Where do I start? I know the beginning is the best place, but at this moment I find I’m not ready to go back to a time that was good but would act as a precursor for this moment. I can’t even spell correctly.
The mist is covering my eyes and I don’t want to see the truth I know must be accepted. My friend Phil has passed. Well, not passed; he’s died of a massive heart attack after I spoke with him last week. It’s a shock and a pain I can’t really describe because I had so much hope he’d pull through.
But that wasn’t in the Master’s plan and now he’s got one hell of a good man taking up residence where all good Vets go after they make the final muster.
I hate that. Knowing death comes to all of us is bad enough, but knowing I’ve outdistanced another man of better personal qualities than I possess is really disturbing. Maybe it’s true only the good die young and some of us are doomed to continue onward.
Phil was a couple of years older than me. He was my publisher on his blogsite Grumpy Opinions, a conservative site dedicated to causing apoplectic seizures in the breastworks and buttheads of the liberal left. We did our best.
Phil did it so well, however, the foreign butt busters sought to hack the site to splinters to prevent any semblance of free thought in the blogosphere. He along with Pumabydesign (the dear lady’s handle on-line) managed to beat the hell out of the drones seeking to stymie free speech. They did it with a vengeance.
It was at this point I started posting my efforts to Phil’s encouragement and advertisement to other site operators and my work was allowed to move into, until that time, undiscovered venues. Phil will always be appreciated for helping an old dog learn new tricks. I never got the chance to meet him in person so as to learn the whole Wordpress operation he was so proficient at. For that reason you may not hear so much from me. So be it. I’m not that important: but Phil was.
He moved discussion forward and gently prodded some of us to think, create strategies and move against what he saw as a diminishment of the American people and the nation in general. His nation was his passion and it was developed to assure hiss children and grandchildren maintained his love for country and the freedoms this country ensures for all of our progeny.
Nature abhors a vacuum and that being said I assure you Phil hated the interior of every liberal’s cranium. He felt this country gave and gives us all opportunities we need to act upon and in doing so rise above our present state. He believed in helping anybody to rise but rejected they were entitled to anything other than the honestly earned profits of their labors. They shouldn’t profit from the sweat of another’s brow so anybody could recline in the shade without learning the joy of personal victory over adversity. He was an still is one of my heroes because he acted rather than # and moan about the problems.
I’m tired now because sadness carries an extreme weight I can’t describe. It’s crushing and breath-taking. It’s oppressive and stunting. It kills with the downward pressure of depression.
But Phil wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d have said go out and do something, anything to fight for what this country and a people’s nation deserve to be, to become and to honor those who died to make it what it is. We must make it the best it can be.
Phil Basset, Rest in Peace. We’ll carry on sadly. But we will carry on.
Thanks for listening
