With the wind chill, it was around 50‑60 degrees below zero. I sat on my heels in the back of the Twin‑Otter and looked out the open door of the plane to the sea of white below. We were 8,000 feet above the ice and making our jump run. Some tiny black specks appeared on the ice in the distance. "Left five degrees!" I called out through my face mask, and Rocky nudged the Otter toward the specks.

"All right, man, how do you feel?' I asked myself. "Are you nervous?" I took a deep breath and relaxed, just letting whatever emotions were there come up. I had expected the reply to be, " What, are you kidding?!? I'm terrified!!" But no, to my surprise, I felt incredibly calm and peaceful.

Memories of the past four years raced through me like a flash flood. All the ecstasy and magic ‑‑ then all the pain and grief and mourning. A year ago, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to live or not. Learning how to sky‑dive when you don't know if you want to live is a good way to find out.

[With a final chapter 34 and an Epilogue to go, The Jade Steps is nearing completion.  So it's worth re-emphasizing again that The Jade Steps is a true story.  Every principal event described actually happened, every named person really lived and had that name.  It all happened almost 500 years ago, but it still remains the cause of the civil war within Mexico's soul.  Mexico will never rise out of the Third World until this spiritual wound is healed.  That is the purpose of this book.]
 
The Jade Steps
Chapter Thirty-Three:  Reaping The Whirlwind
 
"Doña Marina! Doña Marina!"  Someone was screaming at her, shaking her violently.  It was Doña Luisa.  Dazed from fainting, Malinali stared at the woman in confusion.  "You must not stay here! The Aztecs are attacking!"  She heard the words with no understanding.  She felt herself being pulled roughly to her feet and pushed into a run.  They reached a set of trees.  She looked around in bewilderment.  There was this incredible noise, but it seemed so far away.

She looked in the direction of the noise and saw the Tacuba causeway.  It was filled with screaming Aztec warriors swinging their macuahuitl obsidian-edged wooden swords and racing towards Pedro de Alvarado and his men.  Somehow the sight of it seemed as distant as the noise.  Suddenly, like the wave of a storm, the full sight and the sound of the battle crashed upon her.  She heard claps of thunder, but the sky was clear.  Then she saw the brigantines in the lake on either side of the causeway, firing their canons into the Aztec mass.  She recognized the captain of one of the ships, Juan Jaramillo, the officer who had protected her during La Noche Triste.

She saw Pedro de Alvarado lead his horsemen into a charge straight into the Aztecs, as the musketmen and crossbowmen formed positions on the edges of the causeway to fire into them.  So many Aztec warriors had filled the causeway in their fury and rage to get at the Spaniards that they couldn't move.  They just became targets for the cannons and muskets and arrows and the hooves of war horses.  They died in the hundreds, and still more hundreds, until they gave up the assault, retreating back into the city shouting insults and taunts that they had killed...

Then the terrible sight that had caused her to faint appeared before her eyes, the bloody head of Cortez bouncing and rolling in the dust, and she screamed in horror.  Doña Luisa embraced her and she clung to the Tlaxcalan princess, sobbing uncontrollably for "My Captain, my Captain..."  She finally let go, and, whispering her thanks, she walked alone along the shoreline to stare vacantly out upon the waters of Lake Texcoco.

Recently, several liberal - or "progressive" as they want to be called now - professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the PC orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness, and a whole host of other progressive shibboleths.

Northwestern "feminist" professor Laura Kipnis found herself in a Title IX star chamber for an article she wrote decrying the immaturity of her legally adult students.

Over at Vox, another progressive confessed (anonymously as "Edward Schlosser," reminding us that academics are an invertebrate species):  I'm A Liberal Professor and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.

It's shocking that these progressives should now be shocked at such intolerance and persecution after decades of speech codes, disruptions of conservative speakers, campus inquisitions which ignore Constitutional rights, cancellations of commencement speakers, and ideological litmus tests imposed on new hires and curricula.

Their shock bespeaks not principle, but rather indignation that now they are on the receiving end of the bullying and harassment they have long inflicted on conservatives and people of faith.

Call it Karma: the campus intolerance that progressives are now whining about is the child of the progressive ideology many of the complainers still embrace.  Let's revel in the details.

Of those running for president, who will give this speech?

"Ladies and Gentlemen, my administration will implement a series of economic policies to cause the economy to grow at an average rate of 4 percent or more a year.

Growth of 4 percent-plus per year will create jobs at a faster rate than the growth in the labor force and provide hope for those who had despaired of finding a good job again. At a growth rate of a little over 4 percent per year, real incomes for all of our citizens will double in only 17 years.

At the current rate of economic growth of a little over 2 percent a year, it will take more than 30 years for real incomes to double. We can do better -- and we have done better in our recent past.  Here's how we'll do it.

There are several important qualities that define our humanity. Today I want to talk about two of them: our capacity for conscious empathy, and our ability to consciously redirect our emotional impulses. We have a choice of whether and how we will use these; the benefits can change the course of our lives.

Empathy is the quality that allows us to relate to other people, to have feelings for them, to understand them in an experiential/emotional sense, and not just as an intellectual study. Without the capacity for empathy, we could not see one another as human, with common feelings, thoughts, and experiences.

The opposite of empathy is envy.  When we are envious, other people become simply, "the thing that possesses something we want."

But to override our impulse to see people as things requires us to stop and think, to reconsider our initial, more primitive impulses, and to make a different choice.