I turned on the local news recently and was confronted by a very disturbing picture.

It was a picture of a father and daughter, arm-in-arm and dead, drowned face-down in the water at the edge of a river.

What came to my mind was a memory from the Vietnam War: An Associated Press photo near Trang Bang of a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl running in the road, naked and crying, with her skin hanging off from napalm we dropped on her village.

This one picture did more to galvanize the country than all the demonstrations and protests put together.

Tom Powers

Kailua-Kona

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