A raid has killed members of a frontier family. Ethan Edwards, portrayed by an angry, unforgiving John Wayne, was secretly in love with one of the victims. The quick burial in a nearby hillside cemetery is conducted by a family friend, the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnston Clayton (Ward Bond).
Mourners sing, "Shall we gather at the river". The Reverend Captain Clayton, formerly of the Confederate army, stands beside three wooden crosses. He prays.
Ethan Edwards abruptly ends the service with an angry shout, "Put an amen to it. There's no more time for praying."
A posse prepares to ride out in search of the raiders.
These moments below from John Ford's 1956 classic western film, The Searchers, begin a long search driven by the dark emotions of hatred and revenge.
It is now Holy Week in America, a time when Christian America prays in its solemn assemblies.
"Putting an amen" on those prayers, our angry new president has ordered his navy to fire 60 Tomahawk missiles at an airbase in Syria.
It was from that base the U.S. claims Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a deadly chemical attack on a rebel-held town in northern Syria.
What prompted this first American attack on Assad's forces in the seven-year civil war? The official rationale: "Vital national security interests".
Main stream media responsed to the Tomahawks by praising President Trump for finally acting "presidential". Even New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a media champion for oppressed children worldwide, concluded the Tomahawk attack was the right thing to do:
President Trump's air strikes against Syria were of dubious legality. They were hypocritical. They were impulsive. They may have had political motivations. They create new risks for the United States.
But most of all, they were right.
I'm deeply suspicious of Trump's policies and competence, but this is a case where he is right and Barack Obama was wrong. Indeed, many of us believe that Obama's worst foreign policy mistake was his passivity in Syria.
Nicholas Kristof's newspaper, the Times, published a lead story on Friday, by Michael R. Gordon and Michael D. Shear, which described the American missile attack on Syria's Al Shayrat airfield.
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