My Impromptus today is headed “Down with bipartisanship! &c.” This column includes something for everyone (possibly). Now let’s have some mail.
In a column earlier this week, I wrote the following:
Lately, a lot of people have been asking, “Are we headed toward civil war?” Some of them ask it in a hopeful tone of voice.
A reader says,
War is awful and haunts the survivors. I firmly believe that if more Americans shared this understanding, there would be no romantic movies about war, no war-making video games for our children to play, etc. War would be somber. A civil war — unthinkable. In a previous life I dropped a bomb in Afghanistan from a Navy jet. Mortar position taken out. I volunteered for it, I know. Fifteen years later I’m still processing, wondering what God thinks about all of it.
I published a letter about elderly parents with a handicapped son. Several readers have contributed mail on this general subject. For instance:
I have a cousin with Down syndrome who is a few years older than I am, still living in his mid-sixties. . . . Today, Mark’s parents are in their eighties, yet they have never quit loving and providing for their son, whom they always saw as a precious gift from God. Where would our society, our world, be without people like them?
Our reader adds,
An elderly man I know of did push-ups and pull-ups in his home just so he could be strong enough to lift his invalid wife from her bed, place her in her chair, and take care of her needs at home, where she very much preferred to be. Earlier in his life, this fellow had been a powerful (although diminutive) and well-known attorney in the area. He left all that behind when his wife needed him. . . . I aspire someday to be that kind of man, if required.
In a column last week, I quoted James Fenimore Cooper: “A want of national manliness is a vice to be guarded against . . .” A reader writes,
My paternal grandfather was born in rural New Brunswick in 1880. When he was a young child, his family moved to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. By the time I knew him in St. Louis, his language still betrayed his origins (and his age). I spent most weekends at my grandparents’ house. When my grandmother put dinner on the table, my grandfather would sometimes comment, “It wants salt.” I also remember watching him at his workbench in the basement. If some apparatus was squeaking, he’d remark, “It wants oil.”
Think of the opening line of the Twenty-third Psalm, too. Also the proverb “Waste not, want not.”
Our reader continues,
About 10-15 years ago, I was at an event where someone was called upon to read the Robert Burns “Selkirk Grace.” Since he had never encountered “want” with that meaning, he changed the second line from “some wad eat that want it” to “some wad eat that lack it.” Ouch!
Ouch, indeed. My thanks to one and all.