I came home from the gym this afternoon to find that Margaret had brought into the house a carefully wrapped box with "Fragile" written on it.  She was waiting until I got home to open it.  It was from our friends John and Carol who live near the Canadian Border and also have an apartment  in our San Diego community.  We knew it was good, but had no idea what it was... until we got to a card inside that mentioned hummingbirds... so I knew.  I had written the BLOG piece already, and when you read that bit of writing below which begins with "Atatuck Airport," you will know why I needed the gift.  Wow!  That's the way life is.  Wow!

The AtatuckAirport attack has killed at least thirty people. We'll know more later this evening when the police have finished their job at the terminal.  Margaret and I watched the television report of the attack.  I had watched the Donald Trump TV speech in which he talked with assurance and authority about public safety, and I remembered having driven into the airport in Istanbul a couple of years ago, and I remember how secure the entrance to the airport seemed to be   I wondered as I watched the report of the airport attack and I remembered listening to the Candidate talk this morning, and I wondered how he gets information... about anything... and I wondered what he would say about what happened in Istanbul. He speaks like an expert, no matter what the subject.   Later I wondered how he knows what he says he knows..where he gets his information.  Obviously, he has a crew of people working for him whose job it is to get any information he wants.  When he usually describes a need for protection and a need for security, he is clearly talking about how protection and security measures make him and those who are closest to him more secure.  I admit that I finally got around to reading the June issue of The Atlantic magazine which has a picture of the candidate on the cover. .  I had put off reading the magazine for this month because if didn’t know how to be objective about the first article I would inevitably read, no matter where in the issue the piece was printed.  Of course, this morning I went right to the article, “The Mind of Donald Trump.”  The subtitle is “A psychologist’s guide to an extraordinary personality.”  I read the piece before the attack at Atatuck Airport report came on the TV and after I had heard the candidate speak. 

The analysis section of the CNN account of the Trump speech was interrupted by news from Istanbul about the suicide attack on Atatuck Airport.  As I write this BLOG post, the CNN report continues uninterrupted.  I travel out of America at least once each year, so I am interested in what is being said about any country; and then I remembered how big the world is, and how unlikely I am to be in a crowd that is targeted by people who want to make a statement to the world about how big and how bad they are.  Istanbul is a beautiful city   Of course, I will go back there without any more fear than I feel at the airport in San Diego.  The world is not a place where there are guarantees before we step into a place in it that we will be secure.  Life is insecure.  We are constantly reminded that something “bad” may happen to us at any time.  

So what kind of security or protection guarantee should get our attention.  Of course, there are places in the world where we should not go if we have choices.  Istanbul is not one of them even though it is the big city in the world where there are many Muslims.   If we are tourists we go to Istanbul because the Blue Mosque is there, and we want to see it and other places that were designed to meet the requirements of Islam.  My hope is that people who see the report I am watching will not think they are protected in some special way if they avoid places where they are not likely to find many Muslims.  My family, when my children were still very young, lived in Singapore, where Islam is one of the major religions.  Indonesia, the country with more Muslims than any other country in the world begins with islands very near Singapore.  Malaysia, where Muslims make up a majority of its people, a country that begins just across a causeway to north of the island nation of Singapore, Islam is the State Religion. Our neighbors in Singapore were Indian, Chinese, and Malaysians, and their religions represented all the major religions of the world.  They were good neighbor’s, and their religious affiliations were not a cause for any worry whatsoever.  Of course, I knew more about religious affiliations in America, and if there had been Christians in Singapore who live the way they live in America and routinely threaten people who are not like them, I would have been more worried about my neighbors than I was about my Singaporean neighbors in those days.  

Malaysians are not a threatening people.  Islam is a religion that is built on some of the same history  on which Christianity and Judaism are built.  Religious extremism, when it is a cause of fear in people, should be examined, of course.  to identify all Muslims as people to be feared makes no more sense than to identify Christians who exclude any others from civil security and protection   To know what a mistake it is to identify an ethnic group to isolate and discriminate against we have only to remember the history in our own country of that time when slavery was permitted and when we isolated native people from the “rest of us” by shipping them off to live on reservations.   To live as a discriminator, and isolator, a deliberate keeper out of the mainstream of any class or group of people, is monstrous. To campaign for office by declaring that any group of people is not welcome among us is unthinkable... is un-American.