Serendiity? I’ve had to clean out my parent’s garage and found some letters and documents of mine from when I worked in the Philippines in the late 60′s and early 70′s on a large cattle ranch. A minor part of my job was teaching the ranch hands to shoot, not each other, but hopefully some of the Moros who were active in the area. Their weapons were a variety of US WWII surplus plus one almost impossible to maintain Type 96 LMG. When working it made a wonderful noise that entertained the ranch hands better than a soap opera.

But what I thought was a struggle between Catholics and Muslims, according to the local priest and Marcos officials, but in reality a struggle against organized gangs of theives and extortionists. While the Moros had been fighting the Christians, the Spanish, the Americans and now their fellow Filipinos so long that what passed for a defense of their religion was simply the tactical lessons learned from running criminal enterprises for centuries. Taking only one calf in a raid, even when hungry, was not because of a desire to win the hearts and minds of the Christians, but the realization that if they left the cow and the steer there would be something to steal the next year.

Plus I have to thank Benj for mentioning one of the few radicals I still admire from the civil rights era, Bob Moses. He started his Math Project for children and teens around the same time the FBI was watching him because he was a threat to the nation’s safety.