Dear God. What the past year has done to me. How about you? How are you doing, and can I help?

I’ve got something I know will help.

Call it a panacea, because no matter who you are, no matter what’s happening with you, there’s nothing that can’t be helped, soothed or made better by a chocolate chip cookie.

We need a couple of railroad box cars-full to be run up to Capitol Hill. Everyone up there’s got some kind of problem that’s not getting any better and in fact grows worse by the hour. This country is endangered, all because of one man whom the Republican party refuses to disown.

Donald Trump. The devil will never welcome to hell a more stupid, puerile, bigoted, deluded, vindictive, harmful soul than when he comes to collect that of Donald Trump.

And Trump will be in good company. It’s amusing to think of who he will be joining down there. For example, he idolized Hitler. I wonder how old Adolf and his nemesis Uncle Joe will react to Trump’s arrival. Because they both killed more people. They both caused suffering in degrees and on a scale that time can never excuse us from remembering. You doubt what they did, go back and look at the filmed footage. See those civilians in the streets climbing among mounds of earth around craters, piles of rubble, some of it cut stone from medieval stonemasons? They haven’t had a morsel of food in days. Water is scarce. Their skin is burned from flame and bleeding from unimaginable lice infestations.

Watch them. Nobody looks up. They’re not even thinking about the next air raid. They can’t hear the planes coming anyway; most have hearing damage from close proximity explosions.

Does it matter in the end whose bombers did that to them?

Oh, I know, you have made no judgment, or you already have. You see the actions of every fighting force as evil, or one side as just.

History tells us that history itself is written by the winners of every conflict ever recorded: to the victors go the spoils.

What was it like to be on the ground during the incendiary bombings of Dresden and Hamburg?

The fires burned so hot that, as with the same attacks over Tokyo, the last bombers to drop their loads were buffeted, their crews battered, by violent updrafts. Heavy bombers were hurled hundreds of feet upward.

There was an almost immediate backlash from such ruthless tactics. From the Nazi propaganda ministry and leaked to the Swiss, thence the world, the death toll was inflated, and from men in Britain and the United States some heated dissension; the targets were mostly, if not all, civilian ones.

It was deemed terrorism. They actually coined the phrase “terror bombing”.

And so it was. It was always meant to be. It was a warning to the German people that the war had terrible consequences.

Later it was claimed that there were railroad marshalling yards responsible for distribution of German munitions and supplies in the cities, giving the raids some justification, but rumors also had it that Allied POWs were kept there. If that’s true, it was a typical Axis trick: let it leak out that Allied POWs were held in a strategic location to keep the bombers away. Meanwhile, they could operate key facilities free of aerial danger.

Whatever dissent existed among allied commanders then, although truly admirable, it faded as the war eroded the German fighting abilities. Thousands of pilots and airmen died delivering the message which had earlier included dropping propaganda leaflets.

But Hitler gave no quarter on either front. In Soviet territory his command officers sent word that they were doomed unless they pulled back. He threatened them with arrest, and by extension, execution.

Two months would pass before Hitler shot himself. He died a monster and ultimately a coward.

In the Pacific fierce fighting on an unimaginable scale continued. Read any book about the war in the Pacific, and it cannot begin to tell the whole tale. G.I.s and allied British, Australian and others faced gruesome effects every day. They sometimes went for long periods without relief and suffered from jungle rot, a hellish malady that, if untreated, became worse and could end in amputations and death. In the Pacific theater it was merely one of many health threats like malaria that removed men from actual combat and resulting in casualties and diminished fighting strength of infantry and amphibious units. When several missions with incendiary bombings over Tokyo failed to get the desired result, Harry Truman decided on what his advisers handed him as a last, drastic resort.

The fallout of the war in Europe went on. Countries were divided up between the Allies and Soviets and don’t let anyone lie to you. It was not the end of suffering. That merely began a new chapter.

How a Nazi-admirer rose to power in this country came as a shock. How the movement has infiltrated our government is terrifying. The bastards are blind, hungry for power. If they get it, God help the human race.

Trump stoked an armed crowd to assault congress and they did it. That wasn’t his first time. He’d also tweeted that groups in Michigan should act against their governor. They came close to killing her.

Trump also hoped the COVID-19 pandemic would kill Michael Bolton, one of his former aides. That pandemic has claimed over half a million lives in this country. And it’s still here.

Donald Trump first called the virus a hoax. When he could no longer do so, and it didn’t take very long, he switched tactics. In this CNN interview a recently published book is discussed which claims that when infected Americans on cruise ships were inbound, he wanted to have them diverted to GTMO, a Navy prison in Cuba and a place of atrocities committed against suspected terrorist detainees during the administration of George W. Bush. How he (Trump) came up with the idea is anyone’s guess.

All throughout 2020 we heard or read Trump bitching, “the reason we have more cases is because we have more testing.”

He actually said, “If we get rid of testing, the numbers will go down.”

Well how can you argue with logic like that? The astonishing fact that so many fell for it shames me. Are people really that stupid? The whole world saw that, and they’re not going to forget it.

They saw what he told them to see. Nothing penetrated their closed minds when he tweeted. He was a god.

This is a man who shits on a toilet of plated gold, folks.

Another recent headline has it that daughter Ivanka, object of his most oft-admitted sexual obsession, and her husband Jared Kushner, are distancing themselves from Trump over his unrelenting and utterly false claims that Biden fixed the election.

So when he gets to Hell, how would its most famous inhabitants welcome him?

Stalin might say, “You may have killed your own people but you never came close to the record I hold. Get down off my level, idiot!”

Hitler might say, “You told a lot of lies. I like that. You used manipulation and that’s awesome. But you never sold your country out with a war the likes of mine. You are nothing!”

And on Capitol Hill, his adherents are trying to dismantle this government.

I think we all need to think it through. If they win, another world war is inevitable. America will be the instigator, as it has been in every conflict since World War Two. They are soulless and have no conscience. They are evil and crave disaster and death. Don’t listen to them.

And in this moment, relax. Walk away from the phone and TV, groove on the sunshine and the gift that life is, and have a chocolate chip cookie. You need the break. And the magical panacea. Be good to you.

The time in Great Britain is 18:31. In South Africa, it’s 20:31. In Romania, the time is 21:31. In Guatemala, 12:31. In Vietnam the time is 01:35.

My time is 14:31.

Wherever you are, be well. You’re in my thoughts. And in my heart.