"May"

 The photo: flowers outside our entrance at Essex Meadows, welcoming us to spring and to the month.

 

Amidst all the turmoil in the world, it is nice to take a moment to reflect on the month of May, and on our great good luck to be living in this nation at this time.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“May”

May 1, 2026

 

“There is May in books forever;

May will part from Spencer never;

May’s in Milton, May’s in Prior,

May’s in Chaucer, Thomson, Dyer,

May’s in all the Italian books: – 
She has old and modern nooks...”

                                                                                                                “May and the Poets,” c.1812

                                                                                                                Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

 

May is named for the Roman goddess Maia, daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes; thus the right month to celebrate Mothers’ Day, as we will on May 10. Maia was the nurturer of plants and was associated with fertility and springtime. Students, cooped up in dorms and classrooms during the long winter, would, on the first of May, chant: “Hooray! Hooray! Outdoor sporting starts today!” It is a month when newly-blossomed flowers offer thanks for April’s showers. It is the month for graduations – a granddaughter’s from high school this year, along with a granddaughter and grandson from college. It is the month in which my parents were married eighty-eight years ago, and one in which a brother and granddaughter were born. 

 

While the summer solstice arrives on June 21, whiffs of summer appear in May. It is when Connecticut’s state flower, mountain laurel, bursts into bloom, and when lilacs and rhododendrons provide fragrance to a newly-wakened Earth. It is when trees become fully clothed, in their summer-green finery.

 

May Day, the first of May, commemorates the fight for labor rights. Its origin stems from the May 4, 1886 Chicago Haymarket Affair, when a confrontation between striking workers, primarily from the McCormick Harvester Machine Company, and the police turned violent. It was a date usurped by the Soviet Union to display socialist solidarity, industrial achievements and military strength. As an aside, the distress signal “Mayday! Mayday!” has nothing to do with the month. Instead, it originates from the French phrase m’aider! m’aider!, meaning help me.   

 

May is a month celebrated by poets, like Leigh Hunt, in the epigraph above, and a month noted in history: On May 10, 1869 the Golden Spike was driven into a rail tie at Council Bluffs, Utah, completing the first transcontinental railroad. Sixty-two years later, on May 1, 1931, construction on the Empire State – then the world’s tallest building – was completed. After causing the deaths of almost 40 million people over five and a half years, Victory in Europe arrived on May 8, 1945. Nine years later, on May 6, 1954, medical student Roger Bannister, became the first man to run a mile in under four minutes. And on May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon. Five years later, on May 30, 1966, the unmanned Surveyor 1 landed on the moon. (It would be another three years and two months – July 20, 1969 – before Neil Armstrong and Aldrin actually walked on the moon.)

 

.............................................................................

 

And, as this essay was begun on a cold March day, I know that one of the best things about May is that it is not March.

"Hatred - Unifier, Divider and Destroyer"

 In an essay on hatred, it is perhaps unfair to lions to attach this photo. Nevertheless, I have done so. Lions may get angry, but I doubt that they hate. However, the expression on the lion’s face reminded me of extremists in Washington – politicians, news commentators and pod-casters. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Hatred – Unifier, Divider and Destroyer” 

April 26, 2026

 

“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life;

love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.”

                                                                                                                Martin Luther King (1929-1968)

                                                                                                                Strength to Love, 1963

 

Hatred has become pervasive. It has been around for decades but sprouted anew during the Obama Administration when ‘identity politics’ divided people into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed.’  It accelerated with the hyperbole of President Trump’s postings on Truth Social. It has been fertilized by members of Congress like Chuck Schumer, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Marjory Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, encouraged by podcasters like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Nick Fuentes, and abetted by those from main-stream news like Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow.  

 

It is true that hatred can be unifying. Hatred for Hitler’s Nazis and Tojo’s Japanese military helped solidify Americans in their defense of democracy. In his 1962 travelogue, Travels with Charlie: In Search of America, John Steinbeck wrote: “‘I didn’t think that at all, sir, but I bet I’m going to. Why, I remember when people took everything out on Mr. Roosevelt. Andy Larson got red in the face about Roosevelt one time when his hens got the croup. Yes, sir,’ he said with growing enthusiasm, ‘those Russians got quite a load to carry. Man has a fight with his wife, he belts the Russians.’ Maybe everybody needs Russians. I’ll bet even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans.’” 

 

Steinbeck wrote this during the Cold War. Five years earlier, the Soviets had launched Sputnik1, marking the start of the Space Age. Dislike and distrust of the USSR served as a unifier, as something on which to place blame, something to hate. Most of us knew no Russians. Like Andy Larson, we didn’t hate individual Russians; we hated the Soviet system that denied the dignity that stems from personal freedom and the potential for reward that comes with free-market capitalism. The Soviets had put down the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, stomped out the Prague spring in 1968 and beat back Polish “Solidarity” in 1980. In the United States, even with vocal political differences, that hatred of the repressive Soviet system served as a social glue that bound our nation – and the democratic, freedom-loving West – against the totalitarianism of Communism. 

 

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we lost that common enemy, but hatred did not disappear. Hatred provides a ready-made, intense sense of self and purpose. It has engulfed our politics, and it has become personal. It is most obvious today in “Trump Hatred Syndrome.” Certainly, Mr. Trump is an easy man to hate. He is vulgar, boastful and inconsiderate. Nevertheless, if a policy emanates from Mr. Trump, Democrats are against it, regardless of its value to the American people. His opponents stoop lower than him. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, in an interview on CNN regarding Iran, spoke honestly about the dilemma he faces: “The problem is I really don’t want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war, because they are two awful human beings.” His brethren in the media industry are not that candid. Hatred is responsible for the rise in anti-Semitism, which has swept across Western Europe and the United States. Especially obnoxious is when anti-Zionism becomes an euphemism for anti-Semitism. 

 

While extremists, I am sure, represent a minority of the American people, this spread of hatred forces us to pick sides. Democrats claim to be on the side of the good guys – aiding the oppressed, the down-trodden, the poor, those unable to help themselves. But there is hypocrisy in their virtue-signaling. They have more money and spend more on elections – $4.5 billion in 2024 versus $3.5 billion by Republicans, according to Axios. They live in the nation’s wealthiest states – Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, California and Connecticut. In contrast and ironically, Republicans, “oppressors” according to Democrat pooh-bahs, live in the nation’s poorest states, states that lean Republican – Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee. In the minds of those on the far-left, I am Simon Legree to their Little Eva.

 

Today, there are over 160 million registered voters in the United States. Yet fitting them neatly into two main parties is more difficult than the task given Sisyphus. It is one reason why the percentage of voters registered as either Democrat or Republican have declined over the past forty years, while those registered as Independents have increased. Nevertheless, extremists in both parties have seized control; so that the interests of the American people are subordinate to the interests of Party leaders. What would our first President think of the gerrymandering efforts in Virginia, North Caroline, Illinois and Florida? Or consider where I live – New England, home to 15.4 million people and about 11 million registered voters. Thirty-five percent are registered as Democrats; twenty-one percent as Republicans, and forty-four percent as Independents. Yet, of the twenty-one House seats, Democrats occupy them all. Of the twelve U.S. Senate seats, Democrats have eleven. Are our Representatives truly representative?

 

This spread of hatred threatens to destroy our country. In his Farewell Address (September 17, 1796), George Washington warned against political parties, that while they “...now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

 

With the notable exception of the Supreme Court, and despite Washington’s admonition, unprincipled men and women have found their way to Washington, as well as to many state capitals and large cities. Nevertheless, I believe that most public servants are still devoted to their jobs and work for the public good. Moderates comprise the majority of the military and even, I would guess, most federal employees. Many are in Congress. But the number of extremists is expanding. What is needed are civility and respect toward all people, tolerance for differing opinions, and humility regarding our own. 

 

An anonymous quote has pertinence: “We may fight against what is wrong (or what we believe to be wrong), but if we allow ourselves to hate that is to ensure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.” It reminds me of counsel once offered me by my father: “Never argue with a fool, for a passer-by would be unable to tell who is the fool.” His words apply equally to one who spits out hatred. An eye for an eye does not solve problems.

"A Scandal in Königsberg," Christopher Clark - A Review

 Giving birth can be difficult, which is one reason why T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month.” It is the month when nature re-awakens and birds and animals emerge and give birth, breaking the comfort of winter’s dormancy. Among those that come out from hibernation are Connecticut’s Painted Turtles. The photo depicts a “bale” of turtles, sunning themselves to harden their shells and stacked for socialization.

 

This review has nothing to do with turtles . I just liked the photo, which I took a few days ago.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

A Scandal in Königsberg, Christopher Clark

April 18, 2026

 

“The tension between reason and faith, between philosophy and

revelation was one of the central themes of these years.”

                                                                                                Christopher Clark, A Scandal in Königsberg, 2025

 

Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, is the author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War and Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. While researching the latter, he came across the story of a little-known scandal that took place almost two hundred years ago in Königsberg, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad but then the capital of East Prussia.

 

In his introduction to this short (152 pages) history, he explains that the “scandal” spread through conflating news with rumor and facts with innuendos. “Resemblance, he writes, “to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.” 

 

Johann Ebel (1784-1861) and Heinrich Diestel (1785-1854) were Lutheran pastors in early 19^th Century Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. It was the home of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the place from which Napoleon gathered his forces for the invasion of Russia in June 1812, and to which they returned, bedraggled and defeated six months later. Kant was a philosopher of the Enlightenment period, an elderly professor when Ebel and Diestel were students in Königsberg. The Enlightenment had introduced reason, science and critical inquiry: “The waning of ecclesiastical authority went hand in hand with an expansion of religious feeling. The consequence was a loss of certainty and a proliferation of possibilities.” The era saw the growth of individual liberty and natural rights. Cark writes that as a sensitive young student Ebel found it difficult to reconcile “...the rationalist teachings of his instructors with the warm positive belief he had grown up with at home.” A central theme of those late Enlightenment years was tension between reason and faith.

 

It was also a time when patriarchalism reigned, when intelligent, unhappy women, married to wealthy landowners and aristocrats, sought sympathy and ministration in religion. They found it with Ebel and Diestel. As the scandal unfolded, the two men were castigated as home-wreckers and disruptors of family harmony. Yet not a woman complained. In the end, after seven years, both men were exonerated, but their lives and their livelihoods had been destroyed. As Clark tells us, it was allegations of sex that “..gave wings to the scandal.” In his chapter titled “Closing Thoughts,” Clark writes: “The grotesques conjured up by the press (at the behest of the provincial authorities) were not images of what had actually transpired around Ebel and Diestel, but the fantastical inversions of liberal ideals.” 

 

While it may seem strange to recommend a book about a scandal that was largely contrived and in a city and country that no longer exist, Christopher Clark is too accomplished an historian and too good a writer to ignore. The book can be read as a history of a little-known Prussian city on the Baltic during an interesting time, when philosophy and religion were transitioning. Or it can be read as a parable for our times.