There was befuddlement in the 4th Floor Conferences Room. We had closed out the evening with festive beverages and the basketball game up in East Lansing. We had expected the next storm to sweep Iin starting late yesterday afternoon. The bets for what was had been for nine inches of new fluffy snow. Instead, sunrise in Fairfax brought only bright light, blue sky and the same ice we saw yesterday morning.

The Early Crowd, mostly Boomers except for Holly, tried to figure out what track the storm had taken.

It looks like Track 3 or some variant that kept the swirling snow away from Northern Virginia. And playing with numbers was the reason the conversation veered abruptly from meteorology to history. It was purely a matter of figures, between the Track of the Big Ass Storm and the 31st day of the First Month. There is the matter of the government shut-down, which they say will re-open once the House is back in Session on Monday.

Splash was on top of the date, since it matched the historic accounting that results when you switch the “3” and “1” to make ’13,” the number of the Constitutional Amendment that was signed into law on this date in 1865.

It was a big deal at the time, though we don’t talk about the way we do some of the others about Speech and Firearms. Which have a certain immediacy. The State of Mississippi even misfiled their copy and did not unearth it for 148 years after this day in 1865 with the smoke of cannon-fire wafting lighter than snow.

The abolition of the baleful tradition of involuntary Slavery is what the 13th Amendment was about. The Boomers are familiar with it, being taught that President Lincoln had made his Abolition proclamation to end a great evil. There followed the usual transformation of what we would call today a Presidential ‘Executive Order” into something that would be an enduring legacy of legislation;

Then, everything was fine. Except for the rumbles across a century and the tumult of the sixties that has lurched across Y2K and is now seething in Minneapolis.

So, the conflict and messaging this morning led to the run-up to creating something publishable so we can enjoy a chilly but bright afternoon.

“Slavery was abolished a century and a half ago. I thought it was a pretty solid thing and long settled. But there are people running around with rhetoric that could have been used by the Confederates. We want to avoid turning back to those times of desperate conflict. But we seem to have re-created a strange inversion of what had been the struggle between Rebels and Yankees.

The nature of conflict has changed. We no longer claim to fully understand it. Cannons have been replaced by drones, essentially making things intensely personal with remote controlled grenades atop drones that can fly unseen and siient and put the grenade in the middle of someone’s conference table. They say Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is looking for the incoming ones this morning.
The way warfare is now conducted has changed. There has been a transition from massive Force-on-Force battles between well-organized forces. Now struggles may include the selective elimination of opposing leadership by sabotage of things like explosive cell phone pagers distributed to the pockets of enemy leadership. Targeting and distribution are now intensely personal. And visibly grotesque.

Melissa came into the room from the Galley, hands full with a bag of still-warm bagels and a tray in the other with cream cheese and lox and thin-sliced cold cuts. ‘Did you see the videos of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster hey are showing on the anniversary of the explosion? It is spectacular. And horrifying even after 40 years.”

There was an image on the Flat Screen on the North wall:

Creative section lead Miles waved Melissa toward a place at the table for the food and a big jug of Flat Yank coffee. “There are a lot of anniversaries this week to which we ought to pay attention. The controversy over immigration is just one major thread of trouble in this new year. The Big Deals are about whether we should allow migrants or asylum seekers to walk in and set up shop here, whether they are law-abiding or not.”

“So? I have seen the numbers of the people picked up and departed. It is startling,” said splash, reaching for poppy seed roll on the tray, it might be worth talking about the 320,000 unaccompanied kids the DHA folks lost track of? That five year old whose Dad dumped him in the ICE raid .was a huge deal. What about a couple hundred thousand kids handed off to human traffickers who will mess up their lives but good.”

Rocket frowned and leaned forward to snatch a fresh Hero Protein Bagel. “Well, considering the 13th Amendment seems sort of optional these days, why don’t we consider getting those kids out of involuntary servitude wherever they are? I would be happy to help but I don’t want to have people calling me a Nazi for trying to free lots of people, since the kids are just one population in the millions of people who were permitted to enter the country without much scrutiny.”

Miles frowned and took a bite of a “Are you saying that we ought to pay attention to the 13th Amendment? The slavery thing was settled long ago.”

There was laughter around the table qt the notion of actually dealing with the population of uninvited migrants moving among us. Vic waved at the blue sky out the 4th Floor window. “We need to remember that there was a lot of trouble about this matter, and now we sort of ignore it and the notion of what happens to people in migration. And who is running it.”

There was a pause in the morning bustle. Miles clicked the remote on the flat screen to track the storm that missed us. “We have the afternoon now and no snow shoveling required. But considering how people felt about the five-year-old, a few hundred thousand should be easy to find.”

Splash leaned back and laughed. “They certainly found us, didn’t they? And a bunch of them probably didn’t even know they were traveling.”

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www,vicsocotra.com