Some years ago, my wife and I attended a peace conference over a Fourth of July weekend at the Seabeck Conference Center out on Hood Canal. Beautiful pastoral setting, a perfect place for such an event. Barbara and I arrived in the morning of the first day of the conference, and at lunch, we shared a table with a young woman who had a daughter, about three years old, I would guess, who had Down's Syndrome. Her condition was apparent from her facial features, and she couldn't talk, but it soon became evident that she was a sweet, happy child.

We saw the child and her mother many times over that weekend, and as I went from meeting to meeting in my wheelchair, every time the child saw me, she would come running down the path or across the lawn, crawl up in my lap, and give me a big hug while her mother stood by. She and I would smile at each other while the little girl clung to me and I hugged her back.

Whatever life had in store for this little girl, I felt that she had one very important thing going for her. She was a little bundle of love. Pure, unconditional love. It's so rare that you actually experience something like that. I've never forgotten her, and I never will.

When I read that story, I thought of the little girl, and I'm having a hard time dealing with the way it made me feel. I'm having a hard time reconciling the feeling of simple, open love I received from her with the fury that overwhelmed me at the thought that there are people in the world who would take someone like this innocent little girl and use her as a weapon.

Hell can't be hot enough!

Don Firth