April 18

Hope you all had a happy Easter. We had a pleasant dinner with my brother, his son and grandsons. We are always amazed about how those two boys are growing--grandpa is now the shortest member of the family and my grandnephews will soon be taller than their dad. The weather has been more early March than mid April. We woke to a thin layer of snow on the colder surfaces. It won't last long but it is still too cold to do much more than look at the post for signs of life which several are. I am still a month away from the earliest possible planting date but more likely a month and a half.

I have been lazy and haven't read much today. However, I did find this piece by David Kaiser this morning and went over it twice. He says number of things that reflect similar ideas Andrew Bacevich expressed in a longer form in After the Apocalypse which I finished yesterday. Bacevich doesn't use Strauss and Howe's generational turnings framework but the notion that seismic shifts in the U.S. and the world are in progress and will continue for sometime. Kaiser, I think, defines his time periods too narrowly. The crises he refers to (Revolution/writing of the Constitution, Civil War, and Depression/WWII) are drawn too narrowly. The conditions that led to the new orders, or new balance, after each crisis had brewed for sometime, often decades, before the final crisis. Some historians I read talked about a time of chaos that covered WWI through the end of WWII. What we are experiencing has deep roots and won't be resolved easily. Bacevich is absolutely right in noting that the event's of his apocalypse (8/11, the economic meltdown of 2008/9, and the pandemic) are crises our current political thinking can't deal with effectively. Neither author is at all optimistic about where things are going or how they will be resolved.