FOOLS! (2025-24)

Realizing today is April Fools Day, I drafted a witty little post this morning. In my scribblings I teased about how, after we dedicated our home as an International World Peace Site last weekend, we got a letter from the leader of the free world apologizing for his mistaken methods of swamp draining. He added that he was also ready to make his sparkly white house a peace site as well. 

Before posting it I was researching the etymology of the word “fool” (it goes back to the French term for bellows, or empty headed and strong winded). Then somehow I randomly happened upon a story about Sophie and Hans Scholl, a brother and sister who saw unfolding in 1943 Germany strikingly similar events to what we are seeing in America. 

Trusting that their fellow citizens, when made aware of what was happening, would demand it stop, they printed up flyers on a hand crank printing machine, calling for people of conscience to speak up.

Sophie tossed some flyers into the atrium of the university where she was studying. A janitor reported her and her brother to the Gestapo. Six others from their group, The White Rose, were also arrested.

Sophie, Hans and Christoph upon their arrest.

Sophie, her brother Hans and Christoph Probst were brought before the notorious People’s Court, a mock judicial court. All three students were sentenced to death. Roughly 90% of the people brought to that court were sentenced to death. Sophie was not given the opportunity to testify. Within hours of the conviction, all three were beheaded by guillotine at Munich’s Stadelheim Prison.

Sophie, aged 22, was recorded as saying:

"Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just do not dare express themselves as we did.”

The executioners noted the courage with which Sophie walked to her execution. Her last words were:

“Die Sonne scheint noch.”

“The sun still shines"

Christoph Probst was a medical student with Hans who simply wrote his feelings on a paper that Hans added to their flyer. He was not a radical. His wife was sick with childbed fever after the birth of their third child days before. They had two other very small children. Christoph didn't even know why they were arresting him when he went to pick up his paycheck before visiting his wife in the hospital. He never saw her again.

Reading all morning, from various sources, about this tragedy from which we should have learned, it felt wrong for me to make light of the situation we all face, even on April Fools Day. We are fools being trumped. We are surely being hurled into dark days. Swiftly spiraling dark days. Can't you see it, my fellow Americans?

I am praying, with fervor, for more Sonlight.

Lord, give me the courage of Sophie Sholl.

 

Would someone please lift the magicians cape from this country of ours and call out: “April Fools, Everyone! Just Kidding!”