Overwhelmed by evil

Really, I am.  It just keeps coming, too fast, too often.

In Turkey the nationalist government opened the Hagia Sophia as a mosque.  It had been a World Heritage site, important to both Muslims and Orthodox Christians.  It was also the main tourist destination in Turkey.  Now it is a mosque for one religion.  Erdogan is pandering to his right-wing religious base.  (That has a familiar ring.)  Why any tourist would go to Turkey now I do not understand.

In Hungary the government moved to take full control of the most widely-read news site.  The site had often been critical of the government.  Can we now quit calling Hungary a democracy?  It hasn’t been one for years.

In the U.S. the Trump administration:

•  ended an Obama program combating housing discrimination;

•  announced that it was allowing homeless shelters to exclude transgender people people from facilities that correspond with their gender identity, in violation of a recent Supreme Court ruling; and 

•  decided to sell large armed drones internationally, bypassing part of an international weapons agreement that the U.S. helped to implement.

But wait.

In Grenoble in France, six people caught a three-year-old child who was dropped by his 10-year-old brother from a burning building.  The 10-year-old then jumped into the waiting group.  Two of the men broke their arms catching the children.  The children were not hurt.

and...

In Iran victims of Covid 19 are buried in a separate cemetery.  Ok, that’s dumb, but one of the dead was an Orthodox Christian.  People aren’t allowed into the burial area, but one of the grave diggers made the sign of the cross as the body was lowered into the grave.  I don’t know if he did it correctly, but he did it.