I was nearing the city after a very long drive on the interstate. Traffic had been horrible. Perhaps it was due to the waves of Floridians fleeing their state due to the terrors of Milton. And to think that the devastation of Helene is not even close to being appreciated or dealt with adequately, at least in terms of efficacy at relief and restoration. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, are unaccounted for in western North Carolina. But that is a different topic for a different day.

I had been driving for hours, but the interestates were jammed with fellow travelers.

As I neared the city, black smoke caught my eye, and I saw a wave of red brake lights washing towards me. I slowed down. Then I spotted the reason. A car had just caught fire. When I arrived on the scene, the car was already on the side of the interstate, roiling in flames. You would have thought the car had been made of kindling.

The smoke was a deep black; it reminded me of some of the scenes from the writer Dante’s epic. Much judgment in Dante is icy, but there’s also smoke and fire.

Suddenly I was arrested–convicted–for my angry attitude. I had been listening to podcasts and news for hours on the road, and had been stuck in traffic, growing more and more frustrated. I was growing more and more angry by the mile. I was crestfallen that my nation I serve as a soldier is borderless, that North Carolinians are offered $750 to rebuild their lives, but illegal aliens enter and are bused to hotels, that this administration writes $8 billion checks in support of Ukraine (with what end state, exactly?), that funding for fiscal year 2025 is on hold for the U.S. military, but somehow Congress continues to be paid just fine, their insurance is just fine, and sheeple may actually vote for open communists and oligarchs to continue taking America down and circle the drain of damnation, more concerned about pronouns and medical castration and DEI indoctrination than actually knowing history, hating communism for what it has always done, and will always do–steal, kill, and destroy?

I passed the car as it continued to succumb to the flames. I switched off the news and podcasts. I could not take it any longer; it was just more of the same. I switched to my music playlist. Suddenly the soulful sounds of Gregg Allman came on. I could feel myself loosen. The ABB was playing “Melissa.” And suddenly I was back to times I’d seen the Allman Brothers Band play it in concert, and my eyes looked in the rear view mirror to see the black smoke continue to rise on the perimeter of Atlanta, and I thought the imagery bespoke lessons of warning for a people rushing headlong into what they do not understand.