WILL AND GRACE

It never ceases to amaze me how man can be so inhumane to his fellow man. Today we visited the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, a fairly pleasant name for what was basically a variation on the concentration camp theme of World War II. Some 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent were interned during that conflict, about 11,000 of them at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Incarcerated with nothing more than they could carry from homes and businesses they had built up over years, they lived in conditions at which most of us would more than balk, in a climate for which they were not prepared. Yet, by sheer will and the grace of God, they overcame these conditions and created a veritable city with hospital, farms, repair shops and schools. Even more amazing was the fact that many of them actually left to serve in the American Army.

Homo Sapiens goes pretty far back and still we don’t seem to have learned our lessons. On the walls of the canyon in Medicine Lodge State Park are pictographs and petrographs going back some 12,000 years. Driving through Ten Sleep Canyon, which was probably created over millions of years of erosion, I wondered exactly how many years it would take us to learn our lessons?

Tonight, we are on the most beautiful ranch outside of Buffalo, WY, having driven down long miles of gravel roads, winding through majestic scenery but far from anything,. We’re comfortable here and, outside the house, the American flag is waving.

 internet very intermittent here