Apparently the users of social media don’t like long articles, and so I’ve used three or four paragraph tracts to get readers for my blogs.  Behold!  It worked!  The high school composition was reborn, and became a stand-by on social media.  It flew on Twitter, it presented an appearance on Facebook, and its conquests will increase, I hope.

You have to work the punch line into the last paragraph, and you need an introduction followed by rising suspense.  Just what your English teacher was trying to get across in your teen confusion.  But it works now on social media; little did you know that at the time.

Today’s reader has little time for long exegesis, and would rather pick up a detailed narrative from a magazine or even a newspaper.  And who will protect him from a tale that is one-sided?  A composition is just a short statement, not a term paper, and if you don’t agree with it you can just forget it.  After forty-five minutes, you can go on to the next class, maybe more exciting or duller.

It would be the appropriate time to end the universe now.  The whole world is besieged by an unbeatable pandemic, the foremost democracy is divided by an incident in which neither the victim nor the perpetrator are faultless people, and nobody will let this unfortunate accident rest.  Is there room for hope?

I think so.  Humankind has survived seemingly hopeless situations in the past, much to its credit (or should we say divine intervention?) and we look forward to better things to come.  Neither side is faultless, neither the descendants of slaves nor the promoters of advancement, and neither side seems to take a daily prayer, the Our Father, seriously.

Is there a time for a revolution?  What, fourteen percent of the population is going to start a revolution?  Even with the radical Left to support them, that would never work.  I put more hope in people realizing what they are saying in the Our Father.

I recently saw a video in which a white, business suited defender stood to protect the statue of St. Louis, King of France, from a malevolent mob of Black Lives Matter demonstrators.  St. Louis elevated the status of the aristocracy, which is definitely needed so that the common people can have a civilization to prosper in.  I don’t know what turned the BLM mob from their goal, which should be to protect black lives from predators, but an aristocracy of leaders is needed to help a country survive.  That’s the truth the Haitians missed in their revolution – making Haiti the poorest nation in the Caribbean or the world.

Sir Galahad in the video stood in the way of Madame Defarge, a dread-locked version of Dickens’ villainess, and he bore the abuse of the crowd with stoic gallantry.  Oh, I’m not saying he was Jesus Christ, but the parallel is there.  As a citizen of a democracy, I claim no nobility, but the democracy will not survive without an upper class of employers and cognoscenti.  And St. Louis, a king, dissuaded his fellow aristocrats from worldly goals to the heavenly.

He was a New York Giants fan back in the days when they still were in New York.  He showed me where to get a composition book to keep their baseball statistics, such as wins and losses, players and their batting averages.  He also patiently showed me how to play stick ball, curb ball, jacks and other games we played on the street, 76^th Drive in Forest Hills.  On a cold January day, we would burn a discarded Christmas tree in an empty lot.  We watched and helped as the school kids accumulated a pile of scrap metal in the school lot for the “boys overseas,” and topped it off with what must surely have been a WWI German helmet, because all the soldiers were overseas.

He was my first American friend, because we had just gotten off the boat in 1942, and he was one of the best human beings I ever met.  He came to visit me after our family had moved to Long Island, making a difficult journey by train, and I never saw him again after that.  It was just that I was still too young to make a return trip to Forest Hills, and way leads onto way.

He is firmly lodged in my memory, evidenced by this writing.  There are few people that make so lasting an impression, and I hope to meet him again in that great beyond.

Rumor has it that George Floyd had been drinking before his arrest, and what has been called the worst cop in the U.S. had no intention of killing him.  If these allegations are true, I can see why Christians feel Jesus must have had to suffer so badly for what is the flawed life of humankind.  We really know how to make a mess of things, black or white.

I really think there is a role for forgiveness in this whole mix up, including for slavery in the USA.  Hirsi Ali, a black African, writes in the Wall Street Journal, that African-Americans have a better life than any other blacks on this globe.  He cites the tribal wars in Africa, the genocides, the corrupt governments who can’t provide an education nor any form of health care for their citizens.  Despite the work of missionaries, whole areas have not risen much above their Bantu origins.

We must encourage those activists who take a positive, Christian view of things which fits in with the not-always-positive established order here in the U.S.  We all claim to be human, and while that includes failings, it should include forgiveness.  Yes, that is an almost unheard word – forgiveness.