Thursday - Not knowing what to write I write about history and Afghanistan. More Beacon photos.

Sometimes I don't know what to write and I don't know what I will write, but write I will. Today I've been thinking about history and how ignorant of it most of us are. At best we have a superficial smattering left over from high school and perhaps university. If only the latter, more than likely what was learned was mostly forgotten and that would be for the best since pre-college history is less about understanding how we got to where we are and more a matter of making us proud of who we are. Teaching civics is well and good but calling it history is malpractice and leads to disputes  such as the one going on now regarding how and whether to teach the history of racism in the United States.

More current is how we are absorbing here, in the USA the sudden fall of Afghanistan. The the recriminations come from the same people who wanted us in then out of Afghanistan. 20 years ago we sought to punish the Taliban without every trying to understand who the enemy was, how our enemy fought and how their military was inspired by the same intensity of faith that drove them to never give up despite being chased from power. Don't blame George Biden alone, blame George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump for never trying to take the measure of the enemy. Blame Ronald Reagan for supporting anti-Communist terrorism around the world, and blame George H. Bush and Bill Clinton for continuing these failed policies. Supporting terrorism in a war against terrorism only generates new terrorists and more terrorism.

And if there was a failure of intelligence, it goes back to our support for the Anti-Soviet Islamic Mujahideen beginning in the early 1980s. We armed them but never really got to know who they were and what their supplanting the Soviet backed regime in Kabul would lead to.

I don't know if it's apt to quote George Santyana here, but he famously said,“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Considering I didn't know what to write, I ended up writing more than a little.

Here's a few more photos from last Saturday's stroll along Main Street, Beacon NY. 

The firefighters in the first pair were on duty, alert and ready to roll. Luckily, there were no fires in Beacon that evening.

The next one is shot from across the street from the Hudson Valley Food Court. The banner is for Shmuck's Sweet Stuff. What I wonder is whether that's the owner's name or did the proprietor not know how to spell schmuck?

We got our sweets further east on Main St. at Gourmetibles where the proprietor was mixing Sunday's fudge. Would've been even cooler if she was mixing Sunday's sundaes. Sadly, no website so I've linked their facebook page. As you might know, I am off facebook for many reasons. The ice cream was excellent.

On the east side of Fishkill Creek - or should that be FishCreek Kill or Fishcreek creek or Fishkill Kill - near the waterfall, there was an event going on. Probably a wedding from what I could tell.

And the man with the flip phone(!) was selling a variety of interesting used goods outside the former Matteawan Train Station but though there are tracks there are no trains. 

And last, lots of fossils from an ancient sea bed embedded in matrix with some sort of protective, clear  coating. If anyone can tell me more about it, post a comment.

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