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Last letters from the living dead man

Chapter 17: FOOTNOTES:
By David Patterson Hatch
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Philosophy & EthicsReligion/Spirituality

About This Book

A series of automatic letters and essays purportedly transmitted from a departed communicator, offering reflections on the afterlife, spiritual guidance, and social renewal. The pieces move between personal counsel and broad commentary on war, national unity, and moral responsibilities, proposing ideals such as world federation, collective spiritual labor, and an emerging age of higher consciousness. Interwoven are meditations on grief, ritual fellowship, unseen guardians, and practical exhortations for ethical living and communal reconstruction after crisis.

LETTER XII
LEVEL HEADS

May 15, 1917.

DO not get excited, you Americans. If you keep your heads, you will come through this all right. If you lose your heads, you may lose much besides—you may lose more than you can win back in a hundred years.

I am not excited. I have not lost my head. (Yes, I still have a head, and hands and feet. If I should try to live out here without hands and feet, the adjustment to that unaccustomed condition would have a reactionary effect upon my head. I am not experimenting in the elimination of my members.)

You see a country now, Russia, that is making the experiment of living without its head. No nation can continue as a nation without a head, and a level one. Even the most extremely republican, democratic, socialistic, or any other kind of a nation must have a head. A completely anarchistic aggregation of people could not be called a nation. Its land would be only a geographical section populated with units, and such units unrelated to other units might as well be ciphers.

Do not be impatient because I write seldom at present. I am rather busy. I shall always come when I have something that must be said.

A change is coming in America. Quite a change has already come about, has it not?[2]

This country is great, this country is strong, this country is adaptable. It can adjust itself to change. The people of this country have not been slaves for a long time. The people of Russia have been so many kinds of slaves that their reaction to freedom is unexpected by a free world. Wait! Do not lose your heads about this matter.

I do not object to there being a few persons who know that I am writing with you again. They cannot affect me, save to encourage me with their interest.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] It was about this time, if I remember rightly, that many of our wealthy men began working for the government at one dollar a year.