{"id":189154,"date":"2021-07-19T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2021-07-19T11:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=189154"},"modified":"2021-07-18T05:43:24","modified_gmt":"2021-07-18T04:43:24","slug":"drinking-coffee-in-the-early-morning-rain-and-thinking-of-donald-rumsfeld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/drinking-coffee-in-the-early-morning-rain-and-thinking-of-donald-rumsfeld\/","title":{"rendered":"Drinking Coffee in the Early Morning Rain and Thinking of Donald Rumsfeld"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 Jul 2021 – <\/em>It\u2019s been raining incessantly for three days.\u00a0 It is a cool early morning in the beginning of July and I have just made a cup of coffee. Now an electrical power outage has occurred and so I am sitting in a rocking chair in the semi-darkness savoring my coffee and feeling thankful that I made it in time.\u00a0 I have a close relationship with coffee and the end of night and the break of day.\u00a0 As for time, that is as mysterious to me as the fact that I am sitting here in its embrace. The electric clocks have stopped.\u00a0 I think: To exist \u2013 how amazing!<\/p>\n

More than the coffee, however, I am luxuriating in the sound of the tumbling rain.\u00a0 Its beautiful music creates a cocoon of peace within which I find temporary joy.\u00a0 The joy of doing nothing, of pursuing no purpose.\u00a0 Of knowing that whatever I do it will never be enough, for me or anyone, and the world will continue turning until time stands still, or whatever time does or is according to those who invented it.\u00a0 I will be gone and others will have arrived and the water will flow from the skies and the clocks will still tell people what they don\u2019t know \u2013 time \u2013 although they will continue to tell it.<\/p>\n

Humans are the telling animals.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, when this area was in a mini-drought, the local newspaper, in the typical wisdom of such cant, had a headline that said \u201cthere is a threat of rain later this week.\u201d\u00a0 They are experts at threats.\u00a0 This is the corporate media\u2019s purpose. \u00a0\u00a0Rain is a threat, joy is a threat, doing nothing is a threat, the sun is a threat \u2013 but the real threats they conceal.\u00a0 To create fear seems to be their purpose, as they do not tell us about the real threats.\u00a0 Their purpose is not to tell the truth, but if you listen closely you can hear it.<\/p>\n

In the middle of the night I woke up to go to the bathroom, and outside the small bathroom window I watched the rain engulfing the lower roof and sluicing down the shingles in two heavy streams.\u00a0 I thought how the desiccated mind of the headline writer must be feeling now, but then I realized that he or she was asleep, as usual.\u00a0 There is a moist world and a dry one, and the corporate media is run by arid souls who would like to make the world a desert like their masters of war in Washington.<\/p>\n

Then as I sit here my brief peace is roiled by the memory of reading Tacitus, the Roman historian, and his famous quote of Calgacus, an enemy of Rome:<\/p>\n

These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed.\u00a0 Here was a man whose entire life was dedicated to the American Empire.\u00a0 He spent all his allotted time making war or making money from the spoils of war.\u00a0 He was a desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire.\u00a0 No doubt he died very rich in gold.<\/p>\n

I can no longer hear the rain because my mind is filled with the loud thought of what Rumsfeld thought as he lay dying.\u00a0 Was he sorry?\u00a0 Did he believe in God or was his god Mars, the Roman god of war?\u00a0\u00a0 Did he smile a bloody smile or say he was sorry and beg for forgiveness from all his innocent victims?\u00a0 Did he see the faces of the children of Iraq that he slaughtered?\u00a0 Or did he pull an Eichmann and say, \u201cI will leap into my grave laughing\u201d?<\/p>\n

Your guess is as good as mine, but mine leans toward the bloody smile of a life well spent in desert making.\u00a0 But that is a \u201cknown unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rolling thunder and a lightning strike in the east jolt me back from my deaf dark thoughts.\u00a0 The sound of the rain returns.\u00a0 The coffee tastes great.\u00a0 Peace returns with the unalloyed gift of the ravishing rain.<\/p>\n

Yet the more I sit and listen and watch it soundly stipple the garden and grass, the more thoughts come to me, as my father once told me: Thoughts think us as much as we think thoughts.\u00a0 It\u2019s what we do with our thoughts that count, he said, and like lightning, if we don\u2019t flash when we are given the gift of life, when we\u2019re gone, it will be as if we never were, like the lightning before it flashed.<\/p>\n

Thomas Merton\u2019s prophetic words from his hermitage in the Kentucky woods in 1966 think me:<\/p>\n

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and \u00a0 distribute for money. By \u2018they\u2019 I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that \u00a0 the only way to make something <\/em>actual<\/em> is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are moments in many lives when, if one is lucky, they are initiated into a ritual that sustains them throughout life.\u00a0 To others these experiences can easily seem paltry and meaningless, but to the receiver they offer a crack into deeper dimensions of being and becoming.\u00a0 For me it was my introduction to coffee during a hurricane.<\/p>\n

My father had driven my mother, three of my sisters, and me to Jones Beach on Long Island.\u00a0 This was before people checked the weather every minute.\u00a0 The sky in the southwest grew darker as we drove, but on we went.\u00a0 The beach was deserted except for some gulls and the parking lot empty.\u00a0 My father parked the car close to the beach and while my sisters and mother sat in the car, and my mother, listening to the weather reports, issued warnings to us, my father and I ran like wild dogs into the heavy surf despite her admonitions that the hurricane from the south was arriving sooner than expected.\u00a0 It started to rain hard. The surf picked up.\u00a0 We swam and got battered and shouted exultantly and came out shaking with the chills.\u00a0 A pure white sea gull landed on my wet head and my father laughed.\u00a0 Awe-struck, I stood stock still and my shaking stopped. In its mouth the sea gull held a purple ribbon, which it dropped at my feet as it flew off.\u00a0 I grabbed the ribbon and we jogged up to the concession building where there was one man working.\u00a0 My father ordered coffee and a hot chocolate for me.\u00a0 But they had run out of hot chocolate.\u00a0 So my father ordered two coffees and filled mine with three or four sugars. I had never sampled coffee and didn\u2019t like the smell, but my father said to drink it, with the sugar it will taste good and it will warm you up.\u00a0 It strangely tasted like hot chocolate. We toasted our adventure as I drank my Proustian madeleine at eleven-years-old.<\/p>\n

I had put the ribbon on the counter as we drank.\u00a0 When we were going back to the car, I noticed there were words on the ribbon. They said: Rest in peace.\u00a0 I have long lost the ribbon but retain its message.<\/p>\n

So now every morning between the end of night and the break of day, I sit with my coffee and listen.\u00a0 And even when it isn\u2019t raining, I watch the birds emerge from their nightly rests to greet the day with their songs.\u00a0 They tell me many things, and they are all free.<\/p>\n

This morning I am wondering if Donald Rumsfeld ever heard them.<\/p>\n

I suspect their message was an \u201cunknown unknown\u201d for him, just like the gift of rain.\u00a0 He preferred the rain of death from the skies in the form of bombs and missiles.\u00a0 He was only doing his job.<\/p>\n

He made a desert and called it peace.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a widely published author and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: Behind the Curtain<\/a> – email: edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Jul 2021 – I think of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on his recent deathbed. Here was a man whose entire life was dedicated to the American Empire. He spent all his allotted time making war or making money from the spoils of war. He was a desert maker, a slaughterer for the Empire. No doubt he died very rich in gold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[93,867,741,2200,70,481],"class_list":["post-189154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-afghanistan","tag-anglo-america","tag-iraq","tag-us-empire","tag-usa","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}