Month March 2024

Another witch hunt

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“This has been yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country. No president has ever gone through anything like it, and it continues because our opponents cannot forget the almost 75 million people, the highest number ever for a sitting president, who voted for us just a few short months ago…Our historic, patriotic, and beautiful movement to Make America Great Again has only just begun. I look forward to continuing our incredible journey together to achieve American greatness for all of our people. There has never been anything like it!”

It is like I have been saying over and over again. The corrupt media and radical left Democrats are out to destroy me, this great country, and by extension millions of my followers.  No matter what they do; my truth will conquer all.  I am like Jesus Christ, the more I am persecuted, the more the people love me – because they know the truth as I speak it.  We love each other because we’ve been bullied by those coastal elites who think they are better than us. They smirk at me because they think I’m a joker and a clown but I am much smarter and more powerful than any ordinary fool. I am like a once-in-century storm, a force of nature.  I’m not only a self-made billionaire; I am also a media made hyper celebrity.  I’ve got the looks, the body, the presence. I am irresistible to women and men. 

I can turn villains into victims and victims into villains.  I’ve made heroes into the objects of scorn and heaped praise on strongmen and dictators.  What the critics don’t understand is that my charm runs very deep. People always want to side with the powerful and strong, even children who have been abused come to the defense of their abusers. We may pretend there’s a place in our country for underdogs but I have never met any man – any real man – who wants to be that underdog.  We all want to be on top. I am on top and people want to be here with me. We know who our enemies are and that gives us strength and purpose.  This country must be saved no matter how.

I don’t feel too sorry for all those chumps playing by the rules. My father told me long ago that the world was divided into winners and losers and you never want to be a loser. We want to be the kings of our own kingdoms; we want to play the game under our own rules.  The elites don’t think it’s true but I feel the pain of my people and they know it; that’s why flock to me and not to all those libs who are supposed to be their friends.  My people don’t want pity or programs. They want what I have.  Money and a pretty wife and the freedom to do what you want. They want what they had before other people took their jobs and power away. They know that I am working for them — to fix the mess the politicians have made of this great country.

I started my campaign in 2016 to poke fun, to play a game, to show those politicians that ideas and politics didn’t really matter. At first my people hated politicians, like Sleepy Joe and his crooked family more than they loved me but now they just loved me. To save this great country, we had to do everything we could to overturn the fake results, marching on D.C. with those patriots reminded me of our Founding Fathers.  As expected, the Democrats tried to impeach me (again) but they didn’t even come close. We need to Make America Great Again, like me.

Not my kind of Saint

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When I was a child growing up in the fifties, it seemed that everyone in my life – my parents, my teachers, my aunts and uncles, and grandparents – and everything in my life – from the movies I watched to the books I read to the things I dreamed about – were all aligned in a project to make me a very good person. I resisted these influences in my childish ways but overall, I bought in. I embraced their hopes and dreams for goodness for me, but that wasn’t enough; I wanted to be a Saint.

My little sister and I shared a tiny bedroom and, on those nights, when my mother had a late shift at work, I would read to her at bedtime. I had the upper bunk and with the streetlight falling brightly onto my pillow, I could read as late in the evening as I wanted without detection. Our favorite book was given to me by my aunt Gaby. Without her own children, she had plenty of time and energy to devote to my development and guidance. She gifted me The Children’s Book of the Saints for my First Communion.  Every day of the year, there was another story of a Catholic saint, a simple guide for us to inspire goodness and courage. It was perfect for my dreams of sainthood. We loved best the stories of the saints who were martyrs. Stories of Saint Ignatius who was a rich boy and a soldier who then repented and found the Society of Jesuits did nothing to excite us. Saints like him seemed to us good enough but not bold or inspiring. We need saints who had visions and who suffered. We loved stories of saints like St. Bartholomew who was skinned alive, St. Ignatius of Antioch who was fed to the lions, or St. Lawrence who was burned at the stake. Never denying their faith. We relished stories of saints, like St. Juthwara who’d been beheaded and walked away with her head in her arms, on her way to church to pray. Our favorite was St. Thecia. When they tried to burn her at the stake, it rained. When they fed her to the lions, they laid down and licked her toes. She kept trying to kill her with snakes and swords but protected by her faith, not torture not the work of man could kill her. She lived to her eighties. As a child, I hadn’t yet worked out just how I would get myself into situations where I be given a chance at martyrdom but my mind was firmly made up to do whatever I needed to do to become St. Sandra of Rhode Island. 


Recognizing the power of movies over our generation, the nuns gathered us together in the cafeteria every month to watch an inspirational film like Boy’s Town, Captain January, or The Miracle of Fatima. When I was in the second grade, we watched a film about the Maryknoll Brothers doing missionary work among the pagans in China. At the end of the movie, the Chinese marched a Maryknoll Brother up a hill and crucified him – “He refused to deny his faith”, the narrator intoned.  We were stunned; I was inspired. Our nun talked with us about the movie and about our faith and passed around the little metal box where we were supposed to drop our change to support the missions. Some of the kids had spent theirs on candy; not me. Then, she asked, “Children, how many of you are willing to die for your faith?” Almost all our hands went up. “Me, sister! Me, sister!” I was so proud of myself for offering my life for Jesus Christ.  I never told my Mom, although maybe she would have been proud of me, as well. She knew about my sainthood thing.

From that moment on, I have never doubted for a minute that children could be recruited into Brown Shirts or an army of child soldiers or into the Children’s Crusade. Children may be innocent but they are engineered to be socialized into groups well-intended or evil seeking. I gave up on sainthood when it seemed the pagans were disappearing from the planet and emerging as Buddhists, Muslims, Hindis, and people of other faiths. There were other diversions from sainthood, as well, but that is a much more common story.

COVID Lessons

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Even though I keep a daily journal, my notes on the pandemic are sparse. I recall best those very early days when neither science nor faith could stem the tide and terror, fear, and dread of the virus. As an older person, I felt my age for the first time, as both a high-risk target for the disease and as a vulnerable elder requiring careful watch and extra protection. I’ve learned that children can be just as paternalistic as their parents in that caring but condescending way. 

I do have an entry in my daily notes for Sunday April 5th, a few weeks after the federal government declared a national emergency, just a week after the U.S. had more COVID cases than anywhere else in the world. We were in the early days of lockdowns, travel bans, shortages. Fear of the disease and of each other. Daily briefings. Panic. On that day, I spoke with my sister in Florida.  A few weeks prior, we had set up bi-weekly check ins. That Sunday, we talked about how these could be our final days. That sentence sounds melodramatic when I write it, but it rings true to my experience. On that day, we broached the subject of final plans. She had organized a box full of important documents with my name on it on the second shelf of her guest room closet. All her contacts– professional ones and personal ones – to be notified when she passed away. Emails, phone numbers, passwords, online accounts. She had thought of everything – so kind. I committed to doing the same thing as soon as possible, yet still to this day, four years later, I have left most of this undone.

She considered almost everything. I asked her about her eulogy. Had she thought about who would say those final words? As soon as the question left my lips, I knew what I wanted to hear. As her older sister, I prayer it would me. She confirmed that hope. I would deliver her eulogy and she mine. We wondered together whether we knew everything we should know about each other. I made these notes in my journal. Committed to writing Marcia’s eulogy. That sent me down a rabbit hole of wondering. Was I really the best person to write this? Did I really remember the important points in her life?  Did I underestimate how painful those early illnesses were for her? Did I comprehend how deeply she at age twelve felt my father’s early death? Did I know the whole story about her marriage? Did I appreciate how deeply others loved her? Did I know only my special sister-side of her? Did she know I’d nearly been hospitalized for depression? That I came close to suicide more than once? Those eulogies may reveal more than we have told each other so far. These can be reckonings. 

I delivered my first eulogy for my mother. I asked her parish priest if I could say a few words after Mass. He told me that this wasn’t the custom in his parish but since my mother was a parishioner, he’d allow it. I could have three minutes. Three minutes? For my mother? And then I thought of her, so hating attention in any of its forms. She would tell me to take no more than two minutes, more than enough to say what needed to be said. So, I delivered that eulogy from my heart as I knew my Mom to be, underestimated, full of broken strength. I learned during the reception in the church basement how much I didn’t know about her. How kind she was to a neighbor. How much attention she paid to a lonely resident in assisted living. How crazy funny she was. That she was a wonderful dancer in her twenties. How she was a complete person separate from me—a richer, deeper, more complex story than I knew. I wished I had done better for her. Reaching beyond what I know or think I know; I will do better for my sister. 

V and me….Sandra Enos

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In space capsule years, 47 is a long time; Voyager I and I have spent the best of those years together.  When Voyager was launched in 1977, it was the heyday of space exploration. The public was dazzled with flights to the moon, astronauts were heroes. Nowadays, any clown with a billion dollars can send up a rocket or satellite. In fact, there is so much traffic in space that we need rocket tow trucks to remove all the junk in orbit. 

V, my nickname for Voyager I, is an antique in terms of spacecraft and technology. It is the size of a Volkswagen Bettle, the car I drove when I worked at NASA in the seventies. It has a tiny computer. My iPhone is 235,000 times more powerful and 175,000 times faster than the computer on board V. The power it needs to transmit messages is equal to that of a refrigerator light bulb. It sends radio signals with a 3-watt transmitter, much weaker than a typical radio station. It takes ten hours for a message to get from V to the earth where it is picked by special antenna designed by NASA and by me. Right now, V is 15 billion miles from earth, traveling through the solar system, through the heliosphere and is now traveling in interstellar space. 

There are just a few people like me who can speak to V with our outdated programming languages – just a few lines of code – but the younger engineers have no interest in their grandfather’s spacecraft. We used to be able to do miraculous things under great limits but no more.  am thinking that our great riches have spoiled us; we seem these days to require enormous resources from our planet and from other humans to do stupid things. If our iPhones are hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the computer on board on Voyager, then we should I be doing some important things than watching cat videos and ordering avocado toast delivered to our door. This is the measure of our age, it seems. 

I hacked myself into a special arrangement with V. I receive all those images that NASA gets — moons around planets alive with volcanos, craters full of sulfur, oceans buried underground, gaseous rings around Saturn – and much more. V sends me images of black holes, of extraterrestrial spaceships, of dwarf planets, of solar storms and hurricanes. The scientists predicted that sailing through the stars would be quiet and majestic. V reports to me that the noise and tumult and wind are deafening. 

V has stopped communicating with NASA early in 2024; this may be the end of its “official” life. But last week, I received a message from V that the Golden Record had been removed from its front plate. The Golden Record was our generation’s tossing a message in a bottle out into the universe. It was compilation of messages from the earth to other civilizations that may encounter Voyager. There were greetings from earthlings in 55 modern and ancient languages. Music from across the planet. Images of the earth and its people. Stamped on the record were instructions for its use in simple graphics. Evidentially, according to V, it easy enough for another civilization to take back home for closer inspection, like we did with moon rocks.  Also, according to V, they weren’t impressed.

The last message that Voyager sent to NASA was a simple one. Because its computing power is so limited, V has kept his comments brief. At this stage of its life, it sent a simple “Hello. By the time you get this message, I won’t be here any longer.”  It’s been silent ever since hurtling through space at 375,000 miles per hour. My V.  Where else will we go?