...But bends toward justice," declared the iconic Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is.
But, how long, O God, how long?
Not long, said King again.
More than moral complicity at Auschwitz for deaths of some 300,000 Jews.
Mr. Oskar Groning, 93, claims now his oral responsibility in his role as Waffen-SS officer in the brutality against mostly Hungarian Jews.
His trial April 21st was telling.
Justice needs serving in this long ordeal.
The arc bends toward it as King concedes so well.
He is a frail man speaking in a criminal trial that teeters too for this money counter on a walker now.
And, Saigon's fall reverberates still today like that sorry saga above.
North Vietnam forces were invading as America was frenetically getting out.
In college at the time, I wondered what this all meant while my brother was killed in the TET offensive in 1968, a time of so much disorder, assignations as in Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kenned, so many more men and women fighters, including the demise of South Vietnamese pressing against colonialism as Communism was the U.S.'s take.
April 30th.
4 decades ago tis week.
Blood ran like a river. And, shrapnel seared and knifed my brother there, my parents were told by U.S. officials on their 25th wedding anniversary.
Armed international aggression for containment was our reason for that war and its woes.
Support for that war vanished as some claim the U.S. was gaining ground there.
We were divided then.
Perhaps, we still are. Fragmented, disordered we are for sure.
Warriors returned in body bags like PFC Lukas Ventline, and some 58,000 more American soldiers.
Traumatized are still others today. And, forgotten, in many cases.
How sad.
Clarity about Vietnam and our role needs claiming now.
It was all fuzzy for this college Freshmen at Saint Mary's, Orchard Lake, Michigan 40 years ago.
Coming clean on this and all war helps me mend an unhealed wound, let along a loop long overdue for closure and clarity in the arc of justice.
I still wonder.
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