The golden leaves drift from the ginkgo tree in the median of the street outside the window.

The sky is a shade lighter than its normal cornflower blue, streaked with wisps of clouds in the south shading to blankets in the north, and reminding me of home skies in Florida.

Meteorologists forecast rain later today. We’ve had rain off and on for several days now. God knows we need it, badly.

Willie Nelson sings “Blue Skies” on the Starbucks’ radio.

I am worried so much these days. I see not only the horrible things said  by candidates for President (not only Donald Trump, although he yells the loudest and espouses the most extreme views, although not by much), but that far too many people support them. I have often wondered what it must have been like to be a German citizen in the era before Hitler was elected. In my nightmares I see this happening. Figuring out my response is a big task.

I worry that events have been put in  motion that will bring us to an era of violence, based on nationality and religion, that will drag us back to Jim Crow. As I said before, I fear the Kristallnacht.* Already mosques have been torched, the Council on American-Islamic Relations  offices in Santa Clara and across the country in Washington, DC, received threatening letters containing suspicious white powder, a Queens deli owner was  beaten by a racist who yelled “I kill Muslims,”Muslims have been shot at, Muslims in a California park have been assaulted with hot coffee by a California state corrections officer.  And the list lengthens every day.

Every act of violence, every word spoken in hatred or mistrust, every attempt to incite bigotry, becomes recruiting fodder for ISIS. The terrorists claim that they are engaged in a war of civilizations, the West against Islam, and Donald Trump agrees with them. So why wouldn’t a young man or woman join an organization that values them when immersed in a society that despises them?

But…

The world will survive. Germany was cleansed, not completely, but enough: it took a war, and a lot of pain, but today Germany is a more welcoming country than we are. In any case, the planet will survive. I would hope America would too, but if she does not, or does not remain free for all, then there are other countries who can take up the slack.

The countries of the world have agreed to a climate change treaty, against all odds. Maybe we can fix the horrible mess we are heading into before it becomes completely irreversible.

And, in any case, the sun shines on the golden leaves, and the skies both show blue and portend dearly needed rain.

Life goes on.

*For those not familiar with Facebook, when you click on a link the algorithm suggests related links that you  might find of interest. When I clicked on a link yesterday about anti-Muslim violence, one of the suggested links was the Wikipedia article on the Kristallnacht.