What Rough Beast | Poem for August 8, 2017

Herbert T. Abelson
Finger on the Button

If someone is undisciplined, reckless, thin-skinned, a bully, looking for revenge and retaliation, has to always be right with little examination of options—someone who seems to follow the dictum of fire, aim, ready; what if that person was our leader at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962?

JFK was the President and the decider—just about everyone, certainly the generals, wanted him to attack the Cuban missile installations—to show that Russian bully Nikita K who was boss, but only Kennedy could make the final decision and he said NO after great deliberation which may be the only reason we did not have a nuclear war and still have a civilization on Earth.

Think of Trump in JFK’s position at that critical time and try to imagine whether we would now exist as more than rubble.

 

Herbert T. Abelson’s poems have appeared in Pharos, The Silkworm, American Academy of Pediatrics Senior Bulletin and What Rough Beast. He is a retired academic physician widely published in scientific journals. He is also a husband, father, grandfather, pinhole photographer, cook and car collector.

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