The Washington Times. Narrator: Inquisition has a curious history. It was printed once before, by an obscure publishing house called Andromeda. The phone number listed for Andromeda in a leading publishing directory is the home phone of former Reagan National Security Council official Roger Fontaine an ex-reporter at The Washington Times. When we called, Fontaine’s wife Judy answered and said she knew nothing about Andromeda. Then she told us that the company was bankrupt and that Inquisition was published by Regnery-Gateway. Narrator: Alfred Regnery is the head of Regnery-Gateway. Regnery: “It is not unlike a lot of other books we have published. It is a story that deals with the First Amendment, which is something that is very dear to publishers, of course.” Narrator: Alfred Regnery was told by Carlton Sherwood that the Moon Organization would purchase one hundred thousand copies of Inquisition at least according to former Washington Times editor James Whelan, another Regnery-Gateway author. But Alfred Regnery denies it. Regnery: “I never said that to Jim, and I’ve never had any conversation with what’s his name-Bo?” Narrator: “Bo Hi Pak.” Regnery: “I’m not even sure who he is.” Narrator: One week after talking to Regnery, FRONTLINE obtained a copy of a letter addressed to Sun Myung Moon. The letter was written by James Gavin, a Moon aide. Gavin tells Moon he reviewed the “overall tone and factual contents” of Inquisition before publication and suggested revisions. Gavin adds that the author “Mr. Sherwood has assured me that all this will be done when the manuscript is sent to the publisher.” Gavin concludes by telling Moon, “When all of our suggestions have been incorporated, the book will be complete and in my opinion will make a significant impact…. In addition to silencing our critics now, the book should be invaluable in persuading others of our legitimacy for many years to come.” Narrator: Although he refused an on-camera interview, Carlton Sherwood told Frontline that the Unification Movement exerted no editorial control over his book. Narrator: When we visited Gavin’s office in McLean, Virginia, our request for an interview was refused. Narrator: Many questions about the Unification Movement remain unanswered. But none is more pressing or perplexing than this: Where does all the money come from? The Moon Organization has spent an astonishing amount in the United States: -more than $800 million on the Washington Times; -hundreds of millions on national periodicals; -tens of millions on electronic media; -at least $40 million on New York newspapers; -more than $10 million on a New York publishing house; -millions on World Media Association junkets and conferences; -millions more on New Right organizations, including the American Freedom Coalition; -well over $100 million on real estate, including the New Yorker Hotel in midtown Manhattan; -at least $40 million on commercial fishing operations; -and at least $75 million on the New Birth Project… It all adds up to more than a billion dollars. Narrator: But most of Moon’s operations in America are losing money. Virginia Commonwealth University professor David Bromley: Bromley: “Most of the Unificationist Movement’s businesses, as far as I can tell, have lost substantial sums of money. Again, the best example is the Washington Times, which may have lost as much as fifty million dollars a year a major loser.” Narrator: So where does the money come from? Moon himself told the Senate Judiciary Committee in June, 1984: the money comes from overseas. Moon: “Several hundred million dollars have been poured into America, because this nation will decide the destiny of the world, these contributions are primarily coming from overseas.” Narrator: But from where overseas? Not from Korea. According to The Far Eastern Economic Review, many of the Church’s businesses in Korea “are performing poorly or need to make major new investments.” . Narrator: For nearly two decades, it has been reported that one major Moon patron is Ryoichi Sasakawa, one of the richest men in Japan. Narrator: Sasakawa’s money comes from his monopoly on the motorboat racing industry. Legalized gambling on the sport is a $14 billion a year industry in Japan. Choate: “For more than a half century, Ryoichi Sasakawa has been one of the primary political brokers inside Japan.” Narrator: Author Pat Choate, whose book, Agents of Influence, examines Japan’s campaign to shape America’s policy and politics… Choate: “When Reverend Moon expanded his operations inside Japan, he asked Sasakawa to be one of the principal advisers to his Church inside Japan. Many of their operations the Sasakawa operations, the Moon operations seem to parallel each other. They operate in many of the same ways giving away money, a great deal of attention to media and media organizations, the establishment of think tanks and other policy organizations that operate across national borders, and the maintenance of a very right wing conservative focus.” (Soundtrack) NEWSREEL – MUSSOLINI ADDRESSING CROWD Narrator: Sasakawa’s right-wing associations go back more than fifty years. In 1939, he flew to Italy to meet Benito Mussolini, whom he called “the perfect fascist.” Choate: “He formed one of the most radical of the fascist parties inside Japan. He was one of those individual business leaders that was calling for war with the United States.” Narrator: Immediately after the war, Sasakawa was arrested and imprisoned by the U.S. Army as a war criminal. Sasakawa was sent to prison with two other suspected war criminals—Yoshio Kodama and Nobusuke Kishi. Kodama went on to become a leader of the “yakuza”, or organized crime syndicate of Japan. Kishi went on to become Japan’s Prime Minister. All three men reportedly played key roles in the early days of the Moon organization. Junas: “Kishi had emerged as the front man for the Moon Organization in Japan. And Sasakawa served as an adviser… He was a behind-the-scenes powerbroker who was manipulating the Moon organization. Moon, in his own speeches, refers to his Japanese friend who is quite wealthy Mr. Sasakawa.” Narrator: In 1967, Moon and Sasakawa are reported to have formed the Japanese chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, which funded anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide. Thousands cheered Moon at this 1970 rally in Tokyo. Narrator: Today Sasakawa denies providing any financial or political assistance to Moon. Sasakawa told Frontline that he only met Moon once 25 years ago. Yet Moon in a 1973 speech claimed he was “very close” to Sasakawa and Bo Hi Pak called Sasakawa, Moon’s “chief ally in the battle against communism.” Choate: “If they are using substantial amounts of the Japanese money, they are not only running a Korean agenda, but they’re also serving as political mercenaries for the Japanese. And it should be a matter of great concern.” DESERT STORM RALLY FOOTAGE: “Support our troops, support our troops, support our troops!” Narrator: Moon has been operating in the United States for thirty years. Whether Americans know it or not, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is a force in their political lives. Woman sings: “God bless America, my home, sweet home.” Narrator: But some Americans are suspicious of Moon and question whether his political activities are in the interest of America. Weyrich: “Here is what disturbs me. It is the lack of knowledge of the people who are being taken in by this activity of who is behind it, where the funding is coming from, and what are their ultimate objectives.” Choate: “This should be the ultimate congressional investigation to lay all of this out before the American people and bring it into the sunshine and stop it.” Narrator: Since 1978, Congress has demonstrated little interest in investigating Moon. And when we visited the Justice Department, officials there had nothing to say. Scene – Eric Nadler at Justice Department. “We’d like you to come down and answer the question, ‘Why the Justice Department isn’t investigating the Washington Times under the Foreign Agents Registration Act… No comment is your answer.'” Narrator: We asked the White House to comment on the Unification Movement’s activities in America. We asked specifically about Bo Hi Pak’s 1988 meeting with Mr. Bush at his home, about the President’s knowledge of the campaign to obtain a pardon for Sun Myung Moon, about the help that the American Freedom Coalition gave his election campaign, and whether the President thought his Justice Department should investigate the Washington Times for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The White House declined to comment. Narrator: Finally, Reverend Moon also refused to talk to FRONTLINE. But in this Church-sponsored film, Reverend Moon in America, he had this to say: “Now whether positively or negatively, America knows me and it happened quickly. At least I have America’s attention. Because of that, I will be able to tell the people the truth of God, the new revelation. The worst treatment America could give me is to ignore me. Now I can preach the truth.” THE END

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Moon’s Japanese Profits Bolster Efforts in U.S. – Top leader, Yoshikazu Soejima, was interviewed by The Washington Post in 1984

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe

Sun Myung Moon and the United Nations

How Moon bought protection in Japan

United States Congressional investigation of Moon’s organization

Gifts of Deceit – Robert Boettcher

Politics and religion interwoven

Sun Myung Moon organization activities in South America

Tragedy of the Six Marys translated video transcript

A huge Unification Church / FFWPU scam in Japan is revealed

Moon extracted $500 million from Japanese female members

#Sun Myung Moon #Hak Ja Han #Moonies #FFWPU #Unification Church

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