Craig and Meghan

The news for today is that Bill called to tell me that Craig and Meghan and their family were in a horrible car crash last night on their way home from somewhere. Craig and their 11 month old died at the scene, Meghan lost her pregnancy, and Craig Jr (6 years old) died this evening. That leaves Meghan with two boys recovering from various serious (but not life threatening) injuries. I can’t imagine how devastating this is for their family and for Becky who now has only one living child.

Since it is too late tonight to start a conference talk I am going to record some thoughts I had during family scripture as we were reading Alma 46. This summary is an uncanny parallel to our day with Trump as Amalickiah, elected Republicans and conservative media personalities as lower judges, and unfortunately we don’t have our modern Moroni:

1 And it came to pass that as many as would not hearken to the words of Helaman and his brethren were gathered together against their brethren.

3 Now the leader of those who were wroth against their brethren was a large and a strong man; and his name was Amalickiah.

4 And Amalickiah was desirous to be a king; and those people who were wroth were also desirous that he should be their king; and they were the greater part of them the lower judges of the land, and they were seeking for power.

5 And they had been led by the flatteries of Amalickiah, that if they would support him and establish him to be their king that he would make them rulers over the people.

7 And there were many in the church who believed in the flattering words of Amalickiah, therefore they dissented even from the church; and thus were the affairs of the people of Nephi exceedingly precarious and dangerous,

8 Thus we see how quick the children of men do forget the Lord their God, yea, how quick to do iniquity, and to be led away by the evil one.

9 Yea, and we also see the great wickedness one very wicked man can cause to take place among the children of men.

10 Yea, we see that Amalickiah, because he was a man of cunning device and a man of many flattering words, that he led away the hearts of many people to do wickedly; yea, and to seek to destroy the church of God, and to destroy the foundation of liberty which God had granted unto them, or which blessing God had sent upon the face of the land for the righteous’ sake.

11 And now it came to pass that when Moroni, who was the chief commander of the armies of the Nephites, had heard of these dissensions, he was angry with Amalickiah.

12 And it came to pass that he rent his coat; and he took a piece thereof, and wrote upon it—In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children—and he fastened it upon the end of a pole.

29 And it came to pass that when Amalickiah saw that the people of Moroni were more numerous than the Amalickiahites—and he also saw that his people were doubtful concerning the justice of the cause in which they had undertaken—therefore, fearing that he should not gain the point, he took those of his people who would and departed into the land of Nephi.

30 Now Moroni thought it was not expedient that the Lamanites should have any more strength; therefore he thought to cut off the people of Amalickiah, or to take them and bring them back, and put Amalickiah to death; yea, for he knew that he would stir up the Lamanites to anger against them, and cause them to come to battle against them; and this he knew that Amalickiah would do that he might obtain his purposes.

31 Therefore Moroni thought it was expedient that he should take his armies, who had gathered themselves together, and armed themselves, and entered into a covenant to keep the peace—and it came to pass that he took his army and marched out with his tents into the wilderness, to cut off the course of Amalickiah in the wilderness.

Part of why we are in our current situation is that Merrick Garland and Jack Smith were not fast enough in bringing Trump to trial. I’m not going to place too much blame on them however because I am not qualified to say how much faster they could have done that work and it’s hard to guess how much Trump’s legal team along with compliant federal courts could have dragged the process out even if the charges had been brought sooner.

Inspired by reading this chapter again today I used AI to craft a modern Title of Liberty which I will be using on my social media profiles. I asked chat GPT to synthesize something like the title of Liberty geared toward liberty under the Constitution. It synthesized two options and I applied those as a base melding the two suggestions:

In defense of our God given freedoms and our Constitution—for the American dream of peace unity and justice for the generations to come.

Chat GPT refined that to:

In defense of our God-given freedoms and our Constitution—for peace, unity, justice, and the American dream, for generations to come.

I then asked for a slightly more compact version and got:

If I were to make a change it would be: