From Boston to Bangladesh... April has been a hell of a month.  Thoughtful people all over the world have been trying to make sense of it... trying to figure out why a couple of young brothers who came to America from Chechnya... seeming to be men with good prospects and bright futures in the land of the free and home of the brave... before they took ordinary pressure cookers and turned them into bombs that killed and maimed innocent people.  Then in Texas a fertilizer plant carelessly sited, tragically operated and negligibly inspected exploded killing and injuring many innocent people.  On the other side of the world in Bangladesh a poorly constructed eight-story garment factory collapsed killing more than 300 people and injuring hundreds of others.

You know how it is sometimes when you think you’d like to talk with someone about something, but it’s impossible... for all kinds of reasons, the most absolute of them being that the person you’d like to sit with at a coffee shop for a long chat is, well, dead... and has been for more than half a century.  I realize this journal piece is beginning to ramble, so I’ll get right to the point.  I’d like to chat with George Bernard Shaw because I think he was on to something important that I should very much like to know about being human.

I know... I know.  It’s ridiculous... but did you know that George Bernard Shaw, besides being an Irish playwright and poet and critic was an enthusiastic photographer.  He didn’t do photography for a living but for fun.  He got his first camera sometime in the 1880s. I’d like to talk with him about taking pictures... about what he was trying to see in the world and how he went about looking at it.  I’d like to tell him about digital photography... about my cell phone... and... and... and...

But the main reason I’d like to have the conversation with Mr. Shaw is that I’d like to ask him what he thinks goes wrong with people, people who seem quite ordinary, people who do things like make bombs that kill and hurt even children... and about people so eager for profit in their businesses that they are willing to put hundreds of people at risk of being hurt or killed or just being abjectly poor and miserable for a whole lifetime trying to make a living. Did I mention that George Bernard Shaw was fascinated by the stories he heard about Native Americans?  He once told about a Native American elder who described his own inner struggles in this manner: “Inside of me there are two dogs.  One of the dogs is mean and evil.  The other dog is good.  The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.  When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.”