Loving Frank discussion

Hi Alexis! This is Donna again!!

It saddens me to think that your father left your middle name off your passport and that your brother needs to be circumspect about his religion in the Marines - and in the South especially - which makes me even sadder since I grew up in the South, and it is a beautiful and wonderful place - but at same time, blighted by those who have chosen hate. It is also sad to think that people everywhere practice this same kind of monitoring to guard against a sort of miasma of hatred that is in the world.

While I was teaching, I taught two novels that dealt with hate, destruction, and war - A Separate Peace and The Lord of the Flies. In both, some kind of destructive force was buried in the young boys. But without God, religion, guidance, they succumbed to hate, murder, and destruction.

Here are two great quotes from A Separate Peace:

“Wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.”

All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves, these MAGINOT LINES against the enemy – they thought they saw across frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way - if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.

I love the last quote - which is the last sentence in the novel because in this life, many times those we perceive as enemies are not enemies at all.