6/23/2025

My Dear Friend & POTUS, DJT,

            “What am I going to do with you?” My dad would ask me that in a loving tone when he was baffled by some situation, he found me in. I can’t remember a specific moment when he asked me that, but I do remember the question, because it caused me dissonance. In my mind my dad always knew what to do, so if he was in a quandary over something I had done, then my stable world had turned to chaos.

“What am I going to do with you?” The question is in my head in a new way today. The I is me, not my dad, & the you is you, not me.

Others seem to be similarly stymied. Citizens in Pakistan are parading in the streets, less than 24 hours after their government nominated you for a Nobel Peace Prize for defusing their recent crisis with India. Your buddy, VVP, is saying, “(this) absolutely unprovoked aggression against Iran has no basis and no justification.”

            I am holding my breath, waiting for what comes next & I know it’s not going to be pretty. Vassily Nebenzia, Russia's ambassador to the UN, spoke my mind when he characterized our bombing as opening “a Pandora's box (Pb). No one knows what new catastrophes & suffering it will bring.”

         Don’t get me started on Pb! I am bothered by its parallel to the Adam & Eve scenario where women are blamed for unleashing evil into the world.

         The Pb myth does have one redeeming feature, specifically that the one thing that remains in the vase (the original poem refers to a vase, not a box) after the badness escapes is HOPE.

         That’s what I hold on to today. That’s what women in Burma, in Iran, in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Israel hold on to as the bombs fall around them. They believe in a better world for the sake of their children.

         I am finding the prayer of St. Frances of Assisi helpful today & will do my best to abide by this part:

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to
comfort than to be comforted;
to understand, than to be understood;
to love, than to be loved.

         BYBS,