"Isn't that treason?" said Anton.

      "Of course it is," I admitted quietly. "It is an impeachable offence, a high crime against the nation. But what this matter when nobody takes action to impeach the man and remove him from office? Unfortunately, when nobody cares, matters get worse, because in a dictatorship it becomes impossible to impeach the king. The Congress has the power to impeach a President, but if the President owns the Congress by stealing the election time after time and owns the courts too, impeachment becomes impossible. It is hard to get out of this trap now. Since impeachment is no longer possible, a new platform must be found to rescue the nation. We are in a boundary zone on this count where the whole geometry begins to change, like in supersonic flight."

      Anton shook her head again. "I'm not an engineer. I simply found it intriguing to correlate supersonic flight with the Write Brothers. What happens in supersonic flight?"

      "Air is a fluid," I explained. "An aircraft flies through this fluid. It pushes against the air in front of it as it flies and the resulting pressure moves the air out of the way. But when the aircraft moves faster than the pressure can propagate, something amazing happens. The propagation speed in the fluid called air is the normal speed of sound. Sound is made up of pressure waves, like ripples on a lake, which are propagated through the air. The whole geometry begins to change when the aircraft moves faster than the pressure waves. The pressure can't escape. A very thin shockwave begins to form for which the old propagation rules no longer apply. A new physical reality unfolds that enables the air pressure to slip out sideways with an enormous speed until it clears the aircraft. At this point, when the 'emergency' is over, the normal rules apply again."

      "Are you implying that this can be done politically?" said Anton. "Are you also suggesting that it applies to the new marriage concept?"

      "That is what we face in all such cases," I said to her, "but it is very difficult to implement. "The German people couldn't do it when Hitler forced this kind or boundary type emergency on them. They didn't understand the nature of the boundary zone. Neither did the aircraft engineers understand it in the early days of supersonic flight. Many an aircraft simply disintegrated when they were encountering the sound barrier. And so did the German society disintegrate. The Hitler regime had turned their republic into a dictatorship, and suddenly the normal democratic rules suddenly no longer worked. The people didn't know what to do to protect their culture and their existence, and as a consequence Europe exploded into war. The Soviet Union is in such a boundary zone now, and so is America. The challenge is that we discovery new principle that can save us in this boundary zone that we find ourselves in. I think this principle is the Principle of Universal Love can do this, and we find it reflected in the original Decalogue in respect to marriage. This discovery coming to light is indeed like supersonic flight, a flight against all the barriers of old traditions. The challenge is to find the principles in our humanity that let us safely put the barriers out of the way. We are in a boundary zone with this one too. If I were to say to you, let me go to bed with you, our relationship would likely disintegrate, even though our humanity should make us capable to get there."

      "We are indeed in a boundary zone," said Anton with a smile and waved a finger at me as a schoolteacher would at a naughty boy. "Don't push against the limits of what our relationship can endure."

      "Oh, we are in that boundary zone already, and we don't know what to do," I said to her. "We both know that our countries and civilization cannot survive without a major breakthrough in establishing the Principle of Universal Love that stood behind every bright period in history. But was also know that that the development love cannot be a political project or proceed from a political imperative. It has to proceed from its own imperative, for its elements of joy, sublimity, beauty, power, and grace. If these don't move us, nothing will move us no matter how urgent the movement is needed in the political world. We can only be moved by the substance of our principles, the principles of our humanity, the principle of love, but never by the tragedies that we find in the voids when the principles are ignored. Unfortunately we have been blind to these principles for far too long, and now that we begin to move they perplex us."

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche