Toys and the Japanese

This is the last of Dad's November posts, it's taken four months for me to get him out of November. Hopefully I can do better from now on. He writes about how they made toys for the Japanese American kids who were in the Japanese Relocation Camps. Now we have Mexican American kids in relocation camps waiting to be deported. And we are making paper cranes for the Japanese as they recover from an earthquake. At meeting we were discussing the violence of our society today and as I read Dad's letter I think that it has been a very violent country for a long time and a long side of the violence are people working to make a better nonviolent world. I actually believe there are more of us working and acting nonviolently than violently. More who are not selfish than those who are very greedy. I remember how depressed my parents got in the 1960's at the state of the world but they kept on working to make it a better place and kept with the values they had. Tim went to a New Food Not Bombs event and met people working for change whom we did not know. young people, that's the way of nonviolence. I remember my grandmother telling me that they had protested WWII in Chicago during the war. My mother did not remember it, but Grandma did. I know at times we feel devastated by the way our nation has been going but I can not imagine the way people felt at the end of WWII when the bomb was dropped on Japan. How horrifying. I have been reading about compassion and I think that for the most part that it is the compassion we can give to people each day of our lives that makes a difference.