"Pleasure in the flowers to-day"

Wishing our subscribers a happy spring and a special thanks.

By JOHN LEAKE

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

I thought of this first stanza of Robert Frost’s poem, “A Prayer in Spring,” while I was out on my daily walk and saw this dogwood tree in bloom. I’ve always thought there is something especially stirring about these days of transition from winter to spring, when the air is still cool but the dogwoods and tulips are blooming and the occasional song of the wood thrush can be heard in parks.

Dogwood, Dallas, Texas, March 19, 2023

The couplet, “And give us not to think so far away/As the uncertain harvest…” really resonated with me yesterday because I sense a great and dreadful uncertainty hovering on the horizon.

As I have noted in this Substack before, we now seem to lurch from one crisis to the next, with no end to the delusional folly that has seized our political and media class and much of our people.

Reports of terrible COVID-19 vaccine injuries and probable vaccine deaths continue to roll in like a steady drum beat. I just received word that the great Cuban Olympian rower, Angel Fournier Rodriguez, has died suddenly of a heart attack here in Dallas at the age of 35.

As I predicted last February, the war in Ukraine has gotten hundreds of thousands killed without changing the necessity of negotiating with Russia—a negotiation that should have happened a year ago. But no, the deranged idiots in Washington thought it would be better to encourage the Ukrainians to take on the Russians with American arms instead of seeking a negotiated settlement. We have become a nation of incorrigible armchair warriors, never growing weary of advocating war in the vain pursuit of vanquishing the world’s bad guys, and never counting the cost.

How quickly we forgot that the same administration that sent Kamala Harris to the Munich Security Conference last year had—just six months earlier—hastily and chaotically pulled out of Afghanistan. After a twenty-year military occupation that got 2,400 US servicemen killed and 20,700 wounded for the purported objective of getting rid of the Taliban, the Biden Administration left that country in the possession of the Taliban.

In the realm of finance, we seem to suffer from the same catastrophic learning disability. After the collapse of FTX and fall of its absurd founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, last November, last week we witnessed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. This darling institution of the tech sector’s best and brightest apparently had zero risk management, and 90% of its deposits were uninsured. Naturally our Federal Reserve bailed out the banks’s wealthy depositors whose accounts greatly exceeded the FDIC insured limit of $250,000, as it has long been the Fed’s policy to bail out the reckless rich with taxpayer money. Now we are possibly facing a contagion of small, regional bank failures.

A body politic supercharged with debt, deception, delusion, and drivel can only hurtle forward for so long before it smashes into the concrete wall of reality. I fear we are now rapidly approaching that wall.

In spite of these gloomy thoughts, I will, on this Spring Equinox, hope for the best and try “to take pleasure in the flowers to-day.”

Dr. McCullough and I wish you all a happy spring, and we thank you for subscribing to our Substack. Though time doesn’t allow us to reply to your numerous comments, we carefully review and consider them. We are very grateful for your feedback and encourage you to keep it coming.