“If You Don’t Learn To Love Each Other, Things are Going To Get Much Worse!”

Valiant Thor and his gorgeous entourage

Russia is killing the Ukraine, and the spirits of the rest of us. 

How often do you find the Pope quoting you? Random remarks you spout off in the kitchen or bathroom while listening to “the horror and gore report,” otherwise known as “the news?” One of my personal rants at the news that only my family gets to hear - “I thought we were done with war.” All this business of soldiers and guns and bombs and weeping and bleeding. Then, I heard the Pope say so, recently, at the beginning of Lent, the time of purification before Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ - “I thought we were done with war.”

But, I’m paraphrasing - here is what the Pope actually said in his own, more eloquent, words -

“The truth is that ‘never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely.’ We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war!”

 

“We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable.” 

“On the contrary,” the pope said, “true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing.”

From Pope Francis to aliens - Yes, aliens have a stake in our survival as a planet and a species. 

First, aliens cannot write music. For music, they come to Earth. (That’s a joke. However, it could be true. We clearly have something they don’t; they have a vested interest in keeping earthlings well and functional.) Next, aliens harvest Earth’s force, usually leaving a crop circle behind as evidence. If humans were to disrupt the ki flow of Earth’s energy by nuclear annihilation, aliens might not be able to use the force. That’s a pretty simple breakdown of a process which most people have never heard of; even alien watchers have not figured out why aliens leave crop circles for us to decipher or why aliens come here at all, or if aliens are actually humans from the future. We do know that UFOs appear near nuclear power plants and nuclear weaponry. Warnings? What it all means is - Earth’s force must remain the same! We cannot destroy ourselves!

An over-simplification of Absolute Death. We are flirting with Absolute Death. I do not think our souls can survive nuclear war. If they are matter at all, physical in any way, then our souls will explode and dissipate.  

Elliot on the Red Phone

Mr. Robot, Season 2, Episode 1, final scene: An episode that was crammed full of hacker delights: bar codes to scan, Easter egg doors to open, and some choice low-tech hints that no one noticed. I was watching. This is what I saw: Eliot is in the front hallway of an old rooming house. There is a red phone on the wall. In these old rooming houses, a community phone was in the front hallway; no one had their own phone in their room. The red phone, any child of the Cold War will tell you, sat on the President’s desk and was a direct line to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, i.e. somewhere important in the world leader vein. The phone rings. Elliot picks it up and says, “Hello?” The voice asks, “Is it really you?” (Now we know Elliot is of extreme importance.) Elliot asks, “Who’s this?” The answer: “Thor. Valiant.” 

Fade to black. I’m shaking on the sofa. Who is getting this? No one. Obviously, someone in the writing department knows their shit. (I tried to comment and tell a writer of an Easter egg article about the low-tech stuff I knew, including the meaning of “red wheelbarrow” on Elliot’s composition notebook - from a poem by William Carlos Williams, about getting back to a simple life, but she fucking hacked the shit out of me to show her appreciation of my efforts. Lucky, I know a few things and I deleted her traps. As well as my comment on her article. Taking my ball and going home, fuck you very much.)

The Red Wheelbarrow

by

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Who was Valiant Thor?

Here is the unofficial story: 

A Visitor at the Pentagon

On March 16, 1957, a strange craft landed in a farmer’s field in Alexandria, Virginia. Local police arrived on the scene with guns drawn, expecting the worst. They were surprised to find what appeared to be an unarmed man stepping out of the craft. They were even more surprised when the man asked to speak with the President telepathically. It must have convinced them, so they immediately took him to the Pentagon. Over the next few days, the visitor would receive his meeting with the President and a fully furnished apartment deep within the Pentagon.

The Mission of Valiant Thor

According to Valiant Thor, he was sent here by a galactic council upholding the tenants of Jesus who was considered by Thor to be an intergalactic God, Savior of All Life Forms, to convince humanity to shy away from their use of nuclear weapons. Thor, and his group of alien assistants, all in the form of gorgeous human beings, hailed from the nearby planet of Venus. Thor convinced President Eisenhower to create a council against the use of nuclear weapons. However, the committee was repeatedly blocked by members of the CIA and DOD. 

Thor had to leave Earth defeated. His conclusion: Earth is more interested in making money than living in peace.

War and Reparation are BIG BUSINESS! Bigger than any other business. First, government contracts to kill, then government contracts to re-build. Until we break it, humanity is trapped by its leaders in this destructive and meaningless pattern. 

Remember, we always become friends again with our enemies - think Japan. The stupidest exchange ever had to be Hiroshima for Pearl Harbor. Isn’t it so much better to exchange sushi, sake, and technology instead of bombs, death and destruction?

Makes war obsolete.

I haven’t even touched on the constant African wars - the Congo, Nigeria - where men use more low tech weaponry, not any less deadly, to destroy. 

The Pope says we should not allow the oppressor to oppress us, but rather share some other options for him to achieve his goals. Negotiation. Talk. Friendship. There is no need to kill. No need to destroy. 

Or is it simply the desire to show the world one’s POWER? Who will be left to read history? Who will witness your power when the world is gone? Is there any power without a witness?

Virgin Mary

wearing her blue mantel of Peace

One more warning:

Came from Jesus's Mother, the Virgin Mary. Fatima, Portugal, 1917. Three young shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary that spoke to them and gave them predictions of our fate. She showed the children a terrifying vision of hell.

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out...When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine... (World War II) and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” 

On 25 January 1938, The New York Times reported "Aurora Borealis Startles Europe; People Flee in Fear, Call Firemen." The celestial display was seen from Canada to Bermuda to Austria to Scotland, and short-wave radio transmissions were shut down for almost 12 hours in Canada.

As a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis announced he would consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It didn’t make the news. God has become a dirty word on network TV.

Jesus’s mother warned us: “If you don’t learn to love each other, things are going to get much worse!”

The blue of Mary’s mantel has always represented Peace. 

Let us take up that blue mantel for purely practical reasons.

Peace is Life.

Yes, they killed John Lennon, but they did not kill his message.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

HOLY DAYS – The Nazi

     Gloria Wisher has an imaginary Nazi lover. I had an imaginary Nazi lover.

    Like my heroine in Holy Days, Gloria, I was born in 1951. Though WWII had ended six years before, my parents and grandparents talked a lot about the Nazis. I heard fearful stories about the Nazis in the same way I heard fairy tales or nursery rhymes. I was just as afraid of the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” and constantly asked my mother, “What’s our house made of?” “Wood.” “Is that the same as sticks?” “I guess so, why?” “Because the wolf can blow down sticks.” I asked the same kind of questions about the Nazis. My mother went around the house saying, “The Nazis fixed everything, they fixed everything.” By that she meant they had taught us how to kill and how to be cruel on a global level. Usually this outburst was sparked by an atrocity on the news. The adults frequently made remarks such as “The Italians would have been next because they changed sides during the war.” “But Grandma’s Italian!” I had heard tales of what could happen if you had a Jewish grandmother and I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry, the Germans lost the war.” Or when my mother would answer my queries with, “Oh, the Nazis would have loved you! You got the blonde hair and the green eyes!” Daddy said, “They would’ve come after people with freckles next.” “Do I have freckles?” “A few.” “Don’t worry, the Nazis lost the war.”

     But, I worried. I could hear a certain tone of stunned admiration in the adult’s voices. I knew in my child’s heart that they secretly admired certain qualities of their Nazi enemy. Power. Control. Cunning. Relentlessness. The singular awe that the Nazi terror and the Holocaust had actually occurred. That awe would remain hanging in the air in the inevitable silence that followed every discussion.

     And, the movies. As a shy child, I watched a lot of television by myself rather than going out to play, where I was constantly bullied by kids who beat me up for getting As. I stayed in and watched many, many black and white movies about the Nazis: Nazi experiments, Nazi concentration camps, the French Underground, weeping men and women as the Nazis marched into Paris, people living in bombed out shells of buildings, people pulling hidden bottles of wine, sausages and loaves of bread out from their tattered coats to share with Jews hidden in their walls. I saw “The Diary of Anne Frank,” I saw “The Pawnbroker.” When the pawnbroker said, “I didn’t die. Everything I loved was taken from me and I did not die.” I was oddly comforted. At the time, I was a devout Catholic child who believed in the trials of the Catholic saints. Like the Catholic saints, the lesson learned was: if it’s not the boiling oil, if it’s not the concentration camp, then you are going to be okay. You can take it. I had been abused and I was already wondering what had happened to me, wondering why such a thing had been done by the very person who was supposed to be protecting me, but I knew that it was not as bad as what had happened to the pawnbroker, or the saints, and, if I had anything to say about it, I was going to be okay.

     I was eleven. I had no conscious knowledge of the fact that I had already been abused when I was three years old. But that wouldn't have changed my determination.

     I wrote Holy Days for the children. I know children can’t read the book because of its sexual content, but I also know that children are out there ironically enduring and suffering from the very acts they cannot read about and really should read about because they would know if they read Holy Days that they’re going to be okay, that they can be okay. I hope adults will read it and start treating children like cognizant beings who know something’s going on about which they need to be told the truth and comforted.

     I created a Nazi lover and I gave this Nazi to Gloria to help her gain some power and control over what was happening to her. Here is her first encounter with the Nazi, which she uses to try to explain a sexual assault by “the boy next door,” her mother’s best friend’s son, who did everything the Nazi does to Gloria in this scene:

THE NAZI

The Nazi officer came into the room. He looked at me where I was, on the bed. There was nothing in the room but a bed, lamp and table. No curtains on the window, which looked out on a bleak, winter field.

            The Nazi was handsome. He was always handsome. I wasn’t afraid of him. I loved him because he kept me safe in this room and he was never cruel to me; he was always kind.

           Never was there any question of my family or my friends, never any betrayal, or any politics, only this handsome man slowly removing his uniform, coming over to me where I was on the bed.

            I was naked, under the covers. Warm and naked. I was giving him something he could not get outside this room.

            He lay on top of me, but, suddenly, he was wearing his full uniform again! He pushed himself hard against me, and again, hard.

            Then, he was naked again, and he held me. His warm, wet lips brushed against my cheek, which was cold, exposed as it was to the chill in the room.

     We see two more encounters with Gloria and this Nazi, but Gloria makes it clear that she has created many such encounters, scenarios in which she controls the action. I don’t think people are aware of how many times beautiful women are sexually assaulted in their lives. Beautiful women are treated as objects of desire for the entitlement of men. They are presented this way in the media and in life. Like Gloria, men stopped their cars for me as I walked to the library, to school or to church from the time I was about twelve years old and could go places alone.  Many, many times I could have been killed if I had been a different sort of girl, an adventurous girl who might have thought a car ride was preferable to walking alone. Luckily, God made me shy. My life was saved over and over by the fact that I preferred to walk by myself. After a while, beautiful women begin to value men who do not try to have sex with them, men who actually like them for conversation, friendship, and dare I say it, their minds. But, I digress. My point in digressing is that Gloria had many, many incidents she needed to explain to herself, many times when she needed the Nazi to protect her. Why she didn’t choose the Allies, I cannot say, except that by conquering the Nazi (who also finds respite from the war in that room), she had conquered the worst enemy of all.

     During her many lonely hours of reflection and observation watching television, Gloria also sees the resemblance of our culture to the Nazi ideal. Over and over she sees the physical perfection of advertising models, TV personalities and Hollywood actors. “Perfection,” Gloria decides, “is the minimum daily requirement.”

     And when President Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, Gloria is twelve.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

THE MOMENT

What difference does it make to history or anything else where any of us were at the precise moment we heard?

            The difference is this: that was the moment we all, collectively, stopped believing.

            We stopped believing in goodness.

          Mama used to click her tongue, whenever she thought about it, in her vague, muddled way: “The Nazis fixed everything, they fixed everything, they fixed!” She was right. The Nazis made it so we could get used to anything. Someone, a man who had survived the death camps, talked once about being forced to shovel graves for the Nazis. He talked about how enormous the hole was and how cold he and the other shovellers were, how very cold. He talked about seeing a weed blowing in the cold wind and thinking how happy he was to be alive, just to see that weed, to know the weed was alive under the freezing snow and how grateful he was to feel the terrible cold because he was alive - and he knew, then, that human beings could get used to anything.

           For a long time, the Nazis were very far away. First, they were in Europe, then, they were in the past. The Nazis were not us, but we became them. We invited them in.

          From the moment the shot rang out, the Nazis, like the devil himself, rose up from hell and rushed to our side. From that moment on, we learned to turn our heads and check our backs; we learned suspicion and fear. At first we were horrified at ourselves and then, we got used to our fear. And then, we got used to our horror. And, then, we became proud of our horror and began to wear it ahead of us, not as a shield, as a medal.

         We were so frightened by the Nazis, that we became the Nazis in order to keep it from happening to us again. We had the comfort of knowing, no matter what we did, no matter how evil, we could never be as bad as the Nazis.

         In Revere, bad had become a virtue. Bad was it. I heard of kids who wouldn’t come to Revere. That struck me as funny, because there were other cities, like Dorchester and Roxbury, where I was afraid to go, even in the car with my parents. Sometimes, bad is all there is. It starts to look good after a while. Bad makes you tough. It makes you ready.

     I still think of Gloria’s assessment when I watch the news. When I watch cops beating people in the streets, when I watch race riots, when I see women’s rights being taken away, when I read stories about children being sexually abused or sexually trafficked, when I see old people being disrespected, when I see LGBTs being mistreated, when I see the sacred lands of indigenous peoples being fracked, when I see our veterans neglected, homeless, jobless, and suffering from their wounds, when I see the earth melting, and the DNA of everything God created being arrogantly altered for money, I think of what the Nazis taught us: how to be ruthless, how to take from others, how to hurt and maim and tear apart – but not destroy – no, because ultimately, like Gloria I believe in the triumph of good over evil. I need to quote a hero (who shall remain anonymous, unless you recognize her) from a sci-fi thriller, a line that has helped me survive: “God never lets the devil win.” Ultimately, whether we become Nazis or not is our choice. Ultimately, no matter what we suffer, we get to choose whether to be good or evil. Evil cannot kill us. But good can help us live. As my dear Gloria said: “They tried to kill me in this place of love and horror. They tried to kill me but they couldn’t because I loved too much.”

©Patricia Goodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation.