TUSKEGEE AIRMEN — 

These trailblazers would fly 15,500 combat sorties in WWII and earn more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses.”

Excerpted from my book, Sitting with Warrior:

“The drive to secure justice, peace, health, and happiness is innate to all people. These are the fruit of freedom that require its preservation. This is the crux of moral persuasion for why we do or do not go to war.

“By ‘we,’ I mean each individual and each group of individuals, however affiliated, that make up the organic whole of America. Whether we consent to war or peace, it is the warrior-within who is called on for strength of conviction, character and will. In the skirmishing of the political right and left—or the up and down, in and out, or anywhere in between—preserving our way of life is by extension preserving the personal-self.

“It is notable that in all the rhetoric contemplated to excite, incite, appease, or supplicate American society, one can hear the symbolic ringing of the Liberty Bell. Each toll of the bell is an affirmation of freedom, justice, and truth. Each toll is an invocation of a free nation, born out of resistance to oppression, tempered by the heat of battle, and sanctified by the blood of sacrifice. ‘In pursuit of preserving the national collective-self, Americans are cajoled, coaxed, or arm-twisted toward the peace table or the war room.’”

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We are at a crossroads in this nation, not unlike the crossroads Germany faced in the rise of Nazi Germany (Deutsches Reich). The personal self of the collective we mentioned above is the revealing dynamic of why we are here as a nation under siege of its own self-destruction. Trump and kind represent a collective personal self that is self-identified by a tyranny of consciousness bent on absolute power to achieve its personal goals in the exclusion of everyone else. Don’t waste your time trying to reason with and understand them. There is no common ground. There is no ideational coming together. There is no intellectual missing piece that once discovered will enable mutual purpose and sameness of underlying motivation. The nation they feel and desire is not the one founded and not the one they wish to live in. STOP trying to psychoanalyze why. Just no it is so. Move on. The fight is not to win them over (too late for that), it is to win period, before it’s too late.

The Blessings of Liberty don’t come cheap. RISE!