First Day Of December

    Tomorrow comes December first, and once again the lights of Christmas begin to decorate neighborhood homes.  Along the roads, the odd car carries atop its roof a Christmas tree.  Tonight, at Rockefeller Center the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony will once again take place when someone flips a switch and electrifies 50,000  multicolored lights strung around an eighty-two foot tall Norway spruce. 

    Perhaps we're sentimental, but each year the lighting of the tree stirs in us a renewed belief that human beings can be kind, generous and peaceful.  But 4775 mile east of New York,  day and night Russian missiles pummel Ukraine, indiscriminately killing men, women and children.  Day and night Russian missiles blast the Ukrainian power grid.  Putin has an obvious objective: to terrorize and freeze the Ukrainians into submission and surrender.  

    While living under this barrage, the Ukrainians have fought bravely and in several instances have repelled the Russian invaders.  Their determination and courage and their fighting spirit radiates through the darkness spreading west from Moscow.  As we enjoy and celebrate this December, let's think of those inspiring Ukrainians and let's continue to pressure Washington to provide them with all they require to defeat the purely evil and rapacious villain who rules Russia.

This poem by Claude McKay expresses the Ukrainian resistance:

        If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!