In San Antonio...

On the plane down, I read some of Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and he said something in it that struck me, hard. “I have seen too much to believe too much.” It speaks to me in ways I haven’t felt since I read Voltaire’s Candide, many, many...many years ago. 

The more you see of people’s actions, the less you believe anything they claim or say. The more you think no one can be fully trusted, no matter how decent and moral they seem, because you’ve seen how their own history puts their claims to lie. 

The Catholic Church lied about its priests molesting children for decades, all around the world. They'd move the offenders from one parish to another without warning, yet they still try to lecture others on what is moral and correct. And too many people go along with it, attacking the church’s victims. 

 That monster in the White House is practicing genocide against the Cuban population with its embargo, just like Stalin did to Ukraine in the Holodomor, a hundred years ago. No oil allowed into the island for months, killing the energy infrastructure so hospitals cannot function and food is spoiled. People will die of disease and starvation, and no one cares. Same for Iran. It's obscene.

People are being told not to trust vaccines that have saved untold numbers of lives over the centuries because some nut job says they should, just like people were convinced by the church that cats were in league with the devil, seven or eight centuries ago. So they killed them or ran them off...and were overrun with rats carrying fleas that passed along the bubonic plague. Which wiped out up to half of Europe’s population. 

It goes on and on and the more I learn about history the more I see us committing the same stupid mistakes, over and over and over. We don’t learn. We don’t try to be better. We only look for new and improved ways of committing the same attrocities as our forbears. And we’re so fucking good at it, we think we’re advancing instead of just coughing up more and more death and destruction. 

I think I’m turning into a curmudgeon...if I wasn’t one, already. What keeps me from losing total faith is my characters and stories. I try my best to do right by them, and sometimes I manage...sometimes. 

I just read Blood Angel 3 - Revelation and like how it turned out, so now plan to work on the next part in the series, sub-titled A Long Journey. Where Léonidès goes looking for Gabrielle in hopes of trading Franz for Dmitriy. He goes to England then Korea through the Suez Canal and via Hong Kong and China...and finds she is as much of a bitch towards him as ever. 

...Sisters...