Alexander Stuart

   Image courtesy of The Mudflats It is hard, as someone who believes absolutely in peace and beauty, to comprehend the shootings in Arizona yesterday, though clearly they were the actions of a seriously disturbed individual or individuals. But it is also impossible to divorce what happened from the ugly rhetoric that passes for political discourse and commentary in this country - a country I love in my soul, not because it is "better" (or worse) than any other nation, but because it is naturally beautiful, its history, though conflicted, is fascinating, and its people, on a personal level, are mostly very warm and welcoming. I became a citizen for many of those reasons, and because my wife and young children are American, and events such as yesterday's - or my childhood memories of the political assassinations of John F and Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King in the 1960s - do not diminish the hope that America offers. Ideally they rekindle the desire for pea