Invasions

In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, the opening salvo of WWII which ended up killing 85 million people. Putin invaded Ukraine in Feb. 2022. 

Over the past nine months The United States has invaded itself. We are no longer the country I once knew, having traded golden knick-knacks for the Golden Rule. We used to be the land upon which God shed his grace and crowned thy good with brotherhood. Grace and brotherhood have been replaced with avarice and vengeance.

Louis the 14^th said: L’etat c’est moi, I am the state. This is the most succinct statement proclaiming the absolute right of kings. We are well on our way in our descent to monarchical rule.

Invasions are seldom contributions to mankind. However, there are exceptions. Almost one thousand years ago a French contingent from Normandy crossed the channel and defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. It might be regarded as a food fight in which French toast bested English muffins, and the result was eggs benedict. Besides their French cooking and new-fangled weaponry, they introduced their Latinate-Romance language, forever softening the English tongue. And the Norman Conquest bequeathed me my name.

To stretch a point, another instance of a good invasion was the introduction of cowpox to treat smallpox. Edward Jenner is credited with this first vaccine. The word itself is derived from the Latin, vacca, meaning cow. In fact, the notion first came from West Africa where the disease was managed by allowing small amounts of live virus to colonize healthy people and stimulate the immune system to create antibodies. Indeed, smallpox is the first human disease to have been completely eradicated.

Thanks to vaccines, we have virtually eliminated polio, mumps, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, chickenpox, rubella, and hepatitis. Dictators tend to disparage science because it is based on independent thought and critical thinking. Evidence-based inquiry is deemed a threat while junk science and conspiracy theories are encouraged.

It is therefore not coincidental that our new regime has aligned itself with the anti-vaccine movement. Ultimately, the death toll from this senseless alliance can rival the aforementioned wars.