Author: frankisemptiness

July 20th, 2022

“The land here is strong
Strong beneath my feet
It feeds on the blood
It feeds on the heat” –The Rhythm of the Heat by Peter Gabriel

We drove down to Texas a week ago. Yeah, I know that making a road trip from Wisconsin to Texas in the middle of July is utter madness, but circumstances dictated that we go now or not go at all. We wanted to visit our oldest son, Hans, and his family. Karin and I had not been this way for almost two years, and it was high time to see the two grandchildren that we hardly knew. We took along our 18-month-old grandson, Asher, who has turned out to be bold and intrepid traveler.

Basically, the entire United States south of Chicago is a sauna. Texas takes the heat one step further. We are staying in Bryan, which lies in the Brazos Valley in central Texas. It is not only hot here, but also exceedingly dry. The whole region is in the midst of a severe drought. The grass, where it is not watered, is golden brown, and it crackles like kindling under our feet. The trees are still green (mostly), but they are obviously stressed. Their leaves are dull and dusty. The natural world is in pain.

People here keep indoors, if they can. The outdoor temperature regularly tops 100 degrees. Asher and his cousins went into the wading pool a couple days ago. They didn’t stay there long. Asher became flushed in his face after only a few minutes. Hans and Gabby’s kids started to overheat soon after that. They retreated back into the air-conditioned comfort of the apartment.

Hans works in the heat every day. He pumps concrete for a living, and he is outside most of the time. Hans can deal with the heat better than he can handle the cold. He does not find the temperatures in Texas to be too extreme, but that is because he was deployed with the Army to Iraq back in 2011. Hans knows what real heat is.

He came home from work yesterday afternoon looking rough and ragged. I asked him,

“How are you?”

“Hot.”

“How much did you pump today?”

“Ninety-five yards.”

“How did that go?”

“The ground was bad.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, it was all sand. You know, it was like that real fine Kuwaiti kind of sand where if you break through the crust with your vehicle, you’re done.”

“And?”

“We only had one mixer get stuck. He didn’t dig into the sand. He just tried to crank the wheels too tight. You have to make slow, gentle turns.”

He gave me a little smile, like he was remembering something else, something from long ago.

Hans’ time in Iraq was hot and dry, and violent. His experiences there have made him impatient with folks who complain about small things. He told me,

“I got no time for people who cry that they can’t find toilet paper in the store, or who whine about not having air conditioning for a day. I was in Third World countries where people didn’t have air conditioning, or electricity…or water.”

Hans’ wife says that his time in Iraq changed him in a fundamental way. She thinks that there he is actually two separate men: the Hans before Iraq and the Hans after Iraq. I think she is right. Hans was different when he came back from the war. He wasn’t the same man. Whatever innocence he had before he deployed to the Middle East was burned away by the sun, and by the suffering he saw.

Hans remembers. He remembers the blood and the heat.

July 2nd, 2022

Several years ago, my wife and I traveled to visit some friends, Senji and Gilberto, near Seattle. We stayed with the two Buddhist monks at their temple on Bainbridge Island for a while, and then we found refuge in the home of an older lady, who was a friend of our friends. Mira, the friend of the monks, owned a home in Seattle proper, and she graciously offered to be our hostess for a few days. She was a sweet woman (sadly, now deceased) who took us all around town and showed us the sights. Mira spent a great deal of time talking with us. She was a highly educated woman, and well-traveled.

Mira was very active with social justice issues and would have easily qualified as a liberal in political terms. As we got to know each other, I told her a lot about our oldest son, Hans. I explained that Hans had served in the Army (like I did), and that Hans had been deployed to Iraq during 2011. In my description of Hans, I mentioned that he was a self-described gun enthusiast, and that he had strong conservative views.

After hearing some of my stories about our son, Mira looked at me aghast and said,

“I could never talk to somebody like that! “

Her outburst disturbed me. I asked her why.

She stammered something like, “Well, I’m sure he’s a nice person, but…”

Mira was emotionally upset with just the idea of dealing with a person whose beliefs were so radically different from her own. I suspect this notion also conflicted with her own self-image as an openminded individual. Mira, in many ways, really was very tolerant and generous. She took Karin and me into her home sight unseen. She had never met us before in her entire life. She only knew us from what Senji and Gilberto had told her about us.

I mention this episode because this situation is not unique. This inability to connect with “the other” is not limited to liberals, or to conservatives. I have met a vast number of people in my life, and I have an eclectic group of friends. I am an outlier in that way. Most people that I know tend to stick with the members of their tribe. It feels safer and more comfortable to interact only with those who share your opinions and values.

Although I know a lot of different kinds of people, that does not by any means imply that I get along with everyone. I don’t. I have my own prejudices. I avoid zealots of any stripe. I don’t mind hanging out with folks who are passionate about certain topics (especially if they are willing to buy me a beer), however I shy away from fanatics. I once read an excellent definition of fanaticism:

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” ― Winston S. Churchill

That sounds about right.

It is amazing to me that with our current technology we can instantaneously communicate with almost anybody on the planet, yet we tend to only connect with those who we already know. People once thought that the Internet would turn the earth into a global village, a world where there would be more understanding through greater interaction. Instead, the Internet has made us more insulated and isolated than ever before in history. Somehow, the web has done more to divide us than to unite us. In earlier times, people had the excuse that they could not travel to learn about alien cultures. Now, with a single click of a mouse, we can learn about nearly every nation, language, or religion that exists. We, at least in America, don’t do that. Apparently, we don’t want to.

How do we get people to learn from each other?

I think the U.S. military provides a possible answer. When I joined the Army, I had previously never been out of my hometown. Suddenly, I was mixing with other young men from all over the country. I was interacting with guys from all sorts of backgrounds. I was forced to work with people who had very different life experiences. My eyes were opened to a new world.

If the citizens of the United States wanted to do so, we could have a compulsory service program for young people. High school graduates (or non-grads) would participate in a year or two of national service. The service would not necessarily have to be connected with the military. There are many civilian projects that need to be done. The program would have to be mandatory for every young person, no loopholes or exceptions.

The potentially positive effect of this kind of universal conscription would be that everybody gets to know somebody that they never wanted to know. They would be forced to leave their tribe. Spending a year with other people from very different histories would require the participants in the program to adjust their world views. Instead of being strangers and adversaries, like many liberals and conservatives, they might actually just become Americans.

It’s an idea.

June 16th, 2022

My son, Hans, called me a couple days ago. He lives down in Texas, and I haven’t seen him for over a year and a half, but we talk on the phone frequently. Hans was deployed with his Army unit to Iraq back in 2011. He got a little banged up while he was over there. Some bad things happened. It seems like when we talk, the conversation always winds up with us recalling our military experiences.

Hans started the call by saying,

“Well, I had an interesting time at Kroger’s today.”

I knew that I would regret asking, but I said, “What happened?”

Hans drawled, “Well, I was grocery shopping and I see this guy wearing an Army uniform. I had to look twice because that kind of uniform went out of service about the time I got out. Nobody in the Army wears that uniform anymore.

I looked closer at this guy, and nothing seemed right. He had no nametag. He had a Texas flag as a patch on his right shoulder. Nothing on his left shoulder. At least, he had his trouser legs tucked into his boots.

People were talking with him and offering to buy him stuff. That kind of bothered me.

I went up to this guy, and I asked him, ‘Where is your unit patch? How come you don’t have a nametag?’

Well, he started talking this shit about being Special Forces, and that he didn’t need the unit patch or a name tag. I told him that I knew Special Forces people, and they wore nametags when they were in country.

The guy was telling people that he was a sergeant. You know what rank he had on his uniform?”

I replied, “No, what did he have?”

Hans answered, “Private First Class.”

I said, “That doesn’t seem quite right.”

Hans went on,

“No, it didn’t. So, I asked the guy if he wanted to see something that he never had in his whole life. He said, ‘Yeah’. I pulled out my wallet and showed him my old, expired military ID card. He didn’t say nothing.”

Hans sighed and said,

“If I had met this guy after I got back from Iraq, or when I got out of the Army, I would have punched him in the throat. But I didn’t. I got a family to care for, so I didn’t do anything to him, even though all these other folks were trying to buy him stuff because they thought he was real. I just walked out of the store.”

I said, “Good move.”

We were quiet for a while. Neither of us spoke, then Hans said,

“Dad, why do people do that stuff? Why make believe like that? It was disrespectful, disrespectful of everything.”

I did a mental shrug and said, “Because they’re assholes.”

Hans asked, “Is it because they want the glory, but don’t want to do the job?”

“Hans, I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Hans told me, “There was an old man there, watching this guy. He was a Vietnam vet. When I got ready to leave the store, the Vietnam vet told me, ‘Son, don’t you worry. I’ll handle this.’ I didn’t stay, so I don’t know what he meant, but he said he’d handle it.”

Hans sounded depressed.

“Well, I just wanted you to know. I love you, Dad.”

“Love you too.”

June 11th, 2022

“A good traveler has no fixed plans
and is not intent upon arriving.” – Tao Te Ching

“My turning point was my pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. It was then that I, who had dedicated most of my life to penetrate the ‘secrets’ of the universe, realized that there are no secrets. Life is and will always be a mystery.” ~ Paulo Coehlo

I know two people who are on a pilgrimage. They are both friends of mine, but they don’t know each other. They are walking along the “Camino de Santiago” in Spain. “The Way of St. James” is 475 miles long and ends up at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. One of my friends appears to be traveling the entire route all in one shot. He will be walking for well over a month, maybe two. The other person I know has been doing the pilgrimage in series of smaller segments, giving himself and his wife the opportunity to rest.

My wife, Karin, and I have often thought about hiking on the Camino. However, that seems to be beyond our capabilities. Karin, since she had COVID in 2020, gets out of breath easily. A walk around the neighborhood is usually all she can handle. I also had COVID, and I find that strenuous activities are sometimes overwhelming. for me. We could potentially walk a short stretch of the Camino, but that would be about it.

My wife and I became the legal guardians of our toddler grandson, Asher last week. This fact is a greater obstacle to the making a pilgrimage than our physical condition. B.A. (Before Asher), we used to travel extensively, sometimes being away from home for a month or more. This is no longer the case. Now, it is a major effort just to get across town with the little boy in tow. I cannot imagine Karin or I going to Spain until Asher is much older, but then of course we too will be much older.

Why go on a pilgrimage? A person who makes a pilgrimage is by definition a seeker. Some seekers have a clear idea of what they hope to find. Some just have an emptiness inside that has to be filled. They know that they need whatever is missing, but they may have no idea what it is. I guess a pilgrimage is a journey to find something, although that something is often difficult to describe. Maybe it is an attempt to find God, or peace, or meaning. Each person seeks something unique, something that they understand intuitively, but perhaps not rationally.

It seems that almost all religious traditions encourage some sort of pilgrimage. Hindus travel to Benares on the Ganges. Muslims are supposed to make a trip to Mecca at least once in their lives. Jews visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Catholics go to Rome.

I’ve been to Jerusalem. That was almost forty years ago. I went there as a tourist, not as a pilgrim. I found the city to be fascinating, but nothing there resonated with me. Other people were in Jerusalem as pilgrims, and that place meant everything to them. In physical terms, Jerusalem was the same for me as it was for the pilgrims. However, our experiences were radically different. The difference was a result of who we were when we visited that city, and why we were there.

A pilgrimage is symbolic of the journey of life. Some people focus intently on the final destination. Some pay attention to the day-to-day experiences. Chogyam Trungpa, the Buddhist teacher wrote a book called “The Path is the Goal”. The gist of the book is that the process is what matters. St Catherine of Siena once said that all the way to heaven is heaven. Some Christians obsess about getting to heaven, when perhaps in actuality heaven is already here.

In my experiences with Buddhists, I have heard the idea that all of us have an essential Buddha nature. We are already perfect, but we don’t realize it. This might mean that going on a pilgrimage is superfluous, because we already have whatever we seek. I’m not sure about that. Sometimes, a person needs to leave home to come home. Sometimes, we have to go through enormous struggles and travel great distances to understand we had it all from the very beginning.

Referring back to our grandson, Asher, it is obvious to me that he is embarked on a remarkable journey. Our toddler is on a pilgrimage. He may never leave this town. He might never go anywhere far away. It doesn’t matter. He is starting on a path that will lead him to new worlds. He is beginning something exciting and wonderful.

I don’t need to go to Santiago de Compostela. I don’t need to go to Rome or Tibet. I can go with Asher on his journey. It will be an excellent pilgrimage. Asher will show me things that I have never imagined.

June 14th, 2022

My son, Hans, called me from Texas a couple days ago. He drawled,

“Hey Dad, our power’s out.”

“That’s no good. Isn’t it stupid hot down there?”

“Yeah, it is. You want to know why the power is out?”

I never know how to answer that sort of question. So, I said, “Sure.”

“A transformer blew up.”

“Wait. Now what happened?”

Hans took a breath and said, “Well, it was one of those small transformers, the kind that sit up on top of the poles. You know, the kind with the ceramic insulation.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I let him keep talking. Hans was on a roll.

He continued, “I didn’t see it explode, but I heard it. It brought back all sorts of stuff from Iraq when I heard it go bang. I hit the ground.”

“Okay.”

Hans went on, “At first I thought I thought it might be somebody popping off fireworks, but it didn’t sound right. It sounded just like an IED.”

“Okay, so what does an IED sound like?”

Hans replied, “They have a funny noise when they go off. I can tell the sound of flying pieces of metal. I know what shrapnel sounds like.”

We were both quiet for a moment. Then Hans said,

“Well, I just wanted you know what has been going on down here. I’m okay. I didn’t have a heart attack when I heard the explosion.”

“I’m glad.”

Hans was deployed in Iraq over a decade ago. It amazes me that he still remembers the sound of flying shrapnel, and that his reflex is to automatically fall to the ground when he hears that sound.

It makes me sad too.

June 3rd, 2022

Suzanne came over to our house on Friday. Karin and I were expecting her. She had been planning to visit us for quite a while. She takes photos. She’s been studying her trade for a number of years, and she wants to be a professional photographer in her second career once she retires from teaching at the local community college. Suzanne is working on her portfolio, and she wanted to take some pictures of Asher, our toddler grandson. She takes photos with film and digitally. She chose to shoot her pictures of Asher in black and white.

I don’t know much about photography. Suzanne does. She is an artist. She can take a scene and emphasize a particular aspect of it. She can find a story in a human face and somehow tell that story without words. Hers is a subtle art, a nonverbal way of depicting reality. We know Suzanne from the Zen sangha. Her work is very Zen, very intuitive, much more so than my scribbling.

Suzanne and her husband came into the house and looked around for a place to shoot a portrait of Asher. They decided to seat Asher on to my footlocker, the one I had from my days in the Army. I told them,

“That footlocker is pretty old.”

Her husband turned to me and replied, “Yes, you went to West Point, and you were a second lieutenant.” Then he looked at the writing on the footlocker.

It says, “2nd Lieutenant Francis K. Pauc” on the top.

Suzanne smiled and asked me, “Does that feel like another lifetime?”

I told her, “Yeah, like different incarnation.”

Suzanne knows about my history. She knows I was an Army helicopter pilot in the 80’s. She knows that our eldest son, Hans, fought in Iraq. She probably knows that Karin’s father was an enlisted man in the Luftwaffe during WWII. She knows that generation after generation somebody has worn a uniform in our family. She also knows that isn’t how we wanted things to be. Karin and I did all we could do dissuade Hans from joining the Army. He did anyway. His time in Iraq did not go well.

Suzanne and her husband set up the camera, the lighting, and the backdrop. We all cajoled Asher into sitting quietly on the footlocker. We were sometimes successful with that. Suzanne took a number of photos. Photographing a little boy is kind of a crap shoot. The photographer never knows what he or she will get as a result. Asher the photo shoot, Suzanne packed everything up.

A couple days ago, she sent me a copy of one of the pictures of Asher.

She titled it: “On my grandfather’s Army footlocker, that I may never see war.”

May 25th, 2022

Yesterday, Salvador Ramos stormed into Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, and killed nineteen children and two adults. Ramos died during his attack on the school.

Another week, another mass murder.

I should feel something: shock, sorrow, outrage. I don’t. I just feel numb. I feel numb because this slaughter happens over and over again in our country, and nothing will be done to stop it. Perhaps nothing can be done. I know in my heart that this will happen again.

I am sure that some politicians are screaming for gun control, and that others are fighting that tooth and nail. After the headlines from Uvalde fade and we are distracted by other events, there will be no change. We will just keep doing what we have been doing, with the same predictable results.

I was in the Army back in the 80’s, and my oldest son, Hans, served in Iraq. We have argued about guns frequently over the years. I don’t own any guns. Hans has numerous firearms. We have gone shooting together several times. At this point, both of us agree that gun control is not a good idea, simply because it cannot possibly work in our country.

I do not believe that new gun control laws will do any good. We can’t or won’t enforce the laws that we already have. We can’t get rid of guns in the United States. We can’t control the supply of guns. We can’t even trace most of them. There are more firearms in the U.S. than there are people. America is awash with weapons, and there is no conceivable way to keep track of them. A War on Guns would be just as effectively as the War on Drugs: not at all.

Other democratic countries have stringent gun laws. The citizens of those nations abide by those rules. They follow the laws because within those societies there is a consensus that gun control is necessary for the common good. There is no such consensus here.

Hans lives down in Texas. That state has a strong gun culture. Hans has friends who are gun owners (a group which includes damn near everybody in Texas), and they are adamantly opposed to any government oversight with regards to firearms. It doesn’t matter what happens what kind tragedy occurs. They will not give up their guns. Period.

The problem is not with gun ownership. Although I have no firearms, I have no issue with other people, like my son, owning them. A gun is an inanimate object that is not intrinsically good or evil. Guns are by nature dangerous, but not necessarily wicked. I enjoy going with Hans to target practice. Shooting off rounds can be fun. In the hands of somebody who is sane and sober a gun can be quite useful.

The problem is, in my opinion, the fact that most people in the United States believe that killing somebody is a legitimate way to solve a problem. Our nation was born in violence, and we have been at war with somebody somewhere almost ever since that moment. Our culture worships violence. Americans can be described in many ways: brave, industrious, inventive, generous. However, I have never heard of Americans being described as peace-loving. That we are not. There are American pacifists like the Catholic Workers or the Quakers, but these people are rare, and they are the exception to the rule.

There are times when violence may be necessary. Some changes in our history have not occurred peacefully. Slavery was only ended through a bloody civil war. Fascism was only defeated by our nation’s involvement in World War II. However, we have made violence a fetish. It is our default mode. Our media glorifies violence and conflict at every opportunity. How many movies have you seen that have a peaceful reconciliation of adversaries?

Gun control will not work until there is a seismic shift of values in our society. Until Americans decide to forego violence, nothing will change.

May 15th, 2022

There is an old man who comes to the synagogue. He always sits in the back row. He must be in his 80’s, but he is surprisingly vigorous for his age. His face is deeply lined, but it is still strong and alert. He looks like a man who has been though a lot, but he isn’t quite finished with life yet.

I stood near him after the Shabbat service. We were sharing a drink during kiddush. He saw that I was wearing a t-shirt with some writing on it about veterans. The old guy was from Ukraine, and he came to the U.S. many years ago as a refugee. He asked me with his heavy Slavic accent,

“You, you are a veteran?”

“Yeah.”

“What service were you in?”

“I was in the Army, the American Army.”

He nodded gravely, and asked, “So, what you do in Army?”

“I was a helicopter pilot, an aviator.”

The old man nodded approvingly, and said, “My son, he too is a veteran. He went to Soviet radio school, like I did.”

I replied, “My son is a vet. He served in Iraq.”

The old man looked at me and started talking. We weren’t really having a conversation anymore. He wanted, or needed, to tell me a story about something important to him. He just wanted me to listen. He asked me to give him a ride home. As I drove, he spoke about his son.

“My son, he was in the radio school. He graduated with honors. They sent him to a military base in Kyiv in 1981. He would write us letters. Then, no more letters. For three months, we hear nothing from him. No letters. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“We write a letter to his commander. The commander, he writes back that my son is on “secret military assignment”. We don’t know where. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“After six months, we hear from our son. He was in Afghanistan with Soviet Army. He was at radar station. The Muslim fighters, they were shooting rockets at his base. These rockets, back then they come from here, from America. You understand?”

‘Yeah, go ahead.”

“The army have trucks there. The Muslims have put in the ground mines. Not just one or two; they put in many mines. My son was in second truck. The first truck hit a mine. Nothing left of it. Not even metal. Nothing! You understand?”

“Yeah, where do I turn?”

He pointed in my direction, “Make a left here.”

Then he continued, “My son, his truck go over a mine. Big explosion. He is thrown from truck. He is hurt bad, remembers nothing. They fix him in hospital. He got two artificial ribs! You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Soviet Army discharges my son. They just send him away. No pension, no money. Nothing. They need him no more. They just used him.”

I could taste the bitterness in the father’s voice. I told him,

“The Army did the same with my son.”

He asked, “American Army? They do that?’

“Yeah.”

The old man shook his head. He asked me,

“What happened with your son? Was he in Afghanistan?”

“No, he was in Iraq.”

The man nodded, “Yes, you said this before. I remember now. He was in Iraq.”

I continued, “He got hurt. He got shot once. He killed a guy. He stabbed him to death.”

The old man asked me,

“How old is your son?”

“He’s thirty-five.”

The man replied, “My son is sixty-two.”

The father thought for a minute. Then he told me,

“I wanted to be an aviation engineer. But the Soviet aviation school did not allow any Jew to come. My father told me that I was wasting my time with tests for that school. They would never let me in. Why? Because I am a Jew!”

There had been anger in the old man’s voice. He continued, now sounding sad,

“My son, he went to the radio school, like I did, like my father did. My father was a colonel in the Soviet Army.”

The old guy said, “My son, he has PTSD. Your son too?”

“Yeah.”

“Your son drink a lot?”

“Yeah.”

The old man said, “My son too.”

Then he looked up and said, “That is my house. There. Stop.”

He asked me, “You got card with your name and phone number?”

“No, but I can write it down.”

“Do that.”

I wrote down my contact information, and he then wrote down his.

The man looked at me and said,

“I think we be friends. Not just in the synagogue. You understand? I think we have similar experience. You understand? I think we be friends.”

He shook my hand. He said again,

“You understand?”

“I understand.”

May 13th, 2022

“I read the news today, oh boy…” – John Lennon

Yesterday, among all of the breaking news stories, there was a brief video clip on the Internet showing the Ukrainians blasting a Russian helicopter that was flying over Snake Island on the Black Sea. I was an aviator back in the day, so the video intrigued me. I clicked on it. As I watched the drone blow up the Russian aircraft I thought, “Wow! Good job!”

Later, I thought, “How many Russian soldiers got killed in that attack?”

I suddenly felt disgusted with myself for looking at the video clip. It was like I had been watching porn. I had viewed the killing of several human beings. Granted, I had only seen the helicopter explode, but there had been people on board, certainly the pilots had been. They probably had families. Somebody somewhere would miss them.

How did that video even qualify as news? What could anybody possibly learn from watching it?

I don’t watch the news on TV. I don’t listen to talk radio. I read the news on the Internet, and even then, I do it, with some reluctance. There is no such thing as objective news reporting. There probably never has been.

The coverage of the war in the Ukraine bothers me. The media seem to be nudging us closer and closer to war with Russia. The Russians are consistently portrayed as the bad guys, and for the most part they are. They are the aggressors in this war, and they make no bones about it. However, there are little things that I notice when I read the descriptions of the war that disturb me. When the Russians lose people or weapons, that makes the headlines. Seldom do I read about the Russians killing Ukrainian troops or destroying Ukrainian ordnance. I read article after article about the Russian soldiers refusing orders or sabotaging their own equipment. I never read about low morale with the Ukrainians. According to the news, the Russians seem to be committing war crimes continually. Are the Ukrainians ever involved in atrocities? If so, nobody mentions it.

The media have sucked us into wars in the past. Look at our country’s involvement in the Spanish-American War. Yellow journalism was utilized before that war to increase readership. “Remember the Maine!” was the rallying cry in the Hearst newspapers. The media in 1898 convinced the American public that the Spanish had blown up an American ship in the Havana harbor. The country went in a war frenzy, and suddenly Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were fighting in Cuba. The media at the time convinced us that we were liberating Cuba, but 120 years later, it doesn’t look like that’s what really happened.

I want the Ukrainians to win this war. They are defending their homeland. However, I feel like the media are portraying the Russian soldiers as negatively as possible. Most of these troops are not criminals or monsters. Most of them are ordinary people caught up in events over which they have no control. They are to be pitied, not hated. I don’t want to feel like cheering when I see an image of a Russian tank or helicopter being obliterated by weapons we gave to the Ukrainians. I don’t want more people to die, whether they be Ukrainian or Russian.

When I read the news, I have the suspicion that I am being manipulated. I don’t like that.

May 10th, 2022

I want to write about abortion, but I am reluctant to so, basically because I am a man. I don’t know what it is like to be pregnant, because I can’t know. By the same token, I cannot know what a woman feels when she gets an abortion. So, whatever I say may seem inaccurate or misguided. That being the case, if you choose not to read this essay, I understand. Go ahead and click on something else.

Thirty-two years ago, my wife developed intense abdominal pains. We went to her gynecologist, and the doctor determined that she had an ectopic pregnancy. A fertilized egg was growing in her fallopian tube. The physician recommended immediate surgery to remove the embryo. My wife was shocked by the diagnosis, and she wondered if there was a way to save the unborn child. There wasn’t. The doctor told her that if nothing was done, the child would die, and she would die.

My wife had the laparoscopic surgery. It saved her life. Because my wife had the surgery and survived, our daughter was born a little over a year later. Because our daughter was born, my wife and now I have our toddler grandson, Asher, running around the house, simultaneously bringing us blessings and chaos.

My wife had an abortion. It can be argued that the unborn child would have died anyway. It can be argued that, if we had done nothing, my wife would have died along with the baby, and I would have become a widower to care for our oldest son alone. However, we did in fact consciously choose to destroy the fertilized egg.

Even after all these years, we grieve over this event. We would not make a different decision now, even if we could. We did what had to be done. It still hurts. It will always hurt.

When I think about women who consider having an abortion, I think about my wife. I think about the trauma and the sorrow. I think about the years required to have the wounds heal.

I think about having compassion and empathy for suffering that I can never understand.