PRENOTE: Overnight came a post from Heather Cox Richardson that deserves your time, and is about Russia/Ukraine/U.S. You can read it here.

Earlier this summer my cousin, Remi Roy, took a trip back to the home area of his German-from-Russia ancestors in the Odessa Ukraine and Romania area.  His post is here.

Saturday we went to Garrison Keillor Birthday Party at the Fitzgerald in St. Paul.  August 4 he made his report on the evening.  You can read it here (scroll to end of Garrison Keillor section)..

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Today, August 9, 2025,  is the 80th anniversary of the second atomic bomb in war, Nagasaki.  The bomb exploded at 11:01 a.m. August 9, Nagasaki time.  My computer says that the exact same time here would have been 9:01 p.m. August 8.

Hiroshima 2025 Minn Star Tribune is the article in the August 7 Minnesota Star Tribune (a snip of the article is below)

The two events were horrendous.  Nobody knows with any certainty the deaths August 6 and 9, 1945.  Here’s a source that seems thoughtful on the issue.

The events at the end of WWII will be debated forever.  The tendency is to try to simplify what is an extremely complicated history. The horror of WWII has been documented, and all that is left is what have we learned for the present day and the future.  That is up to us, of course.  We know what happened before.  Have we learned anything that will help prevent a repeat?

My ‘witness’ this year to WWII was to watch the two hour American Experience program on PBS: “Victory in the Pacific”.

The good news is that the atom bombs were used only twice in combat, both by the United States, 80 years ago.  The bomb and even more powerful successors have not been used in combat since.  Their effect was the best argument against their use.  But they continue to exist, and they are constantly in the dark minds of despots, including our own.  The campaign against them has to continue.

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In the August 6 post this year I took a slightly different tack on the issue.  You can read Peter’s comment  here.

For today, August 9, I want to recall a powerful two day workshop I attended in early February, 2005, at the University of Minnesota titled “Paths to Sustainable Peace: Accountability, Reconciliation and Problem Solving“.  My recollection is that the workshop had a specific connection to the 10 year anniversary of the Rwanda genocide of 1994. It was co-sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program partners — the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Pubic Affairs, the U of M Human Rights Center and the U of M Law School.

Included here is some of the content of the two days, specifically my now-20 years old personal commentary at the time of the conference.  It is simply my writing at the time, and I think it may help the reader to clarify his/her own notions on a most complicated topic: Sustainable Peace Feb 2005 UofM

I’ve participated in one way or another in hundreds of this kind of event over the years, and this is one of the very rare ones where I kept the file.

We are doomed if we fail to learn from the past.

(The workshop was 20 years ago.  We had been entangled in the Iraq War since 2003.  Twenty-two years later we, and the world, continue to be awash in very serious problems: Israel/Gaza, Ukraine/Russia, our own Civil War in the United States….  Resolution – sustainable peace – is up to us, not somebody else.  Your choice whether to open and read what I said 20 years ago.  I hope you do, and that the attachments give you some food for personal thought and motivation to action.)

COMMENTS (more at end of post):

from Brian:  Thanks for posting!   As a pre-teen kid I remember asking my Momma about why we nuked civilians in Japan’s cities?    She hugged, hugged and hugged me and said “Brian they attacked us in Pearl Harbor and Might Makes Right dear.”   Oh Scheiße!

PRE-NOTE:  Take a moment: There are three comments to the Tariff post, here.  Yesterday I did a brief post on three items, here.  Last week, Fred sent along a forward from a friend about Ukraine and Russia weapons.  The friends comment to Fred and by extension to us: “long, worth reading, worrisome“.

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This week is the 80th commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki August 6 and 9.

Longtime great friend, Peter,  from New Hampshire, weighed in after the recent post about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  (That post, with details of scheduled events is here.  That post is largely about Twin Cities events, but check out what might be said or happening in your own local area.)

My local PBS station has at least three related programs: Tuesday Aug 5 8p.m. Channel 2 American Experience “Victory in the Pacific”; 11 p.m.; repeated Thursday Channel 17.  11 p.m August 5 Channel 2,  “Atomic Echoes: Untold Stories from WWII”.  I was five years old when WWII ended, and of course all of my life mentors were directly a part of the history of this country from the Great Depression to Pearl Harbor, thru WWII and Korea and the ensuing Cold War.  Uncle George Busch was Lieutenant on a destroyer in the Pacific 1943 through the end of the war; his neighbor and first cousin from the next farm over, Marine Captain August Berning, was in the midst of the action on Okinawa, and other island conflicts. (See letter from August to George Aug 10 1945 here.)

I’m a Vet and my preference is peace, but I also recognize that this is a terribly difficult question, and with each generation becoming more complicated, such as weapons of war.  My first post on Drones was at this space on May 12, 2009, 16 years ago.  You can read it here.  As with anything I write, it is my personal opinion at a particular point in time.  I did something on the topic of drones, my word search indicates, 20 other times since.

Peter’s comment speaks for itself, and it follows:

 

Peter’s Dad protesting the Vietnam War, Philadelphia area

Sue forwarded Robert Reich’s latest column today.  I think you can access it here.  It is worth your time: “Be warned, the financial bubble will soon burst” is the title.  Also from Dr. Reich Friday, Trump destroys our source of information about jobs.

Of course, whatever one’s special interest is unique.  So some will say ignore Reich’s alarms.  I don’t.

Enjoy the remaining days of Summer (which for us informally end with Labor Day on Sept 1.).  But now is the time to be vigilant and cautious.

I remember so well September, 2008, when the bottom very nearly fell out of the U.S. economy.  It was a true emergency.  Reality intruded on fanciful thinking then, too.  That was 17 years ago, and it was a man-made catastrophe.  If you’re reading this, you remember….

I thought Covid-19 catastrophe would teach us a permanent lesson in 2020-21.  Not so.

Here we are.

The usual ‘rose-colored glasses’ predictions: like claiming that tariffs are not taxes, when on the contrary the least well-off are the unwitting targets, since tariffs trickle down to everyone who purchases anything..

Tariffs are taxes on consumers, period, and hurt worst the millions of folks who live paycheck to paycheck (and hurt least the billionaires who already have more money than they’ll ever need.).

The bad news will trickle down, and intentionally timed to hit home after the next election.

Watch your reality day-to-day, more so than rose-colored predictions.

The victims, always, the ones least in a position to defend themselves.

POSTNOTE August 2, 2025.

The Reign of King Donald I: 

It is impossible to stay ahead of the flood of indicators that show we are no longer a democracy.  You may be the only person who reads this.  Thank you.  What follows is not carefully fact-checked.  I go only by news I have seen on the traditional media (as opposed to social media which I avoid.)

In no particular order, and by no means an exhaustive list: Ghislein Maxwell (Jeffrey Epstein) is being transferred from a Florida prison to a Texas country club lockup, pretty obviously to take the spotlight off of sex trafficking and the King and his castle in Florida.  The gift of an imperial 747 from Qatar to the President is apparently being readied for a billion dollar renovation – a bow to stern redoing.  Plans are being announced for a massive imperial ballroom to become a new East Wing of the White House.  I doubt that the peasant class will be welcome if/when….   The Smithsonian has apparently decreased by one the four presidents who were listed as having been impeached in U.S. history.  You know which one is being taken off.  The firing of the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has become big news.  On and on.

King Donald is 79 years old.  I am six years his senior, so the odds are he has a few years.  As elders know, the exit sign is closer and closer, and you have no idea how or when you’ll get the boot.

Behind King Donald are those in waiting.  My favorite photo from recent history was Donald’s victory swagger over Iran – the “obliteration” speech.  What makes it my favorite is who was behind him that day: my recollection, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.  There was also a vacant place.  I think it was Tulsi Gabbard’s and I think the reason was that she had accidentally and not properly spewed the party line.  None of them inspire confidence.

The peasant class which is the overwhelming vast majority of us has to get over the tendency to feel powerless.  We have all the power, but only if we exercise it one action at a time constantly.

Monarch’s come and go.  Hitler died in his mid-50s, a little short of reaching his objective of a thousand year Reich.

COMMENTS

from Claude:  Thanks, Dick. I always use the term Tariff Tax (because it’s a flat tax that doesn’t affect rich people much, only the poor. I use this term because it irritates the people who play along with the cover story that it’s not a tax.

Lots of interesting info popped up on trade, so I am sharing…..Lois

A week ago I shared some visions of young progresssives and conservatives in the early 1960s.  The post is here.  In the note introducing the post I said “[this is] an invitation to give some thought to our past, present and future as a nation and society, and your role in it.”

As I relate in the post, I was early adult at the time of the Sharon (conservative, 1960) and Port Huron (progressive, 1962) statements.

Today’s post is for a specific reason: 60 years ago today, July 24, 1965, at about 10 p.m., my wife Barbara died at University Hospital in Minneapolis.  She was 22 years old, and she was awaiting a kidney transplant.  I was 25, our son, then 1 1/2, was back in North Dakota with my parents.  I went to the Western Union office in downtown Minneapolis to send the message that Barbara had died.  Barbara’s body was sent home to Valley City by train.  In the morning, I drove to ND by myself, The funeral was in Valley City on July 29, 1965.  This was not the way her and my adult lives were supposed to begin.  By no means was our situation unique.  It was certainly unusual.

Barbara and I had married two years earlier.  We were young,.  Both of us were college graduates.  Barbara started teaching in September, but lasted only two months due to kidney disease, previously undiagnosed or manifesting in any way.  There was little normal, the rest of Barbara’s short life.

At the end of May, 1965, her final trip began when she collapsed at home in Elgin ND, where I was a teacher.  Within a week we were in Minneapolis, over 500 miles away.  The trip was by ambulance, automobile, and train.  There were no other options than kidney transplant for her survival.

In summer 1965 we were, in a very real sense, poor.  I had to leave my job, and move to a place I’d never been before, with no intention of ever being in Minneapolis.  Life was a pretty frightening survival experience. Here are my recollections, written in 1981 for our son, of that time in Summer 1965.

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I’ve been thinking about our experience 1963-65 in context with those vision statements referred to above, and the impact of 60 subsequent years of life experience.

My walk on the tough side of life happened at the very beginning of my adult years.  Like most newly minted college grads, I was something of an empty vessel, and in 1965 in a totally new environment where I didn’t know anyone, nor did I know anything about the new environment of life itself,  I think of that song lyric of John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Thinking back to especially those two months, I got an early and important introduction to two related aspects of humanity: community and partnership.

What I learned from early harsh experience was that the community that was the United States or any country for that matter, was a pretty incredible collection of people who care for each other especially in the most difficult times.  They are mostly anonymous, but when needed they appear.

To this day I could make a long list of people who were there for me in 1965 when chips were down.  I couldn’t tell you with precision how it is that many of them happened across our path and helped out in the sundry small and large ways that made the greatest difference.  Nothing about anyone would stand out.  Each came through in their own ways.

Because of 1965 and other life experiences, it is no accident that I constantly look for ‘community’ in my daily life.  “Community” is not perfect,  but it seems always to be there when it is needed.  Community is all of us.  It is too easy to lose sight of that reality in the current incessant barrage of negativity, but we are a good people, and we should never forget that fact, even in the more difficult times.

Also having an impact were public institutions: the partnership aspect.  These included medical institutions that served us when we had no possibility of paying our bills because we had no insurance; and businesses like the old Lincoln Del, which somehow found out I needed a job to survive and hired me and accommodated my needs.

I could not have survived were I forced to rely on myself.  Those difficult times were a unique opportunity for me to realize how interconnected and interdependent we all are, and in a way I’ve tried, albeit imperfectly to apply this to my life ever since.  There are lots of thanks owed, even now, 60 years later.

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July 29, 1965 we buried Barbara at a cemetery on a hill overlooking Valley City, North Dakota.

After the funeral, my history of the day says, the family went down to a park in LaMoure County and since we were all together the group had a belated celebration of the 60th wedding anniversary of my grandparents, both living, who had married in 1905.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned something else about that weekend in July, 1965.  The day after our picnic, on July 30, 1965, President Johnson signed into law the Medicare Act in Independence, Missouri, and gave President Truman the first Medicare card.  In a sense, Barbara was a witness to the beginning of one of the greatest benefits of government to later generations.

Let’s hope democracy survives.

FINAL NOTE:

Last September I was at the Keys Restaurant in White Bear Lake, and noticed a rather unusual framed piece of art on the wall.  I took a photo, and it is shown here, and speaks for itself to everyone.

POSTNOTE:  At the time of Sharon and Port Huron gatherings (1960 and 62) I was, like millions of others, old enough and able enough to participate.  But such gatherings are always exclusive, for good and not so good reasons.  Most of us had not a single clue that any such conclave was going on.  And that’s okay.

The participants in those meetings had an abundance of passion and energy.  What they totally lacked was perspective – the kind that you can only gain by direct experience, as Barbara and I learned very rapidly only a month or so before the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963.

This is the quandary for the young zealots of any generation.  The elders are a storehouse of wisdom, but they’re old….  What do they know?  Well…plenty.  But….

You can pick up some ideas from reading books analyzing the past, but only by growing through the ups and downs of living can you figure it out – and even then, only very imperfectly.  A certain recipe for losing is the very course that we seem to be on at present in this country, where we’ve been divided into tribes, one good, the other bad, depending on one’s personal perspective.  This has never worked, and hopefully it will not work now.  It is the younger generations who will live with the results….

COMMENTS: more below:

from Fred: This is a sobering yet meaningful and hopeful account of loss and perseverance. The axiom is “life goes on” and so it does. But we never forget those beloved family members and friends inevitably lost along the way.

from Kathy: Thanks for your message about Barbara.

from Marion: As usual, Dick, thank you.

Three years in preparation, a new book is now available on Amazon, Dayton Minnesota Reflections of French-Canadian Roots.  This is a major family history production, 483 pages in English, about over 100 Dayton area families identified with French-Canada antecedents beginning in the early 1850s.  More information about the book is accessible at the above link.  The book is the first listing on the page.

[August 10, 2025]: I purchased and received my copy of the book on August 2.  It is a keepsake, particularly for any French-Canadian family with any roots in Dayton or greater twin cities area.

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I have a personal investment in this story, as some of the 102 French-speaking families identified in the volume are in my line.

My first French-Canadian ancestors, Simon Blondeau and Adelaide LaCroix and four of their children arrived at the Mississippi River location in the early 1850s.  They were my great-great grandparents in the Collette family line.  Their daughter Clotilde, born in Canada in about 1849,  was my great grandmother.  She married great-grandfather Octave Collette at St. Anthony in 1869.  (According to the 1857 Minnesota census, Clotilde was one of 7 Blondeau children born in Canada. She would have been about 6 years old when they arrived at Dayton.  One other sister, Delima, was about two years younger.  What stories they could tell.  As best I know they started their migration to the U.S. from far eastern Ontario.)

The first Collette to Minnesota, Samuel, came to the Centreville (Anoka County) area in 1857.

Octave’s brother Philippe, married Julie Boutin at Dayton about 1877.  Julie died shortly after giving birth to her fifth child and is buried in Oakwood.  Philippe’s second wife, Amelia Samson, grew up in Osseo, ‘next door’ to Dayton.  Alfred married Celina Deschenes at Dayton, and initially moved to Oakwood.

Virtually all of the Collette family migrated to what became Minnesota beginning in 1857, most settling in St. Anthony (later Minneapolis).  In 1875 they all moved to Dayton, and beginning in 1878, nearly all moved to Oakwood ND (near Grafton).  From that migration, one Collette, Alfred and his wife and family, moved back to Dayton area; several of the families moved to other places including to southern Manitoba in the early 1900s.

Every family story is unique of course, as one will find among the over 100 families identified in this brand new book which is, to my knowledge, one of the first such document relating specifically to a French-Canadian settlement in Minnesota.

While I have not yet seen the final copy of the book, I would enthusiastically recommend it as a family keepsake, and maybe a starting point for your own history investigation.  At bare minimum, check it out.

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Two Collette family histories are on line at fahfminn.org.  Click on Library, then on Books, and scroll down to Roy-Collette, the most recent book (2025), and Bernard-Collette, which was my contribution in 2010.

In April, 2012, I did a blog about the Collette’s at St. Anthony (later to be Minneapolis).  The post is here.  Most of the migrating Quebec family was in St. Anthony from about 1865-75, and from there moved to Dayton, thence to ND, thence some to Manitoba and elsewhere.

I still maintain a general website related to the French-Canadians of my history.  It is here.  Included there is a pdf of the 1981 Oakwood Sacred Heart Centennial book published in 1981.

For those unfamiliar with Dayton MN, it is a town on the Mississippi River about 25 miles northwest of downtown Minneapolis.  Here’s a map reference.  The township is outlined in red, the town itself is at the Mississippi River in the northwest corner of the town.

I would strongly encourage considering to becoming a member of FAHF’s 100 Associates – a group seeking $1,000 membership to help assure that future of keeping memories alive of the French in Minnesota and the midwest area.  I am one of the founding members of this group, which was founded in 2013.  100 Associates is a specific initiative to keep memories alive into the future.

Cover of the new book