Because my pictures today are of an orchid that is in full bloom for the second time this year with nine, count 'em, nine blossoms,  don't be fooled into thinking my BLOG writing today is peaceful and optimistic. I needed the orchid to raise my spirits and give me hope.

The second paragraph of the LA Times headline announcing the “Second ‘brutal murder’ seen in video”  got my attention today.  A discussion group to which I belong is considering this week the subject of innocence.  The paragraph is one long sentence:  A National Security Council spokesperson said, “The added deployment, designed to boost security at the U.S. Embassy compound (in Iraq) and its support facilities, was not directly linked to what a National Security Council spokeswoman said appeared to be “the brutal murder of an innocent American journalist.”

A following paragraph described the videoed beheading:  “I’m back, Obama,” a black-hooded militant says in English on the video, moments before he raises a knife toward Scotloff.  “Just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people.”

As I read about the second horrific beheading by ISIS in Syria, I remembered William Faulkner’s response to the murder of Emmitt Till, a Black fourteen-year-old from Chicago visiting in the famous writer’s home state of Mississippi.  Faulkner said, “If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or Black ones or purple or blue or green.  Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.  Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”

(We are appropriately horrified by the ISIS beheading of two American journalists.  It’s a big world and Syria may seem far away, but we are jarred to attention by reading what happened in America on August 28, 1955.  Go to http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till) 

The first paragraph should get any American’s attention.  “While visiting Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier.  His assailants—the white woman’s husband and her brother—made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes.  The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.”