4/12/2026

 Sunday, April 12, 2026

1861 Fort Sumter in South Carolina was attacked by the Confederacy beginning the American Civil War

1955 Polio vaccine tested by Jonas Salk was announced to be 'safe and effective' and was given full approval by the US Food and Drug Administration

1963 The police in Birmingham, Alabama, used dogs & cattle prods on peaceful demonstrators

1966 1st B-52 bombing on North Vietnam

2015 Hillary Clinton announced she would run for the President for the 2nd time

In bed at 9 or so, up at 5:20.  131/70/65 113 204.0;  48/40/71/45. rain and wind much of the day.

Morning meds at a.m.  Ranolazine at 6:45 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.

It's been a semi-busy day (at least, for me), though by 2:30 all I had really accomplished was about 10 minutes of a VA chair yoga exercise downstairs which semi-exhausted me.  I need to at least try to do these stretches everyday.  I know they are helpful from the simple fact that it is so hard for me to do them because of my  Life as a lump.  I also did a load of laundry, read (in a manner of speaking) the Sunday papers, watched Fareed Zakaria, and made a breakfast of two scrambled eggs with mild jalapeno peppers and two pieces of sourdough toast with strawberry preserves.  I also managed to fit in that crowded schedule 😊 one short nap and one longer one.  It's like the first day of summer today, with a high in the low 70s.  We have the heat off and the doors open to let some fresh air in the house.  I almost took one of my paintings off the basement wall and started to rework it with some flesh-hued glaze, but didn't quite make it.  The painting is not very well done, and I'm afraid of making it worse by tinkering with it, but I'm resolved to try it.  Geri's been outside finishing up her Spring yard clean up, amazing me with her vim vigor, and vitality.   

Viktor Orban was defeated in Hungary.  It's not often that I feel real excitement over the results of a foreign election, but this one thrilled me.  I am reminded, however, of Thomas Merton's warning:

A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything around.  But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances. . . power will pass from one party to another but when the smoke clears . . . the situation will still be the same as it was before.  There will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the other for their own ends.  There will be the same greed and cruelty and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before.  For the revolutions of men change nothing.

Merton overstated his case but he was making a case denigrating revolution ground in human ideology to an imaged revolution grounded in the Sermon on the Mount.