The conclusion of the Bonus March

"By 1932 the nation was in the middle of the Great Depression, and in May of that year about fifteen thousand unemployed and penniless veterans camped on the Mall in Washington DC to petition for immediate payment of their bonuses. The Senate defeated the bill to move up disbursement by a vote of sixty-to to eighteen. A month later President Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans' encampment. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the troops, supported by six tanks. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was the liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton was in charge of the cavalry. Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas in to the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames. The veterans never received their pensions" (p. 188).

from Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Making successes from outsiders

"In the economic field, for example, the first Italian port to win for itself a share in modern Western maritime trade was neither Venice nor Genoa nor Pisa, but Leghorn; and Leghorn was the post-Renaissance creation of a Tuscan Grand Duke, who had planted there a settlement of crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal. Though Leghorn was planted within a few miles of Pisa, her fortunes were made by these indomitable refugees from the opposite shore of the Mediterranean and not by the supine descendants of the Medieval Pisan seafarers" (p. 362).

from Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One" (abridged)

Toynbee highlights other examples from the Italian Risorgimento that demonstrate where success lies it doesn't settle upon a nostalgic memory of that Italian state's Medieval past but in a forward thinking vision for a new future. Otherwise, it is brought about by an 'alien' influence.

organisms are craggy surfaces

Organisms are craggy surfaces perched upon the precipice of a clime gradient, slowing the flow of energy through selective membranes in order to generate a charge by which it touches the face of god. 

Life is animate electricity.