Coral, or Scarlet King?  

   While visiting us last week, our adult daughter noticed a snake in the pool. 

   My sneaky method of capture is to hold a bucket under the visitor and let water and gravity do the rest. There was enough light to see rings of three colors: red, yellow and black. 

   This was either a venomous coral snake - "red on yellow, kill a fellow" - or a scarlet kingsnake - "red on black, friend of jack." Each grows to about 2 feet. 

   Without agreeing in the dark, which it was, we released the snake. 

Evil, or Virtuous? 

   Americans are having a difficult time agreeing who we are. Janie Cheaney in WORLD magazine loves her country, but states, "America's sins, common the world over wherever one group gains power over another, are treated as unique" by those without civic education. "Her virtues are taken for granted or waved away."

   "No nation before America," she writes, "ever dared state (our founding) truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them." 

   "Not all men or women were equal in 1776, but those words promised they would be. Power always corrupts, but the words called power to account," Cheaney says. "Our mistakes, some of them grievous, have tended to self-correct because of the words embedded in our national consciousness."  

   "Critical race theory teaches: History is about power, not virtue." While there is some truth to the history CRT cites, she states that "we can build our shared house," or we can "tear the house down, to be replaced with - what?" 

   Meanwhile, we've begun reading AMERICAN MARXISM, by Mark Levin. Without agreement, one side will win. If it is the Marxists in the Democratic Party and its supporters like foreigner George Soros, the U.S.A. will indeed be about power, as in Cuba and elsewhere. 

             Jimmy