Dr. Patrick Henry

Letter to the Editor

from

Patrick Henry

Professor Emeritus

Whitman College

Walla Walla, WA

To the Editors at Westphalia

and Readers Worldwide:

Despite running on a platform of no more wars, Donald Trump now embodies all three evils Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us about: racism, materialism, and militarism.

"A war of choice:" OMG, what an expression! It should constitute an oxymoron.

Last year, the nine nuclear nations spent $100 billion on nuclear weapons. We spent $51 billion, again outspending the other nuclear nations combined. This year's Pentagon budget is approximately $840 billion. Now Trump wants an additional $200 billion to finance the war in Iran. Trump's proposal for the 2027 Pentagon budget is $1.5 trillion, more than the combined budgets of the next nine highest spending countries.

There has been a gradual deadening of moral conscience in America and a growing blindness to our own self-interest as our economy has become progressively more dependent on the production of weapons.

What is it that we regret, if anything: the price of gas or the slaughter of several thousand innocent people and the internal displacement of millions of innocent men, women, and children?

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words haunt me: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Sincerely:

Patrick Henry

--30--

There was nothing special about it.

Just a regular Monday. A regular day.

Still no rain.

The news was all bad.

The cats were looking out the window, like waiting for something, patiently.

I swiveled in the chair in front of my desk, around and around. With every turn it was still Monday. Nothing special.

Printed copies of Culley Jane’s latest novel (her sixth since retiring), The Legend of Lionel, had just arrived from Amazon. I picked up the copy on the table next to my desk and held it in my hands. I opened it to the first page and read the first line.

I remembered the night the first line came to Culley Jane. It must have been more than a year ago. It takes her that long to write a novel. My first thought at the time was that she was going to write a novel about the day she married me. Of course, she had something else in mind, like basing it on a 12^th century French poem. Professors are like that.

The cats had still not moved, still waiting for something I could only imagine.

I re-read the first sentence in Culley Jane’s novel: “It’s not often that a plain old ordinary day turns quite so completely in a new direction and never really recovers, the way that day did.”

Mondays are garbage day, when a big truck pulls up on the street out front to take the trash away. The truck has a big green and yellow logo covering the side of the dump box...

W M

Waste Management

The truck arrives. The cats’ ears perk up. The truck leaves. The cats jump down from their window perch to scamper away.

How do they know their patience will be rewarded? Maybe we’re like cats in that way. In 1773 — at the doorstep of Revolutions against an Old Order —­ the English poet Alexander Pope famously wrote: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”

Maybe it wasn’t a nothing day after all.

Jackson the cat. Patience rewarded.