It is ironic that I was visiting some of the finest people on the planet when I heard about the obscene words uttered about countries less fortunate than ours. I was, in fact, with leaders of our state’s cities. They serve those from a great diversity of areas. All are doing monumental jobs of facing increasingly complex problems, jobs aggravated by members of society who no longer view racial harmony and love of humankind as a way to address those problems.

As with our cities, the founders of the countries of our planet were not all motivated by a desire to seek a new life and a willingness to oust native cultures that stood in their way. Some are peopled now by descendants of humans transported to their countries in chains, their bodies shackled together head to foot in spaces barely 18 inches high. Those lucky enough to survive the sea journey faced a life of misery and spirit-killing slave labor.

We express wonder that some of their descendants don’t see hard work and enthusiasm as keys to happiness.

The volunteer immigrants sought land rich in resources and relatively free from Nature’s resistance. The flourished as much from natural conditions as they did from personal initiative.

We acknowledge their hard work.

At the same time, we should always bear in mind that “the rain falls on the just and the unjust.”

As with our sister countries, the cities of our state have faced a great variety of historical and natural forces. Some cities, once located in pockets of poverty, despair, and backwardness, have found the changes of times generous and bountiful. They flourish, not so much from the actions of former residents, but from the almost accidental turns of fortune.

Other cites watched as the socio-economic dynamics of the world rolled over them like a hurricane of destruction and ill-will. Again, because of nothing their former populations did or did not do, they struggle like “boats against the current,” most often being “borne back into the past.”

I thought about this all the way as I was driving home yesterday.

I thought about times I have been in the luckier parts of our state and have heard otherwise good and decent people describe, to my face, the area of our state from which I come. They use the same terms that the president, of this great and fortunate country of ours, uses to describe those countries occupied by the less-blessed of our brothers and sisters.

I thought of the summer nights I have spent sweating in the Arkansas Delta, meeting in a rural church, windows open and mosquitoes so thick we could scarcely see one another. I remembered how, many times, I was the only white face in a room full of folks in desperate need of potable drinking water for their families, or some other basic need of life.

I thought of cities in our state that once provided goods and services for a population thriving on an agricultural or manufacturing economy, but are now deserted wastelands since those employers mechanized or moved to enjoy near-slave labor in those countries we now call “shit holes.”

I thought of a friend from El Salvador, who fled a country of devastated by natural disasters as well as from gang warfare that results, in part, from the desires of people in our country to purchase illegal drugs. He performs a job once done by three people and is a model of what our country needs to face the future. He has never written a piece, or spoken to a crowd, urging Americans to hate or distrust one another. This, in my book, makes him a better citizen than Franklin Graham, the commentators on Fox “news,” or politicians who use hate and distrust as election vehicles.

The Galilean urged us to love one another and respect other cultures, even the Samaritans of his day. We could use people who would live by his counsel to run our country.

I thought about the young child on the porch of a shack in our state’s forgotten rural areas, a child siting cold and hungry waiting for his mother to finish “earning” enough for a hit of crystal meth. Yeah. He’s living in a “shit hole.” But he’s our son. What will we say, or think, when he's old enough to get his first gun?

I remembered a piece I had read earlier in the day. An opinion writer said our president simply said aloud what many Americans were inwardly thinking. I hoped it wasn’t true, but I started to tear up. For a moment, I felt the Galilean join me.