Cloyce On The Homefront

Me Pops had an old buddy, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who owned a small apartment building in the old neighborhood. One day he took a call from a tenant on an upper floor complaining that the married couple in a first floor apartment were making a terrible racket. Cloyce went to investigate.

He walked into the first floor hall just in time to see the husband of the couple in question scramble out of their adobe, hurrying the other way. His wife was in hot pursuit, a pistol in hand.

Seeing that her better half had made an escape, she turned on Cloyce. "What do you want?" the woman demanded, shoving the gun within inches of his nose.

"Bill," Cloyce explained to my Dad, "I spent a year in Korea, most of it right at the front. But I didn't never see the barrel of no gun look as big as the one on that pistol right that minute!"

"I'm just getting some tools from the basement," he told the gun toting mama, his hands extended towards the skies. She let him by, just as the cops arrived. Cloyce was more than ready to turn authority in the matter over to the boys in blue. 

Why Not a First Strike?

The North Koreans are preening like peacocks this week. Their threats are raining upon South Korea and the United States like a tsunami. Everyone expects that they are hollow. They probably are. Yet with each step towards taking actual action, from moving a missile around which has the capacity to reach South Korea, Japan, and even Guam, up to and including the supposed authorization of their army to use nuclear weapons against the United States, isn't it fair to consider when we and our allies ought to perhaps do something more than talk, or merely move around our defensive weapons and systems? Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel insist that we are doing all they can diplomatically to lessen the pressures. Let's presume they are; how long might it be before the North Koreans actually do something? Isn't it fair to wonder whether they may really mean to do something this time? It is far too easy to believe that they would never do anything suicidal; but might they one day become convinced of their own rhetoric, or reach the point where they feel they cannot back down and manage to save face? It is with great consideration and soul searching that any nation should approach the war option. But approach it, at times, a nation must. Are we reaching the point where it might make sense to take a page from Israel's book? Might we at least begin to consider a pre-emptive strike? Who knows? One well placed missile might cool the North Korean rhetoric; it may even fuel a rebellion there, and end the threat to world peace of evil regime in Pyongyang. Surely this thought is at least at the back of the minds of Secretaries Kerry and Hagel, and even President Obama. It ought to be if it is not. Morally, we do not have to wait for an actual attack to defend ourselves or our allies.