America is a wonderful country, virtually all the people I have met are great -- generous, free-spirited -- the landscape is inspiring, the creative writers and artists and singers and you name it are second to none in the world. I loved living there: noisy, dramatic, beautiful, dark, light. That its politics should now be degenerating so dramatically under the influence of greed, fear, and stupidity is first a local, and now more and more a global, tragedy. It makes one sick at heart. One can only hope that the spirit of liberty will rise again from its self-inflicted tyrannies -- it has before under similar grim circumstances, but it is a long haul up an ever-steeper hill.

yours,

Peter T.