My father passed away this summer and last Sunday the six of us gathered in my brother's barn to divvy things up. We all know it is pointless to try and encompass a life by things, yet, to see them through the context of years is both pain and pleasure.

However, those thoughts do not encompass my post, but it is a book, found lain in my father's things, that was ensconced between a book of trigonometric tables and military symbols that I found the title of this post.

"Of life and Flight" was written by Charles A. Lindbergh, he of Atlantic crossing fame. Of the book I have read none, save the inner cover. For your edification I hereby type it.

"How shall we break the grip of a scientific materialism whose values and standards will lead to the end of our civilization? By what higher moral force may we control the science that now threatens to destroy us? Science has become the victim of it's technologists, as religion has become the victim of it's fanatics. Just as the spiritual truths of Christ were perverted by the temporal exploitation of Christian creed and dogma,so the intellectual truths of science are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war. Hiroshima was as far from the intention of the pure scientist as was The Inquisition was from the Sermon on the Mount.

The personality and insight of a unique individual-one whose experience of flight and of life has been unique-give a stronger force and significance to this little book in which an airman, who is also a student of science, attempts to clarify the crisis the world faces, to communicate with men and women of similar concern, to search for a solution. The flight of his thought, in these pages, is like that flight of his, so many years ago, across the lonely wastes of the Atlantic,. It is as solitary and as daring."

Oh so many years ago written, I find these words to be an eerily transcendent testament to the danger seen by our fathers and their generation of the capitulation of Washington to moneyed interests. I cannot help but wonder, and be grateful,if our perceived victory of these days did not have seeds born in all of us by this generation, and the generations before, upon whose shoulders we now stand.

May our children, and their children, think as well of us.