The first two picture in today's post were taken today on our back porch.  Both orchids are in their third year of blooming for us.  The opening bud is one of a dozen in a second blooming this year. The others are blooming now in the House of Botany in Balboa Park.

I was determined to find reasons today to be hopeful.  Yesterday I made a rough draft of a poem I’d been fooling with for several days, with scraps of notes I’d kept in my “perhaps” folder for several years. I posted it unfinished, but that exercise along with reporting on global outrages, the ISIS beheading of journalist James Foley and the Ferguson riots among them, left me wondering if William Faulkner would still “decline to accept the end of man.” He said, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” 

So I’m determined to be more positive in my own outlook today.  THE WAY I SEE IT, Faulkner was right.  In spite of The Republican National Committee’s perpetual rejection of the United Nations as unworkable and unworthy of American support, I reread with hope the affirmation in the U.N. preamble that the world can and will be made better.

PREAMBLE

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and

to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and

to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and

to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, 

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.