Philatelic societies, Battle of Gettysburg stamp, Van Al(l)en, and synchronicity

I've joined several philatelic societies in the past year to learn more about philately, to avail myself of their resources and services, and to support the work that they do. I have joined my local Philatelic Society of Lancaster County, the American Philatelic Society, the American Topical Association, the American First Day Cover Society, and most recently, the United States Stamp Society. Rod Juell, executive secretary of the latter, kindly welcomed me to the group, and promised me a gift. It arrived yesterday, and it was the First Day of Issue program for the 1963 U.S. Civil War Centennial: Battle of Gettysburg stamp, Scott #1180. This is the second FDOI program I have, after the one for the IGY stamp, shown in an earlier post. The 20-page program is very nicely designed. The cover includes the stamp and the FDOI cancelation.

Cover of my FDOI program for the Battle of Gettysburg stamp, showing the first day cancellation

Committee for the Centennial program (p. 2 of the program)

I do have that stamp on an extras page in my childhood stamp album:

Heavily canceled Battle of Gettysburg stamp outlined in gray

President Eisenhower, who was living in Gettysburg after his presidency, spoke as part of the ceremonies, somberly commemorating the battle and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

This gift from the USSS was especially appropriate, as the battlefield is only an hour from my house. I last visited with my nephew Matthias and his wife Filiz in the summer of 2017. 

Gettysburg Battlefield, August, 2017

Interestingly, on that day we ran into a news team that was doing a story on the presence of Confederate memorials in the Park, as the controversy over whom we should honor with monuments was rising in prominence.

A poem in the FDOI program, Pickett's Charge, was written by James "Jimmy" Van Alen (no, not Van Halen), perhaps best known as the founder of the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame in his hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, and as deviser of the now commonly used tie-break scoring system in tennis.

I have been joking with my wife and with my readers about various coincidences that I have latched onto as I have written my posts (which is why this post does not deal at all with the IGY). I thought it rather interesting that I received this gift with the poem by James Van Alen the day after my last post, which partly dealt with physicist James Van Allen. I mean, there is just one letter "l" separating these two men! This made me think about psychiatrist Carl Jung's concept of synchronicity. According to Benjamin Radford, Jung's concept of synchronicity is essentially describing "meaningful coincidences." I prefer Radford's explanation that synchronicity is really a manifestation of simple coincidence and the human desire to create connections through confirmation bias (which in these times of information bubbles we should all be wary of), as opposed to Jung's suggestion of synchronicity being due to some sort of meaningful universal connection, even if not directly causal.

Hmm, it is probably a coincidence that just last week I watched the movie A Dangerous Method (2011), directed by David Cronenberg, about the complex relationships between Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (initially a patient of Jung and later one of the first female psychoanalysts).