Lizard Leaps

This coming week we celebrate our Independence Day, July 4th. It is a good thing that we celebrate on this day and remember all who serve and who have served this nation's interests. Especially we remember our men and women in service during this time. The troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, and other places where they stand in harm's way. Young men and women of today stand alongside those ghostly figures from Bunker and Breed's Hills, Gettysburg, the Meuse Argonne, Iwo Jima, the Chosin Reservoir, the Tet Offensive, and the streets of the Middle East conflicts of today. All of them, past and present, are equally to be honored for their service. Those who served whom I remember will stand large in my memory this week: the man next door who serviced machine guns in WWI, the dentist who lived on the other side of me who slipped ashore Pacific islands as a pre-invasion specialist in WWII, my wife's father who served a 75mm Recoilless Rifle and was wounded in Korea, my

This week a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. was killed by a white supremacist/neo nazi named James von Brunn. Von Brunn is 88 years old, and has hosted a website for years that I have checked and found filled with the all-too-typical irrational hatred found in such sites and publications. Twisting the Bible, ignoring the truth of history, and completely missing the love of God, these people and their organizations thrive on hate...hate for all who are different from themselves. They hate all ethnic groups, all other races, other nations...I believe they are like the character "Gollum" in J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings . Gollum is actually a man named Smeagle, who has been seduced by the power of one of the rings which exist in the mythical world of hobbits and faries. Gollum was once an ordinary person, but he came into contact with something which appealed to the basest and most horrible parts of his makeup. It promised power if he simply pu