The USA : DEATH IN DALLAS.

My friends abroad are often askance at some of the 'beyond bizarre' events that happen in America.
How, they ask, can these things take place?
 After the "wild west" shoot out that occurred in Dallas last night, where eleven police officers were shot, they will be asking the question again.
Other nations in the civilized world experience strife and civil disorder: name a country and you will be able to point to trouble in it's history. However, there is one factor above all others that contributes to the present mayhem. It is this. The whole nation is awash with guns. From North to South, East to West, America is an armed camp with fire arms of every description.
Half a billion privately owned weapons for a population of 350 million. Do the math
In other nations pikes and staves may be used in a civil disturbance. 
Not in America where, as we saw last night in Dallas, snipers shot from darkened roof tops to kill police officers in light summer uniforms.
Speaking this morning from Europe, President Obama called for calm and the urgent need to bring "our country together".
Words easily spoken, but the legislation that has been passed in the last twenty years has had the opposite effect. Legislation that has widened the fractures in society. Laws that have eliminated the Christian faith from the classroom, from the court room and from the workplace. Laws to end life in the mother's womb. Laws that enable assisted suicide. Laws that aggressively promote the abhorrent lifestyle of homo-sexuality, and now the President calls for PRAYERS for national unity.
From out of the wafting clouds of gun smoke I seem to hear voice  saying "Physician heal THYSELF"
Ian

UNCLE OLIVER

My Uncle Oliver was born in England in the closing years of the nineteenth century. That meant he was eligible for call-up in 1915 for the Great War. By the tender age of seventeen he was in France and, a hundred years ago today, he went"over the top" at the Battle of the Somme River.
He survived the battle; six hundred thousand of his country men did not. They never returned from the human meat grinder which goes under the brief title of "WAR".
Such was the carnage of that conflict that my three aunts, sisters of Oliver, never married. There were few men of their age left in the area of Durham County where they lived.
A few years earlier these missing men had enrolled for the battle. Whole soccer teams, cricket clubs, 'old boys' associations were recruited. One went: they all went. One died: they all died.
A hundred years ago this week began the five month battle of the Somme River.
Grim, gallant memorials to that horror story stand in granite, in towns and villages across England and France (and in my home city of Barrie in Canada).
But MY memorial is of my Uncle Oliver, sixty years after the battle, slowly smoking his cigarette as he stared at the distant moors, as silent at the blue smoke that spiralled in his darkened living room.
Rest in Peace Uncle Oliver.

Your proud nephew, Ian.