Lucky to be American

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consiousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln

Stars in Their Courses

I attended a beautiful memorial today for a young man whose life on earth was cut short by mental illness. In listening to the lay people as well as those ordained in the religion, I was moved by their passion for understanding things that are beyond their understanding. 

I often ponder whether or not God exists. I have seen the beauty of a baby born and the horror of war first hand and it puzzl

es me that one heavenly entity could have a hand in both. I, with jaded eye on the bad in the world, am skeptical. However, in listening to the heartfelt emotions of a family and friends that collectively gathered to remember a young life, I let my mind help me understand what I was hearing.

Often when I ponder my mortality, I think about my place in our universe. That gives me great comfort for some reason I can't explain nor would expect you to. So, I travel in my mind to what I know for an explanation.

When I look at our closest astronomical partner, the moon, for example, I marvel that gravity and time have conspired to force it spin one time on its axis while it completes one revolution around earth. That oddity makes us always see the same face and the man, or woman in the moon. Our neighbor in space also happens to transect the same arc distance in the darkness as does the disc of the sun. That happy circumstance allows us the opportunity to experience the pleasure of majestic eclipses of the sun. They wouldn't be nearly as spectacular if the moon were a few hundred thousand miles farther away. If you've ever viewed a total or partial solar eclipse, the experience is sublime.

My favorite example of why I think things are far more complicated spiritually than some give credit is the Big Bang. All that we know, all that we love, hate, dream about and experience, all that we see in the sky at night and around us in the day, all of our universe, vast as it is, emanated from a single point infinitesimally small. When queried about the explosion 13 billion years ago that set us on a course of being, physicists, most of them anyway, say they can't explain it. But even if they did know, they would not know about what preceded the Big Bang. If the Big Bang started all we know, what started it?

Now that it is nearing winter, I urge you to go outside at night and look for the constellation Orion. You can't miss him. The hunter lords over the winter night sky and his three starred belt with his sword hanging down shines brightly in the cold and dark. Look at Orion's right shoulder to the left and a bit higher than the belt. You'll notice a great orange star there. In fact, you can't miss it. The name of that star is Betelgeuse. It's pretty far away. If you were miraculously able to travel at the speed of light or a blistering 186,000 miles per second, you wouldn't get to Betelgeuse for 625 years. But, despite its great distance from us, Betelgeuse is the only star, except the sun, that appears as a disc in telescopes rather than a sparkling pinprick of light. That's because Betelgeuse is huge. Not to exaggerate, but Betelgeuse is REALLY big. If, instead of a burning ball of hydrogen, it was a mason jar and we could pour earth-sized marbles into that jar at one per second, we wouldn't fill Betelgeuse (the mason jar) for 30,000 years. Think about that. Wow, we're small and insignificant aren't we?

So, on the day set aside in memory of a young man who died many years too early, I hope you take stock of what I say here and sleep soundly under a clear late fall sky with many stars, like Betelgeuse, twinkling high above. Take comfort in knowing that in some way, those that have gone before us, like the young man we honored today, still shine down upon us as well.

Hi in the Middle and Round at Both Ends

As Ohio goes so goes the nation. It was true on November 6th this year and even more so in 1876. We think that our latest presidential election was acrimonious. Hardly in comparison to the Centennial race. The country was in the midst of post-Civil War Reconstruction. Custer and his blue coated troopers had been massacred at the Little Big Horn River and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, from Ohio of course

, and Democrat Samuel Tilden were neck in neck in the race. When the votes were tallied Tilden had won both the popular vote and, what mattered most, the Electoral College. But, not surprisingly, the results were contested. A few of the electors were found to be ineligible as they held political office. After weeks of legal wrangling, the last remaining uncommitted electors were awarded to Hayes and that pushed him ahead of Tilden. Hayes, a Civil War hero who had been wounded five times, became our 19th president and took the country out of Reconstruction and into the modern era.

November

No sun--no moon!
No morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
No sky--no earthly view--
No distance looking blue--

No road--no street--
No "t'other side the way"--
No end to any Row--
No indications where the Crescents go--

No top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
No courtesies for showing 'em--
No knowing 'em!

No mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No park--no ring--no afternoon gentility--
No company--no nobility--

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November! 

- Thomas Hood -

The Time of Year for Ghosts and Goblins

"The dominant spirit, however, that haunts this enchanted region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper, whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak." 

- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow -

Too Big to Comprehend

Wednesday night the presidential debaters tossed around the figure of $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars or a one followed by twelve zeroes) as if it were no great thing.   I guess they were right.  It's not any more.  Especially when we are now annually racking up fiscal year deficits of well over $1 trillion and the total amount of money we owe to ourselves and others is approaching $17 trillion.

Mark Steyn, political pundit and commentator, has observed that the word trillion used to be used solely in the context of interstellar travel.  How else does one measure great distances without huge numbers.  But now, we've reduced it to casually referring to the amount of debt with which we've burdened ourselves.  Steyn quips that we've normally left the word trillion to the realm of Carl Sagan and talking about distances from here to the planet Zongo.  But,  no more.  We've brought it in to common usage and that's a scary thing.

The vice president, Joe Biden, spoke this week at a campaign event and assured Americans that "darn right we're going to raise taxes and collect $1 trillion."  Yeesh!  It's almost like he was referring to a girl scout cookie drive.   $1 trillion?  Easy.  Call me when you have a challenge!

I don't think the vice president, or quite a few of the people he serves, have one iota of an idea of what a trillion dollars is.   You may think you do, but you don't.   The picture attached to this article gives some sense of what a trillion dollars would look like if you could stack $100 dollar bills on pallets two high in some warehouse somewhere.

Here's some other ways to look at it.   A dollar is six inches in length.  If you lined up one trillion dollars end to end,  they'd stretch all the way to our sun and a little bit beyond.  About 94,000,000 miles away.   If you went to the mall and tried to spend one trillion dollars at the rate of one million dollars per hour you'd have to hang around at Macy's and Abercrombie and Fitch for a little over 115 years.  That's the definition of a mall rat for sure.  If you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of one another they'd reach the lofty height of 68,000 feet which is twice as high as jet liners fly and just about touching the edge of space.

The national debt, as I have pointed out, is a little over $16 trillion.  If you think $1 trillion is a number you can't comprehend, $16 trillion is a number that will explode your brain.   In fact, if each dollar represented a mile was laid end to end and you wished to travel from dollar one to the sixteen trillionth dollar and did so at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second),  it would take you only 164 years to get there.  Physics won't allow you to move anywhere close to the speed of light but to make the timeframe reasonable, we're going to have to assume you can do it.  By the time you got back to earth, we'd be long gone but America probably would have rung about another $368 trillion in debt assuming we keep our spending rate reasonable and cap it at a mere $1 trillion per year.

We've just closed out this fiscal year and we've spent another $1.3 trillion more than we've taken in in revenue.  If you did that with your personal finances, you'd be in jail.  But, the government, which conveniently prints its own money and can borrow from itself as well, doesn't really have to worry about such inconvenient things as balancing budgets or fiscal soundness.   But, if we really had to and bore down to pay off our debt, the fact is that we need to come up with $16 trillion to do it.  Even then, we'd be back to just being broke.  No money in the till.  Nothing to show for $16 trillion of effort.   That may be something you might be able to comprehend but, like me, I am sure you're depressed about it nonetheless.

Equinox

I sure felt it this morning when I went out to get the paper.  Venus hung high in the morning sky and the barest hint of sunrise tinged the eastern horizon.  The stars were blinking brightly in the chilly darkness.  So much of a change from the warm and pleasant summer we just enjoyed.

The sun's rays are falling equally on the earth now, for a couple of weeks anyway.  Soon the tilt of the earth's axis will favor the southern hemisphere giving them their summer season and bringing to us the coloring of the leaves, the pumpkins, the smell of wood smoke and apple pies.

The Autumnal Equinox - the best time of year!