I have often said my Martin Henry Dawson project is "all about love" - all three variants of it.
Eros, romantic love, might seem a stretch.
However Dawson had seen too many fellow teenagers die in the trenches of WWI, without ever even having had a kiss or a girlfriend ,to fail to understand what a diagonsis of Rheumatic Fever meant to kids, back in those days.
Doctors and friends told parents in total earnestness, that any extra stress on their child's heart after they had had Rheumatic Heart Disease could kill them.
That meant no dancing, or sexual intercourse or pregnancies and childbirths - all the things that make a young person's life worth living !
Patria love or philia/filial love, love of one's own family and their country, was the reason why the 'greatest generation ever' finally went off to fight.
But patriotism isn't that high on the scale of wrong or right, in the way Jesus reckons things.
He placed agape love, the willingness to die, if necessary, for someone else's country well above the willingness to die to save one's own country.
Here America fell down .
Twenty seven times, by my count, small groups of American citizens came before their congressmen to plea for Congress to intervene militarily when their ( or the family's) homeland was invaded.
Peter only refused 3 times - American did it it 27 times between 1931 and 1941.
(Not that my country - Canada - was all that much better.)
One wonders if Japan had gone into Russia instead of Pearl Harbour would America had gone to war at all in World War Two ?
Even on December 8th 1941, FDR and Congress only went to war against Japan - it took Hitler declaring war on America to bring it out fighting against the greatest evil our world has ever known.
Dawson had already taken up arms years earlier to defend a little country from a bully and been wounded twice for his efforts and gotten the Military Cross with citation for his bravery.
But in this war, he was dying and unfit for military service overseas.
Still he exhibited agape love and agape science when he sought to save the lives of people America's leaders in science and medicine said were unworthy of much medical attention in times of war....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
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