Monthly Archives: December 2020

Crime, Governance, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

ADMIRABLE CRIMES

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After following the flood of evidence of election thievery in 2020, Prudence leads one to wonder many things, posit many questions.  These are questions to Americans who love our nation, our history, our traditions and the ideals embraced by the Constitution.  Asking the same questions of people who are willing to riot, loot, burn and destroy the properties of others, or who are so consumed by hatred for any individual or group that they are unable to consider any ideas with which the objects of their hatreds may agree, or of those who think they are communists and Marxists or fundamentalist Muslims or anyone else whose core beliefs and loyalties are antithetical to our constitutionally limited democratic republic, will result not in thoughtful response or discussion, but in restated hatreds.  Let us not waste that time.  Prudence dictates that we place these concerns before those who want to strengthen our present, defend our heritage and who will build a better future than what appears to be gathering force, as I write, against our highest ideals.

With these caveats in mind, then, a question:  given the growing list of sworn witnesses to malfeasance in the prosecution of elections of presidential electors in multiple states, and given the corollary existence, therefore, of dozens or hundreds of electoral criminals, should not the worst and most significant bad actors be prosecuted?

In other words, crimes against state, county and federal interests – defined by laws at each level – and against states’ and the U. S. Constitutions, were committed.  This fact means that there are criminals guilty of committing those crimes.  Neither Jonah Goldberg nor Joe Biden nor Chief Justice, John Roberts can deny those simple facts.  By some sleight of magic, however, the three Jays and a host of lower-court judges, elected and appointed, are able to determine without reviewing evidentiary specifics, that none of the witnessed crimes – civil rights violations of the highest order – were of sufficient consequence to matter to the declared outcomes of the states’ electoral votes.  Maybe there is a perspective to this that escapes the hapless U. S. citizen who trusts the upholding of his or her Constitution, state or federal.

It’s Friday at 3:00 PM  in downtown Philadelphia (or Milwaukee, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas, Phoenix or Raleigh) and people are streaming out of the city for the weekend.  A well-planned robbery of the Republic Bank branch at 1601 Walnut Street is executed with the perpetrators making off with six bags of cash just delivered by the armored-car service at 2:54.  They exit by a rear door, setting off alarms, and they casually drive away in a sedan, changing cars at Franklin Hospital visitors’ parking and disappear.  Total take: $510,000, all insured.

City police and the Philadelphia FBI “SAC” are all over the case.  The Bank, which handles several millions of dollars every week, is deeply concerned and cooperates in every way possible, sharing video tape and testimony from every person who witnessed anything of the event.  Bank personnel are carefully questioned, since these crimes often have an “inside” component.  Newspapers publish articles and photos, local radio and TV decry the ease with which the terrible criminals made off with, well… money.  By 6:00 PM the insurance carrier has been alerted, coverage processes begun and it sends its own investigator to check out the nature of the incident.  For a while, the whole city seems concerned.

On Monday morning, however, the FBI and City police make a joint statement that since the acquisition of the cash was so very important to the thieves, and since the amount of money is not enough to threaten the continuation of the bank, itself, they have decided to drop the case and congratulate the criminals.

Another question: What sort of reaction would other banks, the Department of Justice, the FBI Director and the governor of Pennsylvania have to that announcement? Do you think they would accept that since the investigators didn’t have all the evidence or “proof” necessary to win a case in court, that the matter should be dropped and the thieves congratulated for such a smooth operation?  Do you suppose that someone, a Republic Bank depositor, say, could file suit in state court demanding that the various investigatory authorities be enjoined from dropping the case?

Another question: If tens of thousands of votes, not dollars, were questioned by witnesses to their tabulation being performed illegally, possibly disenfranchising the same number of legal voters – effectively stealing their fundamental, unalienable right – is not an investigation that might restore their rights and provide the evidence for a trial of criminals who stole them be justified?  Should not the co-conspirators be enjoined from destroying evidence or from dropping the investigation, the theft being so well-executed, after all?

And, if the bank robbers were to use their ill-gotten gains to buy a beautiful, white house with servants, do you think they should be allowed to keep it?  No?

So, if dishonest people steal money we will chase them to the ends of the earth and convict them, but if dishonest people steal as many as a Million votes in an election we should let them keep them and enjoy all the fruits of their crime?

Tell me again, about what the Constitution means.

Family, Health Care

THe Allison Effect

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We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday.  Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes.  She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago.  It was  just after 8 in the morning.  Her mother held her as she slept.  She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her.  Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth.  There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.

We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved.  There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories.  Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services.  Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.”  We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.

During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects.  Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother.  Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered.  Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare.  Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have.  We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done.  She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.

At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact.  She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones.  They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out.  Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient.  The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew. 

Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend.  Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them.  I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say.  In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes.  They changed what I knew about my granddaughter.  So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.

Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes.  Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well.  You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.

When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it.  For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not.  My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day.  I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it.  I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.

What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.

Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced.  Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do.  I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way.  I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.

So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out.  But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.