Returning to Vietnam

by Mona Shaw

I’m old, and I remember things.

Today is August 30, 2018, the local news dovetails stories of the death of Senator John McCain and accolades given returning Vietnam veterans, part of a recent “Honor Flight” at the Moline, IL, airport.

I don’t react to this because I’m no longer in my living room. I’m dropped into the University of Iowa campus, Iowa City, IA, in May, 1972. I am 20.

I’m walking north on Madison Avenue. I’m almost at the Iowa Memorial Union. It’s a gorgeous May day. The thin clouds stretch like feathers against a bright blue sky. I’m not looking at the clouds. I’m looking at the National Guard solider standing on top of the IMU. His long gun follows me as I pass by.

I’m too befuddled to be frightened.

“How is it that armed soldiers are sprinkled over campus?”

____________________

I know the answer, of course, but that doesn’t dent my astonishment at this. I was there the night before. I was one of the more than ten thousand who’d taken over the campus Pentacrest and downtown Iowa City.

The smell of smoke was omnipresent; though I didn’t know its source. I watched a large rock fly into one of the large plate glass windows of Iowa Book and Supply on the corner of Clinton Street and Iowa Avenue. The over-priced monopoly would eventually get a clue and replace the windows with small one surrounded by pebble stucco.

We were being chased. I didn’t know anyone around me, but people helped each other up if someone stumbled. And, though I didn’t get the brunt of it, my eyes were stinging from tear gas. My throat felt raw. I ran hard. I made it to the Burlington Street footbridge. Billy clubs licked my ankles and connected here and there. A group of us took refuge in Hillcrest dormitory and blocked a door for safety. My ankle hurt, but it wasn’t broken. A few were bleeding. We checked them to see how badly they were hurt. No one in my group was seriously injured.

We knew we could be injured demonstrating. Kent State taught us we could be killed. That knowledge grew our numbers. I was glad I was there. I had to be there.

Memories have memories and that feeling I’d had hadn’t left me. I worked for the Campus radio station. It was my job one night to read the draft lottery numbers. There was no way I could deny to my soul and my God that I was announcing a death sentence for some. It was unbearable. Afterward, I threw up. Everything in my being ached to stop the thing that caused that.

Like most people, becoming an antiwar activist was a gradual thing. I was a hawk as a young teen. I come from a military family. I had loved ones in Vietnam. We were fighting communism. Damn anyone who didn’t support that.

The war was on television. Seeing body after body every night dragged lifeless across the screen began to take a toll. I began to wonder if we were right. I realized how much I’d just accepted the word of others. I began to check things out.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the war, I knew why I was against it too. When King was murdered, his moral authority eventually gave me the courage to begin to say so. When Nixon escalated the bombing in Cambodia in 1970, against anything and everything moral and decent, it ignited a burning passion to end it. I was playing cards in a mobile classroom with newly-returned vets at Burlington’s Junior College. When we heard the news on the radio, a vet in a wheelchair threw his cards at the wall and wept.

The War in Vietnam was immoral and illegal. No historian denies that anymore. It cost more than 60 thousand American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. It wounded many, many more. It couldn’t be won, yet we kept fighting long after we knew that. It gave us Agent Orange, deadly accidents at ammunition plants, and countless orphans and families forever destroyed.

We ended that war. Even though our government did this in a shameful manner. It was ended. I wonder how many of those Vietnam vets being thanked today might not be alive, had we not done what we did. There is no question, we saved thousands of military lives. We ended the draft too.

You’re welcome. We’re not remembered lovingly these days. I don’t recall a time when we were. We’re discussed with pejorative and accused of things we didn’t do, like spitting on returning soldiers. But, I know that’s not about us. It’s about our national return to the glorification of war. People are afraid to be antiwar again. They tell anyone in a uniform “Thank you for your service." It's protection against public condemnation, while it guarantees public approval.

I know it’s not about the wars we’re fighting because you could throw a stink bomb at an NFL game and not hit three people who could name the nations where we’re fighting wars, let alone why exactly we’re fighting there. Few even know if the Taliban are our friends or enemies these days.
____________

I try to make eye contact with the soldier pointing his gun at me. He is about my age and handsome. I give him the peace sign. He points his gun down. Perhaps, I had a part in saving his life.

Ignorance for Tomorrow

by Mona Shaw

They don't know anything.

A few years ago I was sitting in a room of recent college graduates. I asked them what they thought about a column I'd given them. None of them had read it.

When I asked for why, a young man said smugly, "I don't read anything longer than 200 words."

"Seriously," I asked, truly boggled.

"If you can't say it in 200 words, you have nothing to say," he said.

The rest in the room agreed with him.

A young woman added, "Maybe other people our age do, but college kids don't read things that are long. You didn't go to college, did you?"

She was serious. It wasn't just that I wondered how they'd earned their degrees, it was their pride in this position that floored me.

There weren't particularly patient at needing to teach their wisdom regarding effective communication to this old woman. How could I not know this?

They'd never read "The Color Purple," and didn't know who Alice Walker was. One thought she may have seen the movie.

"Wasn't Oprah in that?"

They'd never read anything by W.E.B du Bois, or Frederick Douglass or Tillie Oleson or Angela Davis, when she was still radical.

They were proud to know a few quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr., (and they knew who that was), but none had read any of his brilliant essays in their entirety, not even "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Of course, none of them had read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." The point of the novel was lost on them anyway.

When I repeated Bradbury's famous quote, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them," they shrugged.

They'd all come from uncommonly privileged lives, families where they received new cars when they graduated. They were all white.

Those who put their time, their souls, their blood into writing about the panorama and diaspora of human suffering offered nothing they needed to learn.

They weren't curious about them either. They resented the notion they should be.

"I don't expect them to be curious about me." one said.

Even if they wanted to be activists, give them a few sexy sound bites, a few Cliff notes, and they were good to go.

They don't know anything, not even academically, let alone experientially.

We're in trouble, folks.

Top of Form

Liberal Manifest Destiny

An open letter to Gita Larson and other progressive liberals

by Mona Shaw

I write this on the chance that some of you care.  While I’m using Gita’s recent aggression as an example.  I witness similar assaults every hour of every day.

Gita, when you evicted Sharon Smith from your home, you committed an act of violence.

I know I don’t know you, so there is no need for you to tell me that, but I know you will anyway.  I do know you are a white woman, and a Quaker.

There is nothing you can tell me, however, that will mitigate the violence of your act.

Especially violent was your decision to effect that eviction by moving her few possessions from where she was residing into a storage locker, changing the locks, and notifying her of her homelessness with a text message. You did all of this while she was at work. Imagine the trauma, of trying to do your job while learning you no longer had a place to live.

The only benefit of the doubt I can muster for you is that the damage done and the cruelty of the method you chose is beyond your experience and ability to grasp such trauma.  If it’s not, your action is worse.

Every target of oppression struggles with PTSD. It’s part of our dance.

A blow like this, at first, shocks our entire system into an emotional shutdown, as if someone belted an enormous, discordant gong as hard they could.  The vibration lasts for days, if not weeks.  We dare not feel until it does. We must force ourselves to function within that tremor if we are to survive.  We must endure again the agony this triggers of previous abuse, which plays like a Power point presentation in our souls.

We must function and plan despite it. Gaslighting comes with the territory. If we’re lucky we’ll weep, if we’re luckier we’ll sob.  Tears can heal and reset our souls.  But we’ll fight weeping just the same until the crisis is past, until we can breathe, because we fear we might not stop crying; and we want to survive.

We will suffer unspeakable suffering that will become part of our patina for the rest of our lives.  Until the next time, and we know there will be a next time.

I am a white woman and a grandmother. Sharon is a Black, Native American grandmother.  I understand you're a grandmother too.  I think of Sharon's 20-year-old grandson in this.  How must he feel that this has befallen his grandmother?  Mine would be deeply hurt.  Yours likely does not face that risk.

I am not qualified to speak of the racist impact of your act, except to know the racism—the nadir of American evil--is inescapable.  I have, however, lived most of my life in poverty, so I am infinitely qualified to speak of the class aggression in this.  The class abuse I have witnessed and experienced has cost me everything I owned and nearly my life on more than one occasion.  It has taken the lives of many I have loved.  I know when it’s present, and I know how it works.

So, I know the harm is about to get worse.  As the privileged do, you will haul out standard and garish canards, affected rationalizations to avoid introspection. You may even see a therapist or ask clergy to help you work through any sense of guilt.  Clearly, rationalizing had already begun days earlier with help from likeminded friends.  You planned this deliberate act for some time.

While this is a not an exhaustive list, I am intimately familiar with them all.

“Perhaps, I could have handled this differently but….”

“I did all I could do.”

“I have to take care of myself right now.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

“I can’t be all things to all people.”

“I have a right to govern my own space.”

“I’ve done a lot for these people.”

“I could have done much worse.”

I have come to wonder if liberal theology believes that absolution comes from proving others have committed worse sins than they.

The damage will be punctuated by blaming the her for your actions.

“I can’t deal with her while she’s angry.”

“She has a victim mentality.”

“This isn’t really about what I did.  It’s about her pathology.”

“She could have avoided this by dealing with it earlier, differently, better. etc.”

“She doesn’t know how to make herself happy, so she strikes out at anyone.”

“She needs to learn you can get more flies with honey.”

You will ultimately deliver the affluent coup de gras.

“I don’t have to do this.”

“Let’s face it.  She’s not a good poster child for the cause.”

“She is not one of us.”

“I could have done nothing to help.”

“If they don’t stop being so critical, they’ll lose our support altogether.”

These set us up for the most damaging part of all.  To some degree, we will believe you.  We will blame ourselves too.  We will feel like a failure to the point of feeling worthless.  We will think this might not be happening if we were smarter, had better timing, had done things differently, looked different, had a better demeanor, etc.

To paraphrase Dr. King, “It’s not the attacks of our enemies that hurt the most.  It’s the actions or non-actions of our friends.”  Sometimes, it’s your best friends, people you’d previously trusted with your life.

We will consider giving up, quitting activist work, crawling into an anonymous hole and never coming out.  Sometimes, when it’s particularly dark, we’ll consider quitting life. 

Pulling yourself through that contracting, throbbing knothole is the hardest think a justice truth-teller ever must do.  And you do most of the pulling alone.  Your trust in others is destroyed for the time.  You gasp and wriggle and reintroduce yourself to your own heart.  If you’re lucky, and not everyone is this lucky, you eventually collapse, exhausted, outside that knothole.  You rest, for however long you need and when you can.  You stand again.

The pain you inflict has a long reach. When you attack someone's credibility, it not only hurts that person, it threatens that person's ability to help others.

Some will say you don’t deserve this letter.  You and your pals will regurgitate Manifest Destiny again, and again.  And, again. 

Too often liberals expect our deference and servility.  We know you clutch to your class position like rare pearls. You are so terrified of losing that.  So, you must remain convinced our hope is derived from your largesse, largesse which you are free to extend or withhold on a whim.  You like us in our place, and you’re quick to put us back there if we stray.

And, just to survive, we often play along.  We comfort you when you’re offended by a hint of truth.  We applaud when you win a human rights awards for your low-risk, peer-approved support.

We smile approvingly when you raise your hand at diversity forums to show all you’ve learned in all those sensitivity trainings. You are “culturally competent.”  We let it go when you interrupt us because you believe you can tell our story better than we can.

We know we are your project.  We are your self-aggrandizement--your way to prove you are a good person.  When we fail to do that, our value evaporates, and you’re done with us.

You objectify us.  You don’t believe we’re human, at least not as human as you.  We’re not as bright; we’re not as clean, we’re not as savvy, or as knowledgeable about how the “real” world works. We’re not as shrewd; we’re loud; we’re crude and crass; we dress “inappropriately”; we’re messy, and we certainly lack the white, professional-class social graces you revere.

Liberals often throw us under the bus when we present a risk to their comfort or social lives. You are fine with leaving us alone on that limb.  You rationalize that too.

“There is more than one side to this story.”

“I have a mortgage to pay.”

“I have other people I need to think about.”

“I have to work with that man, woman, group, etc.”

“I have to protect my resume, career, etc.”

“I have to take care of myself right now.”

“I need to get away from this controversy and give myself some space and peace."

You don’t really see our bodies outside the hospitals and in the street, and you vote for those you know will kill us, because, they’re not killing you.

You threw out a Black, Native American grandmother as if she were an irksome inconvenience, like weeds in your yard.  You placed a blanket of racism on all of this, a blanket that those of your class and race has historically infected with some variety of small pox or another social infection you’ve never known.

In the end, you provided a service.  We need to learn we can’t count on you.  We must do this for ourselves.  We will plow through even you, if we must, to realize justice and liberty.

I’m not at all concerned that I will turn off allies with this.  In more ways than not, it may be better for us if you go.  As Lila Watson says, if you’re oppression isn’t bound up with ours, you can’t help us anyway. 

If your oppression is bound with ours, if you are one us, I can’t drive you away. You do have to do this.  Justice has never been won by those who must be sweet-talked into it.  It’s won by those who can’t be talked out of it.

I am simply asking you to think with a little introspection.

Fire and ICE

by Mona Shaw

The latest ICE raid on May 8 happened 18 miles from my front door. It also reminded me of how I lost faith in Democrats.  I know some think this came about when I flew off the handle one day in some purist tantrum.  It didn’t happen that way at all.  The truth is much more embarrassing.

My disenchantment with Democrats began during the Clinton administration.  After a spate of unconscionable legislation and policies, from GATT to NAFTA to DOMA to DADT, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act horrified me most of all.  I was so fed up that I voted for Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party for president that year.

But I waffled in my resolve.  I waffled a lot.  I still thought there was value in working for local candidates, and I volunteered for them and cut them checks.  I even voted for John Kerry in 2004, because George W. Bush for an unabashed war criminal, and I was still beguiled into believing that Democrats were against war for profit. I couldn’t envision a 2018 when G.W. would be considered an affable teddy bear by the party.

Indeed, Democratic candidates were a consistent presence at peace festivals and rallies during all the Bush administration.  They often spoke and held their peace signs high. It was at one such gathering that I met Dave Loebsack.  You could always count on him being there.  The first time I met Dave, I mispronounced his last name.  He was more than a little piqued at my mistake and corrected me in a patently snotty tone.  I was quite embarrassed and apologized profusely.  He didn’t accept my apology and just glared at me and walked away.

“People are touchy about their name,” I rationalized.

I swept it under the rug and volunteered for his campaign just the same.

The day he was elected I made phone calls on his behalf until the polls closed.  I was thrilled he was elected.  As Republicans go, Jim Leach had been a very moderate one and voted like a Democrat as often as not.  I knew it would be even better. 

I was excited in early January, 2007, when I learned that he was going to hold a town hall meeting a block from the mobile home park where I lived. I was the first to arrive.

He was still giddy about his win and talked about watching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  (He has yet to participate in a filibuster.)  He eschewed suggestions that G.W. Bush should be impeached for his war crimes.

“Do you want Dick Cheney for president,” he asked.

“Impeach him too,” I suggested. 

He told me to “Get serious,” and shot me that look he’d given me at the festival.

I was embarrassed and intimidated and decided to move to safer ground and ask a soft ball question.

“What are you thinking about the ICE raid in Marshalltown last month?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

My response was a reflex, and my surprise was real.  The Swift raid had been on the front page of the Des Moines Register for weeks and had received national news.  I thought everyone knew about it.

“Really?” I asked.

“I’ve been a little busy,” he said.

His tone was so hostile that others noticed and became quiet.

He gave a nervous laugh and said, “I guess I don’t suffer fools and trouble-makers gladly.”

The subject was abruptly changed.  All but one or two present continued to fawn over him.

I checked out mentally after that.  I was too worried.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know, though that was sad.  It was that he didn’t care that he didn’t know.

His response disillusioned me.  Not because he was rude to me, but because he had exposed to me his modus operandi for dealing with statements he didn’t like.  His M.O. was to shame and discredit the person who asked or said those things.

I also knew that it wasn’t in his instinctive repertoire to care about the families that had been destroyed by the raid.  He didn’t know an Esperanza or a Jorge or a Consuelo or any of the other Latinos who comprised a good third of my trailer park. My neighbors were devastated and now being terrorized.  He had not seen them weeping while shoveling their walk.  He not driven slowly by my trailer to read the sign I’d put in my front window condemning the raid.  I had to do that.  I wanted them to know that this white neighbor was on their side.  He didn’t see Jorge shovel my walk after that.

“Do any of these upper middle-class Democrats really care about the folks?” I had to wonder.

Or, do they just adopt “positions” that are quickly minimized when the rubber hits the road?

I had to pay closer attention. He had stoked my belly’s fire for the truth.  My disappointing discoveries were many and profound.  The rug became very lumpy.

Thank you, Martin

 by Mona Shaw

Martin Luther King, Jr. is personal for me.  He is my teacher, my mentor, and my friend. He changed my life, forever.  He led me to the defining moment of my life.

When I was 16, I believed then, as I do now, that he was fighting for me and all the poor people who lived in Flint Hills Manor, a neighborhood of dilapidated cinder-block row houses, where the poorest of the poor lived in Burlington, Iowa. I had heard the “I have a dream” speech while perusing used comic books in Susie Alvine’s corner store, and I was instantly and solidly on board.  When he said, “Justice and equality for all, I just assumed my people were included in the “all.”  He was like church.  When I heard his voice, I felt loved.

Life was hard for me then.  At school, I was mocked and taunted because of my

Neighbor kids in the Manor

address.  I ate my lunch alone in the hall instead of the cafeteria to avoid the abuse.  My father and step-mother were in a very dark and angry place at the time.  At home I felt the end of a leather belt most days for anything and nothing.

“You left the light on in your room while going to the bathroom!” 

“The way you breathe is disgusting!”

My feet were like blocks of lead when I forced myself to carry myself to either destination.  My soul was even heavier.  But, I had Dr. King.  I also had my church.

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene was my refuge.  They saved me body and soul.  They told me I was special, that I was smart and a beautiful child of God. They loved me, and I loved them back.  I felt joy in church.  I laughed in church.  I prayed and sang until my spirit soared.  They taught me the Gospels and how to stand up for your convictions in the face of adversity. 

I had come to that church the way most children did, by crawling onto a blue Sunday School bus when it drove through our neighborhood every Sunday morning.  They welcomed every child, no matter how they were dressed, with or without shoes, and they loved us all. I could endure whatever came my way, because Sunday was coming.

When I showed up with belt marks on my face or arms or legs.  People in the church tried to do something.  The pastor at the time mucked this up horribly, but they were the only ones who tried.

They didn’t talk about racism in church, but, because they taught us to sing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the word, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight,” I assumed they were against it.

I believed King’s speeches were the 20^th Century gospel.  I thought the Vietnam War might be wrong. When he said it was, I knew it.  His words about poverty and income equality were like drops of water on a scorched spirit.

I learned that Dr. King had been murdered in the same place, but not in the same way, as I learned about the assassination of JFK.  They didn’t announce it over the loud speaker, and they didn’t send us home.  I heard a teacher say, “Someone finally killed that trouble-making nigger.”  I wanted, I prayed earnestly that it was not him, but it was.  I was flattened. And, no one comforted me.

My father did have his kind moments and was patient with my devastation.  He tolerated it when I cut photo after photo of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King behind her black veil from the local newspaper and taped them to my bedroom wall.  I would pray and sob to those photos at night, “Please come back.  Please.  Like Lazarus.  We need you.”

After a few weeks of listening to and watching me, my father did say, “You know you’re not a Negro, don’t you?”  Still, he let me be with my photos and my mourning.

My parents didn’t go to church.  Just the same, every week a “witness” would visit our home, pray with them and try to convince them to save their souls and join us.

One week it was Brother Hartzell.  Now, born-again Christians love talking about

Mug shot of King

the crucifixion more than anything else.  It is an effective topic to elicit agreement.  Brother Hartzell began to agonize with sweat and tears over the mistreatment of Jesus, carrying the cross, the whip, the nailing to the cross, the piercing of his side, and the vinegar shoved to his lips.  He closed his mini-sermon with this.

“That nigger last week got a better funeral than Jesus.”                        

Brother Hartzell left.  My belly burned, literally.  Bile rushed to my throat with an equal scalding.  I swallowed and swallowed to keep it down.  I tried to convince myself that I’d not heard what I heard.  But, I had.  My father couldn’t resist a taunt.

“Well, it looks like your church doesn’t love your guy as much as you do.”

My misery only increased over the following days.  I finally ran to my pastor’s house and poured out my heart and confusion.  The pastor and his wife were loving and concerned.

“You have to understand, “Brother Smith said, “Some people believe the negro is inferior, and some don’t.  We have respect both views. And, even though Brother Hartzell was clumsy in his statement. He is technically right. Hang on to that, Mona.”

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene

I did not respect both views; I did not want to hang on to that, and explained my position.  Sister Smith took my hand and spoke.

“I know this is hard.  I have trouble with that thinking too, but we must still love each other.  Though I do believe mixed marriages are a sin.”

I was even more confused and tormented and a bit derailed.

“Why is mixed marriage a sin?  Aren’t their children precious? And what about…?  And what about…?  And what about…?”

Dr. King had taught me well.  Brother and Sister Smith finally cut me off and told me that I needed to go home and pray about it.  They said if I prayed in truth, God would explain it to my heart.

“Jesus loves the little children.  All the children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.  Jesus love the little children of the world.”

Throughout the night, the singing became gently louder and more beautiful, until it sounded like a choir of angels.

Eventually, I heard bird song and saw light coming through my bedroom window.  I stood and tore some loose skin from my knees blistered by the hardwood floors.  I looked at the photo of Dr. King’s photo on the wall and whispered to my soul with a conviction I had never know until then.

“They’re wrong.”

The following Sunday evening, I preached the first, if not the only, anti-racism sermon in Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene to our youth group.  Sister Smith was not amused.  She took me aside.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t,” I promised, “because I’m not coming back.”

I believed this was a test of who I would be, and that my soul would perish if I did not follow it.  I kept my promise, never went back, and never regretted it, but I missed them. I wept about this many times.  The community, the singing, the love, the refuge were gone for good.

Fifty years later, I still miss them.  Every time I pass the church, a part of me wants to go inside, see the pews, smell the smell of hymnals, and look at the light that comes through the stained-glass windows.  But, I cannot go backward.  Still, I cannot but love them for what they gave me when they did.

I didn’t know what to do with my new knowledge, but I kept walking in it.  In the summer, kids in the Manor and I built tents in our backyards and put signs on the tents that said, “Resurrection City.”  The newspaper came and took a photo.  It was something.

Things at school improved dramatically. It turned out most of the teachers did get it, and they said so and organized the first of MLK events sweeping the nation.  The Black kids and poor kids at school suddenly became cause celebre. I had friends.  I would learn these friendships were superficial, and we were fundamentally a do-gooder project. Still, the persecution stopped. They even hired a Black teacher the following year.  I took his class.  I had fun in school for the first time.

Fifty years have passed. I have witnessed many things. My activism increased and became more radical as did my experiences with betrayal and disillusionment.  Dr. King’s life has been sanitized by the dominant culture. The have fashioned his memory to suit their self-interests. Progress in racism, let alone militarism and poverty, has been painful and slow and is far from achieved. Rarely is it mentioned that his mother, Alberta, was also assassinated while sitting in church six years later. He was far more radical and far more of a socialist than most people realize. Please read his work.  His widow, Coretta, lived on for many years to support equality for women and the rights of lesbian and gay people.

The writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. has sustained me through it all.  When I fall flat, and I have many times, and have no hope, eventually I will pull out “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and it will lift me to my feet. 

Here and there, someone will point out to me the flaws of Dr. King.  These flaws are undeniable.  I also know this.  We all miss part of the truth.  That’s why we all need to preach it.  And, Dr. King never preached anything but the Truth. And, he absolutely lived and put his life on the line for the Truth he preached. For me, that distinguishes him, forever.

I, too, believe that we will get to the Mountain Top.  I, too, believe “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  I’ve now entered old age, so like Dr. King, I know I may not get there with you.  But, I know completely and absolutely that justice is inevitable.  Keep reading his truths.  Keep walking.

Thank you, Martin.