Father’s Day and the Vikings

by William H. Benson

June 6, 2013

     Recent news tells of a cell phone app for Iceland’s 325,000 residents. Because nearly all are descendents of about 15,000 Vikings who settled there late in the ninth century, the chances for incest are high. Software engineers designed the app so that a young Icelandic boy or girl can bump his or her cell phone with another’s and know how close or distant the two are related. If too close, the Incest Prevention Alarm sounds off.

     It is a high tech method for preventing an age-old difficulty, that of marrying far enough away from one’s immediate family to avoid birth defects.

     A problem for the Icelandic people is that they do not have a uniform system of last names needed to track relationships. A person’s last name is his or her father’s first name followed by the suffix “son,” if you are a boy, or “dottir,” if you are a girl, a system that has remained fixed for centuries. One source said that Iceland’s phone book lists people’s names in alphabetic order, but by first names. 

     Iceland was not inhabited in 874 A.D. when a Norseman named Naddoddr landed there. Although he did not stay, others followed him, and by 930 A.D., those first settlers claimed all the good land. Iceland’s colonization was part of a wider migration out of Norway that lasted for three centuries: from the eighth through the tenth.    

     Because of a lack of arable farm ground in Norway, as well as the snow, freezing temperatures, and foreboding mountains, many departed their native Norway for other locations. To the west they settled Iceland, Greenland and Vineland; to the east they marched across Russia and down to the Caspian Sea; and to the south they invaded England. They were Vikings.

     Most scholars agree that on June 7, 793 A.D., it was the Vikings who raided the monastery at Lindisfarne, an English island along Northumberland’s coast. This raid “never fails to capture the imagination,” because the Vikings inflicted terrible slaughter and injury upon the Christian English people. The only items saved was Lindisfarne’s Bible, now stored in the British museum, and the coffin that contained St. Cuthbert’s relics. All else was destroyed. The English never forgot that day.

     Another migration out of Norway occurred centuries later. During the hundred years between 1825 and 1925, some 800,000 Norwegians, one-third of the population at that time, migrated to the United States to settle in Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Iowa. One of those was my paternal great-grandfather, Ben Benson. Because his father was named Ben Davidson, he was given the last name of  Benson, but once in America, that last name stayed with the family.

     When growing up, I heard the stories of how Ben had worked on a fishing ship that sailed out of Tromso, Norway, some two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. In America, he settled first in northwest Iowa, near Sioux Rapids; then in Niobrara, Nebraska; and finally on a farm in Colorado, in southeast Logan County, where he built a sodhouse, farmed, and raised his three sons.

     An uncle explained Ben Benson’s life best. “He fished for a living the first half of his life, but dreamed of farming. He farmed the second half of his life, but reminisced of his days when he fished.”

     That is the conundrum that perplexes every immigrant. Regrets and second guesses. Was it wise for him to leave Norway? I think so. Even though a life on that dry-land farm meant constant wind, and dried up or hailed-out crops, and vermin crawling out of the kitchen walls, he found a life there.

     National Geographic magazine’s June 2013 edition describes the difficult life that the fishermen tolerate on the Lofoten Islands near Tromso, Norway. The work on the sea is arduous and dangerous, the cost to buy a boat is “typically three-quarters of a million dollars,” and then the large seafood companies buy up the quotas for the millions of cod that arrive to spawn among the islands each year.

     First, the history books tell us of the Viking Age; second, my family’s stories tell me of another age and time when my great-grandfather left Tromso, Norway; and third, that app for the young Icelandic boys and girls tries to circumvent what their geography and history gave to them: a small closely-related population with little migration into the island.

     We celebrate the Vikings when we cheer Minnesota’s football team, and for two days each week we pay homage to two of the Norseman’s gods: on Thursday it is Thor, the thunder god, the god of war; and on Friday, it is Freya, the goddess of beauty and love, and Odin’s wife. They all live in Valhalla, the most gorgeous mansion in all of Asgard where the gods feast with slain soldiers.

     Sunday is Father’s Day, the day when we recognize our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great, great-grandfathers, and so on. My last name is fixed, and has not changed for five generations, and by it people know that my paternal great-grandfather was a Norwegian. No need for an app.

The Movie “The Great Gatsby”

by William H. Benson

May 23, 2013

     Last Friday evening I saw “The Great Gatsby.” Playing Jay Gatsby is Leonardo DiCaprio, and he gives his usual rounded and splashy performance. The blonde English actress, Carey Mulligan, plays the comely and innocent-appearing, but not-so-intelligent, Daisy Buchanan, desired by two men, first, her husband, Tom Buchanan, but also her neighbor, Jay Gatsby. It is a tale of unrequited love, of adultery, and its ugly consequences.

     In a sense though, DiCaprio and Mulligan appear mismatched. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 fictional novel, they are close to the same age, nearing 30, but DiCaprio is 38 this year, and looks even older. Carey Mulligan is 27, but her ghost-white English skin makes her look 20. There is an age gap.

     Tobey Maguire plays the thirty-year-old Nick Carraway, the story’s first-person narrator. Tobey will turn 38 next month, and he looks 38.

     Baz Luhrmann, the movie’s director, has created a vision of “Great Gatsby” that is a phantasmagoric dreamscape of music, dance, colors, sights, and sounds that he centers around the most unrestrained party scenes imaginable, scenes that may eclipse anything witnessed in the 1920s. Then, when Nick Carraway types his tale on an early-vintage typewriter, letters appear around him, bounce into place across the screen, and transform themselves into sentences. Also, the camera will zoom across vast distances and then stop at a moment.

     It is enough, or too much, and a far cry from Fitzgerald’s literary novel, and from the chaste and sedate 1974 movie that starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.

     One redeeming thing I noticed. Luhrmann laid a recognizable piece of music near his version’s beginning: a few chords of George Gershwin’s 1924 “Rhapsody in Blue,” that appear out of nowhere, distinct and incongruous, like a rose standing in a weed patch.

     The story is simple. Jimmy Gatz fled his parent’s poor farm in North Dakota and survived combat in Europe’s Great War. Later, he changed his name to Jay Gatsby, and earned a fortune through Meyer Wolfsheim, a New York City racketeer who, with Gatsby’s help, defied the country’s prohibition laws.

    Gatsby met Daisy in 1917 during the war and fell in love with her, but because he was penniless at that time, she married the dashing Tom Buchanan, who came from old money. Gatsby builds a mansion at West Egg on Long Island’s north shore, across the bay from East Egg, where Tom and Daisy live.

     In the summer of 1922 Gatsby stares at night across that bay to the green light that fronts Tom and Daisy’s mansion, reaching out for that light, hoping that he can win Daisy’s love. He throws reckless parties for people he does not know, and so Fitzgerald wrote, “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”

     Gatsby confides in Nick Carraway, his only friend, who lives in the cottage next door, and Nick tells Jay not to expect too much from Daisy because “You can’t repeat the past.”

     “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

     Jay is obsessed with recapturing those first moments he had with Daisy when they were young, before the war, but now when he pushes her to tell Tom Buchanan that she never loved him, she is bewildered, confused, torn. Her hesitation crushes Jay, and so the tale winds down to its hideous conclusion, as do most tales that include alcohol abuse, criminal activity, and adultery.

     Fitzgerald’s literary skills, his way with words, and Luhrmann’s staging and scenery construction  dazzle the screen, and together they surpass the plot’s wretchedness.

     Nick Carraway finishes the story. “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

     Nick feels sympathy for Jay Gatsby because he was innocent: “he believed in the green light.”

     A possible theme for Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” is that one person cannot force another to love them. Although he or she may try, the results are not the best.

     Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald’s own life was tragic. He married Zelda, and their romance was legendary, but his true love was for alcohol. In 1940 at the age of 44, he passed away due to a heart attack brought on by chronic alcoholism. Like his fictional hero Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald missed the green light.

Afghanistan

by William H. Benson

May 9, 2013

     “In June 2010, the Afghan War surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest American war in United States history.” Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, a month after Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The war’s goal was to capture those responsible for the terrorist attacks, destroy Osama bin Laden’s terrorist boot camps, and remove from power the Taliban, that Islamic fundamentalist party that controlled the country and that hosted Al-Qaeda. A year later it appeared that the Americans had accomplished those three goals, but today American troops are still dying on Afghan soil.

     The war’s high point occurred two years ago, on May 2, 2011, when U.S. troops invaded a compound in Pakistan at night, found and killed Osama bin Laden. Otherwise, the continual news that another bomb has exploded and killed more Americans has dented America’s resolve to fight to win in this war-torn country. Last week another roadside bomb killed five more American soldiers.

     Hopes are high for a draw-down that will culminate in 2014 when President Obama is expected to reduce American troop strength from the current 74,000 to as little as 10,000. A genuine fear exists that Afghanistan will deteriorate into another civil war, or that the Taliban will regain control. Either way the Afghan people will suffer.

     Two weeks ago, a French envoy to Afghanistan named Bernard Bajolet spoke at his going-away reception in Kabul and outlined the challenges he sees facing the Afghan people. A New York Times reporter said that “His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.”

     Bajolet said, “I think it crucial that the Afghan leadership take more visible and obvious ownership for their army.” He said that the Afghan government needs to “cut corruption, which discourages investment, deal with drugs and become fiscally self-reliant.” The drugs have “caused more casualties than terrorism in Russia, Europe and the Balkans,” and that the Western governments should discontinue spending billions in Afghanistan “if it remains the world’s largest heroin supplier.”

     Such straight talk from a diplomat is welcome and refreshing. The corruption is appalling. In recent days, the news broke that the CIA has been dropping off bags of cash at Amid Karzai’s office. Afghanistan’s top leader hinted that he used American taxpayers’ money “to pay off warlords and power brokers.” Members of Congress expressed their dismay.

     Yet, this is not unusual. The CIA has worked for decades in Afghanistan. Read Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History for an explanation. A Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson ran Operation Cyclone throughout the 1980’s. His CIA operation supplied anti-aircraft weapons, Stingers, to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians after the Soviet Union had invaded their country on December 24, 1979.

     The Russians learned too late that the Afghan is a tenacious foe, and that once the CIA began arming the mujahideen, the war turned against them. The former invincible Russian army withdrew in tatters.

On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromov, stood on the Friendship Bridge at Afghanistan’s border and told a television reporter, “There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me. Our nine year stay ends.” It was nine years, fifty days.

     A wasteland lay behind Gromov. Fifteen thousand Russian soldiers died in what is now called Russia’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union spent billions of rubles, a million Afghan people died, and seven million Afghans streamed into Pakistan and other countries. Other foreigners streamed into Afghanistan to join the mujahideen in their fight. One such foreigner was the Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

     In the power vacuum created when the Russians departed, the mujahideen quarreled and fought among themselves. A vicious civil war broke out in 1994 that made the fight with the Russians look tame. Mullah Mohammed Omer and his Taliban party emerged victorious.

     What will happen once American troops leave Afghanistan and another power vacuum opens up? What will that last American general say? Will another civil war erupt? Will the Taliban regain power?

Questions pile up, but answers elude us.

     The Afghan people deserve better. They deserve peace. The children play in cemeteries because those are the only open fields without land mines. Their land is a battleground where the Western powers play their war games, and the Afghans are shot and killed in the crossfire.

     After eleven years and seven months, it is time that the American troops leave Afghanistan.  

Mars: The Red Planet

by William H. Benson

April 25, 2013

     Mars One announced startling news last week that they would receive applications from those willing to travel to Mars and establish a permanent colony on the Red Planet. A Dutch entrepreneur named Bas Landsdorp heads Mars One, and he hopes to send four astronauts to Mars by 2023, and then another four every two years thereafter. Landsdorp and his associates say, “this is not a hoax.”

     The catch is that no Martian colonist can expect to return to Earth. Those chosen for the Mars flight would live, die, and be buried there in that planet’s reddish soil, at least 34 million miles from Earth. Absent the expense required for a return flight, the foundation will reduce their costs enough to make the colony feasible. Landsdorp says that the technology is in place now to establish a Martian colony.

     Space travel lures men and women, just as land and ocean travel has called our ancestors to pick up and move across Earth for millennium. Human beings wander.

     Looking back, NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended almost two years ago, on July 21, 2011, when Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center after carrying four astronauts into outer space. The Space Transportation System program began on April 12, 1981 with the Columbia, and over the next three decades, NASA launched 135 missions, and only two failed: Challenger on January 27, 1986, 73 seconds after liftoff; and Columbia on February 1, 2003, upon re-entry.

     But there is a vast difference between a shuttle flight and a one-way mission to Mars. Instead of counting days inside a space shuttle orbiting Earth, an astronaut to Mars would count between 150 and 300 days of space travel just to get to Mars, and once there, they would live in an environment utterly inhospitable to men and women. People’s willpower would break down under such harsh conditions.

     Except for ice crystals on Mars’s polar caps or below the rocky surface, water is absent. Because Mars has such a thin atmosphere, water cannot exist in liquid form. The Red Planet offers no plants, trees, animals, or insects, and the astronauts would walk on land  with only 40% of the Earth’s gravity.

     To survive, men would have to transport their own food, water, housing, and protection from cold and radiation, and those supplies must last for years. Incredible it is to think that they can do it.

     The debate between manned and unmanned space exploration to Mars continues, but NASA has pursued unmanned flights there for decades. In 1996, rocket scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory responded to a challenge to complete a Martian expedition that was “faster, better, and cheaper,” meaning complete it in less than three years, obtain a great result, and keep the cost under $150 million.

     The result was Pathfinder, a rocket that bounced onto Mars’s surface on inflated air bags, and Sojourner, a small rover the size of a microwave that took 550 photographs and collected soil samples.

     Right now two additional rovers named Opportunity and Curiosity roam across Mars’s surface, and two satellites named Odyssey and Reconnaissance orbit above the planet. Another project, MAVEN, will launch in November this year to study Mars’s scant atmosphere.

     Carl Sagan, the planetary astronomer at Cornell University, died in 1996, but prior to his passing he recorded a message to future explorers that he called his “Vision of Mars.”

     “Science and science fiction,” he said, “have done a kind of dance over the last century with respect to Mars. The scientists make a finding. It inspires science fiction writers to write about it, and a host of young people read the science fiction and are inspired to become scientists to learn about Mars.”

     At an early age, I read Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” and also Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian stories that feature John Carter, an American who finds himself transported to Mars where he discovers a civilization slowly dying, but my dance with science fiction was tentative and did not result in a life-long commitment to astronomy.               

     Unmanned missions make better sense for now, because they are faster, better, and cheaper than manned missions, but with the technology for space travel expanding, that may change before 2023.

     Marc Shepanek a NASA official, said, “If the kings of Spain and England could send people around a world that was potentially flat, I could not imagine that we would not be capable of going to Mars and coming back. People are flexible; they adapt. There are all kinds of people in history who have survived heroically. It’s amazing what people can do when they have to.”

     Not anytime soon will I sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. I prefer seeing Earth’s sunrises and sunsets. I like watching the seasons change, and I am partial to water, food, grocery stores, books, my cell phone, my house, and above all else I enjoy meeting people. Call me an Earthling.

De-Extinction

by William H. Benson

April 11, 2013

     Spring has sprung, temperatures have warmed, and plants and animals have revived again after another winter. This all happens without human direction. No one tells the grass that now is the time to green up, or that trees should sprout leaves, or that pheasants should produce chicks. We call it Mother Nature’s invisible hand. The ancient Greeks had their own myth, that Hades forced Persephone, Zeus’s daughter, to live in the Underworld for six months every year, and then he released her in the spring.

     Earth is unique in the solar system. It is alive. Life exists here, but no one life form is permanent. Species arise, and then they disappear. Humans bear responsibility for numerous species’ extinction because men have hunted them or wrecked their habitat. In National Geographic‘s April issue, the author Carl Zimmer lists some extinct animals, all because of men: the Pyrenean ibex, the dodo, the auk, the thylacine, the imperial woodpecker, the Chinese river dolphin, and the passenger pigeon.

     The early settlers to North America were amazed at the extraordinary numbers of passenger pigeons. In the nineteenth century, the ornithologist John James Audubon once encountered a tremendous flock.

     “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, and the continual buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose. Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensbugh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.”

     Hunters shot them, gassed them from trees, and carted them by wagon and railroad car to the east where the poor and the slaves ate them. The last passenger pigeon named Martha died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1902. The same fate befell the Carolina parakeet. According to the writer Bill Bryson, “it existed in vast numbers,” but due to relentless hunting, its numbers diminished until the final one died in that same Cincinnati zoo in 1918.

     More fortunate was the American bison. A South Dakota rancher named James Scotty Phillip rescued five buffalo calves, almost the last survivors of the proud herds that once covered the plains. 

     Ancient hunters may have contributed to the Ice Age animals’ extinction, but the evidence is not certain. Gone are the saber-toothed cat, the giant sloth, and the woolly mammoth. That same issue of  National Geographic tells of men who roam across Siberia every summer searching for the tusks that dot the landscape, the only remains of those long-haired elephant-like animals that ranged for eons across northern Siberia, until about eight thousand years ago.

     Bill Bryson wrote in his book A Short History of Everything that “as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen in the tundra of northern Siberia alone.” Why did they all die out? Hunters may have contributed to their demise, but so may have climate change or an epidemic.

     Some life forms thrive despite humans’ best efforts, an astonishing fact. Consider the coyote or the prairie dog. Poisoned, trapped, shot, or torched, and yet they still live to produce more progeny.

     Scientists are now poised to reverse extinction by the process called de-extinction, bringing back to life a clone from a perished species. That National Geographic article mentioned the birth of a Pyrenean ibex that lived for only minutes in 2003, handicapped from breathing because of a third lung.

     James Graff, a writer for The Week magazine, suggested that scientists should resurrect the Neanderthals, another species that Homo Sapiens may have hunted to extinction, but then Graff warned his readers: “I can’t imagine a sadder fate than being a specimen of a lost species. Sure, a woolly mammoth would be a zoological sensation. But is that reason enough to make one? And what moral quandaries are posed by a mix-and-pour Neanderthal?”

     Read Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park to see how scientists’ experiments can backfire. Carl Zimmer wrote, “In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are resurrected for their entertainment value,” and the consequences terrify.

     Mary Shelley wrote a haunting story in 1818 that she entitled Frankenstein. A college student, Victor Frankenstein spent time “in vaults and charnel-houses” assembling dead human body parts into an eight-foot giant that came to life through galvanic action. One day the creature stared into the eyes of his creator. “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge,” said Victor Frankenstein.

     Mary Shelley delved deeper into these issues of life and death and extinction, and so in 1826 she wrote a science fiction book, The Last Man. Her hero, Lionel Verney, lives alone in the year 2100 A.D., after a plague kills off all all other human beings.

     She may be right. A bacteria named Yersinia pestis causes the plague. If human beings go the way of the dinosaurs, bacteria will survive. Earth belongs to them. It is their planet. Bill Bryson writes, “Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. It is part of us.” Bacteria live to produce more progeny.

     Spring represents a revival of life, when Hades releases Persephone. We live and we enjoy life.

Ten Years Ago the United States Invaded Iraq

by William H. Benson

March 28, 2013

     On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered General Tommy Franks to invade Iraq. That day jets rained down bombs on military targets in Baghdad, and the next day the land troops marched into Iraq. Last week marked the invasion’s ten-year anniversary.

     In the war’s run-up, Bush had sought and received Congress’s vote of support, but, according to Kofi Annan, the U.S. president had “bypassed the UN Security Council and violated the United Nations founding charter.” The world’s nations opposed the invasion, except for Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. On February 15, some six million anti-war protestors took to the streets in 600 cities across the globe.

    On February 26, Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector said that “there was no evidence that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction,” despite Bush and his cabinet’s proclamations to the contrary. The same day Bush spoke of a post-invasion democracy as a model for the region.

     On March 17, Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq, but because the dictator failed to comply, the president commenced the war. By May 1, combat operations ceased, and the White House declared “Mission Accomplished.” On December 13, U.S. army soldiers lifted Saddam Hussein from a hole in the ground, and three years later, on December 30, 2006, authorities hung him. The war officially ended December 18, 2011.

     That spare time-line of events fails to convey the human cost that resulted from the U. S. president’s “unilateral” choice to invade Iraq. According to the “Costs of War Project,” the number of Iraqi’s killed were between 176,000 and 189,000. Of the coalition forces, 4,805 were killed. Those numbers represent a huge psychological scar upon the Iraqi people, as well as the Americans.

     The U.S. invasion of Iraq reminds me of Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia in October 1935. Italy’s troops possessed rifles and cannons, but the Ethiopians were armed with spears, bows, arrows, and a few antiquated rifles. It was a gross mismatch, but not as unequal as Bush vs. Hussein.

      Throughout the eight-year Iraqi war, the anti-war protest movement here and abroad fizzled, a reversal of what occurred during the Vietnam War. When President Kennedy sent the first 7,000 troops to Vietnam in November 1961, there were no protests, but as the war effort sank into a quagmire, college students took to the streets, demonstrated, protested, carried placards, burnt the American flag, and torched buildings. By contrast, during the Iraqi war, U.S. college campuses were quiet.

     Noam Chomsky, a professor at MIT and an early opponent of the war, said that “the activist movements of the past forty years have had a civilizing effect,” and yet those movements dissolved once the bombs began dropping in March 2003.

     When a person or community or nation picks up a weapon and assaults another, everything changes, and for the worst. Nonviolent techniques, though slower than rifles and tanks, will conquer dictators. Newsweek pointed out in its March 8 edition that Srdja Popovic, one of the leaders of the Serbian resistance, OTPOR, overthrew the murderer Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 with nonviolent methods.

     Gene Sharp, a professor at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, drew up a list of 198 methods, each designed to extricate a tyrant from his or her position, and they include “street theater, social networking, speeches, letters, petitions, slogans, banners, leaflets, and skywriting.” It is unfortunate that Syria’s rebels yielded to the temptation to pick up a gun, because ever since, the continuous cycle of violence has become tragic, with no endgame visible today.

    Could the Iraqi people have removed Saddam Hussein by nonviolent means ten years ago? Could the United States president have accomplished his goal without sending in bombers? For some, the answer is a resounding “yes!” For others, it is not so clear. But nonviolent methods look appealing now in light of the immense destruction heaped upon the Iraqi people over the past ten years.

     To children, words like “weapons of mass destruction,” and “models of democracy,” are concepts that sit high atop the ladder of abstraction. At that ladder’s base reside more concrete concepts, those a child can understand, like feeling terrified when a jet roars overhead and drops a bomb on a neighbors home and kills those inside. Then, there is the despair one feels from loosing a leg or an arm; or burying your brother; or seeing your school leveled, a home turned to rubble, or your sisters cut down. 

     The journalist, Anthony Shalid, asked, “What’s the sin of the children? What have they done?”

     How can we prepare ourselves for another president who will declare another “unilateral” war? We need a more organized and better prepared anti-war protest movement, we need Congressmen who will dare to vote “no,” we need a more united United Nations, and we need some means of reigning in a “shock and awe” president.