1968

That was the last time our country seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In that long-ago election year, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April and shortly after that in June, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. There were riots all over America because of King’s assassination and then, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a few months later, a police riot in Grant Park rocked the country as cops clubbed and gassed demonstrators.

Yes, it seems America is coming apart again because of a simple reason. America is always coming apart. It’s designed that way. It’s even written in the Declaration of Independence: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...”

Yes, that means us. We can do it peacefully, intelligently and diplomatically, or we can burn our land to a cinder. We can kill the very people sworn to protect us and our protectors can turn against us and we can swirl into a tornado of hate and murder. We have another choice. We can step back and ignore the inflammatory hate-mongering.

Between overcrowding, wars, mass murders, new diseases, extreme weather, extreme religious beliefs and food shortages, I’m convinced that nature is doing its best to try to wipe out our species. Let’s not help it.