tschram

One November evening in 1978, Dan White, a supervisor for San Francisco, climbed through a basement window at City Hall and murdered Mayor George Moscone and peer Supervisor Harvey Milk by gunshot. White, a former fireman, and a police officer, was later found guilty by a jury of his peers for voluntary manslaughter; rather than premeditated first-degree murder, which would have allowed the death penalty. White served only five of a seven-year prison term due to an early release for good behavior (Solnick). The announcement of White receiving the lightest possible sentence set the city in an uproar and sparked several nights of riots, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damages and injuring over 140 law enforcement officers and civilians (Twinkie).

It isn’t as if we no longer stop for a bag of ice at the convenience store. We still do. It is just less frequently that we stop to get enough to keep our cooler cold for a long afternoon at a picnic, with enough extra to keep the huge container of ice tea cold too. Air conditioning seems to have practically eliminated the wonderful picnics I remember from my youth.

It took almost two hours to get out of Pratt County last Saturday. On a fat tire bicycle and into a stiff south wind, that is.

Have any of you readers seen the quote on the capstone of the Washington Monument? If you have not, it says Laus Deo in Latin. In English this is translated, Praise be to God! This was so thoughtful of the planners to use this quote. For as the sun rises in the very east of our United States and orbits to the west, we have this knowledge proclaiming that God’s glory and protection is moving across our great land from east to west at the rising of our God’s sun every day. What a proclamation of God’s glory over America. The aluminum capstone was placed on top of the monument on the breezy December day in 1884. It made the monument the tallest building in the world at that time.