I am amazed, keep being amazed, at the great variety of many

of the living things, including people, on our planet.  

In San Diego we are surrounded by orchids...

Different  kinds...

Whooooooh!  ISIS!  What’s the world coming to???  The news today has been about the bombings in Brussels.  Of course, it’s a sad day.  Of course, ISIS and other terrorist organizations anywhere in the world must be stopped from their drive into madness.  The way to begin is not to build verbal or actual walls to keep people from coming across oceans or rivers.  A fellow who wants to be the president of the United States thinks an answer to the terrorist problem in the world is more torture… waterboarding and even other methods of torture. The approach is old fashioned.  All the way back to the beginning of organized government in North America, a theme has been to take advantage of some group of people.  Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, makes clear that efforts to keep undesirables out of the land where a new nation was forming started with attempts by the earliest European explorers and conquerers to drive out the people who were already living on the continent. My great grandmother, a Cherokee lady, was one of those driven off farm land in the Eastern region of the early nation to settle in “Indian Territory” that later became the state of Oklahoma.  Subsequent generations from those early Americans have generally been willing to accept citizenship in the United States… if they do it quietly and with a generous nod especially to their forebears who were European if they have those on their family tree.  Most of us who have a thin stream of Native American blood flowing in us don’t know anything else to do except accept quietly what was done to our ancestors... but we can stand against bigots.

What some of us don’t like is the rhetoric of Americans who claim they are defending the nation by standing against Muslims or any other ethnic or religious groups.  What is clear is that there are no easy answers.  Election of a bigot or a religious extremist of any religion with hope of leading the country out of the confusion would be a futile, foolish exercise… no solution to the problem of terrorism in the world.