Sunny today but rain expected

Lots of rain yesterday and it is so green. Lovely to see that. The world needs lots of greening and flowers for sure. 

Nothing added to Blake Newsletter yesterday; it was a day of sorting and cleaning but another load ready to go to Salvation Army. It will be good to have all of those things that have sat on the shelves for a long time recycled to people who will enjoy them. We enjoyed them in the past but my future doesn't include so much stuff and it belongs to Edward's and my past not the future really. Ed loved to buy something where ever we went  as a memory. I am more of a minimalist although I have also purchased memory items but did tend to give them away as gifts to share my memory of where I went. 

My mind was mulling over an article about the Marshall Plan this morning. This plan passed by the United States government after World War II was a plan to help Europe after the war to rebuild in a democratic way and basically build peace. It worked for Europe as we now have the European Union (EU) and their differences are settled in the European Parliament and gradually many many countries in Europe have become part of this enormous group of people numbering over 600,000,000 people with many more million on the path to membership in the EU. The Soviet Union at this same time as the Marshall Plan was created was busy revenging the Second World War on any country that they felt had contributed to their losses as they literally gobbled up territory all the way to Berlin and so much south of Germany right back to the original borders of the Soviet Union. That enlarged Soviet Union only lasted until the early 1990s when it collapsed. Why it collapsed was poor management by the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with the so-called West. Their idea of communism was to make a few people rich and keep the rest of the people under strict control so that they (the wealthy) could plunder these areas including Russia proper. Hence there wasn't really anything in place to help bring good government to Russia because the wealthy and those in power (like Putin especially) did not want to be part of the European Union. That wasn't really obvious at the time but as Putin became stronger and stronger it became more obvious. At the time of the Olympics at Sochi the world realized that Putin and his enablers had ambitions to rebuild the post-Second World War Soviet Union which was somewhat ludicrous because it had collapsed (and a considerable number of the countries enslaved by the Soviet Union were now part of the European Union or applying to join). There wasn't a new mechanism proposed for rebuilding the Soviet Union but rather brute force which they are using in Ukraine which was how the enlarged post-Second World War Soviet Union was built originally. The world wasn't ready for conflict in 2014 but then the pandemic came along and we became a world that could once again look Armageddon in the face and resist Russian aggression. This article reminded me that the "winning the peace" became the new mentality of the 1950s when I was a child. That is what we are aiming for in supporting Ukraine so heavily - winning the peace for Europe once again. All that Russia presents us with is war mongering as they try to take back something that they never really had - from the day the Iron Curtain dropped across Europe resistance was there - initially somewhat futile as the Russian boot was too strong but gradually that resistance became expensive to counteract and the enlarged Soviet Union collapsed. But how to get back to that lovely peace that we had where we all worked together and just lived with the differences in ideology. That is the question and where we are at. But the democracies which Hitler called soft are not soft; we are ready to do what has to be done to help Ukraine to fight off the greedy Nazis of Russia. For that is what they are - land stealing, property thieving, murdering of the innocent, greedy Nazis.