Thang Nguyen 555

President Ford, before being sworn-in, had been a good team player both on the football field and on the floor of the House. As an unelected President, he pardoned his predecessor and “paroled” 131,000 of us, who quickly were scattered into the four corners. In the process, he “de-obligated” the Treasury from its fiscal nightmare i.e. democracy advocacy was having a diminishing return both in body counts and bomb counts, more destructive than constructive accounting.

Reinhold Niebuhr once said: “despite of it all, we still have to seek justice in a sinful world”. In practical terms, he must have meant when the task lies within our purview or falls on our lapse. Other “none of our business” affairs like genocide and pesticide, we rely mostly on local regimes and tribunal courts.

A 93-year-old Nazi bookkeeper is finally put on trial (hope he wears his hearing-aid). Other massacres e.g. Armenian, Ukrainian, Cambodian and Nanking are still out there – the latest was so atrocious that the author of The Rape of Nanking killed herself.

I am a believer in Common Grace – pray for rain on both the fields of the good and evil. Yet I want to be reminded when it does rain, the hypocrisy of good men or the invincibility of the evil ones are both irrelevant. We cannot allow a repeat of Holodomor or Holocaust. And we know it’s women and children who disproportionately bear the brunt of suffering.

That summer of 1975, I learned to wrap my fingers around a football at lunch time (ready to be a Nittany Lion fan) with co-workers who helped place unaccompanied minors into foster homes. I never caught what is now coined “compassion fatigue”.

Perhaps I had already been inoculated with untold and imploded suffering of my own. Helping others was the best cure. Parole did help – not to mention a few hundred bucks to get me started. My Staten Island was Indiantown Gap, once occupied by Native American (for Remarque’s crowd, it’s Brooklyn). Jerry Ford himself got a $600 loan early in life (per A Time to Heal). Go Wolverines (no 48 Center).

They too may be wondering what the fuss with White Men and Yellow Men, Cowboy hat vs Cone hat, Holodomor and Holocaust, a few hundred bucks to spin the wheel or to start a life. In the game of survival, one needs to be a team player. Then say a prayer for rain.

President Ford seemed to know that having kneeled and prayed too many times before each college football game e.g. ” in all your ways, acknowledge Him.” It’s not those winning games that shaped the man. It’s the lost ones that built characters, his, as a congressman and finally as President albeit undeclared candidate, who pulled the plug on the unwinnable war.

Reinhold Niebuhr was better known for his Serenity Prayer – “…the wisdom to see the difference between the changeable and unchangeable nature of man”. For many of us, that wisdom is like a gem hidden at times but is always there.