88-cent Whopper Day (8/8)

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This Burger King in Baldwin Park participated in the 88-cent Whopper day today, Aug. 8 or 8/8. The line for the drive-thru was not the only thing that wrapped around the building. Inside, the line of diners looking for a lunch deal snaked from the front of the restaurant down the back dining area and nearly out the door.

I was sitting there, checking my phone, noticing how the Dow (stock market) was dropping by 500 points and thinking, is this a sign of the times?

The Burger King off San Bernardino Road in unincorporated Covina also had a line of cars out of the parking lot. The 88-cent promotion and the Wall Street drop on the same day? I don’t think BK planned it that way. But in today’s economic climate, everyone is looking for a deal.

The lessons of Eagle Mountain

ALMOST 19 years ago, a determined jojoba farmer from Indio let fly the following missive at the Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting:
“Shame on you!” Donna Charpied shouted after the board approved a landfill project called Eagle Mountain, billed as the answer to the San Gabriel Valley’s garbage crisis.

Charpied literally had the last word then. I know. I was there.
That morphed into a two-decades-old legal battle over the impact of the proposed Eagle Mountain Landfill on a national treasure, Joshua Tree National Park, just a few miles away. This spring, the United States Supreme Court, in so many words, also told the proponents “shame on you.”

Our nation’s highest court rejected an appeal brought by Kaiser Ventures, principals of the project. Instead, the justices upheld a U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision saying the landfill project’s environmental impact statement was flawed, did not consider alternatives and that the project would bring harm to the national park’s delicate ecosystem, including the endangered desert tortoise. It also threw out a key land exchange.

It appears the Supreme Court’s ruling was the final nail in the coffin. Unless Kaiser Ventures goes back and authorizes another environmental impact statement and makes changes that mitigate the environmental concerns, this project seems dead.
Why am I telling you this?

This hole in the ground 199 miles from Irwindale — a spent iron ore mill formerly used by Kaiser Steel to make raw materials for cars and skyscrapers — was supposed to be the resting spot for Los Angeles County’s household trash. I covered the hearings back then and witnessed the momentum building locally for a waste-by-rail project that began with the defeat of the giant garbage burners. I even flew in a small plane with Rep. David Dreier, R-San Dimas, and others to check out the place. I remember Dreier looking over the vast dug-out pits and saying this could really take all our trash for decades.
The San Gabriel Valley Association of Cities, with the help of the Southern California Association of Governments, approved a plan to train trash to the desert. Many investors jumped on board. The idea was a good one. But, as it turns out, they had the wrong spot.

“The courts have seen the value in protecting Joshua Tree National Park,” said Seth Shteir, California desert field representative for the National Parks Conservation Association, one of the environmental groups that took up the local farmers’ cause and won. “You don’t put a sewer next to the Sistine Chapel.”

The county Sanitation Districts, which is implementing the waste-by-rail plan, smartly moved its chess pieces to a landfill in Imperial County, the Mesquite Regional Landfill. This one has been permitted and is ready to accept trash from L.A. County via train, once the Puente Hills Landfill near Hacienda Heights closes on Oct. 31, 2013.

As I moved into editing positions, we had a writer, Laurence Darmiento, who covered the topic. He would say that any giant landfill next to the beautiful desert park would never pass environmental muster. And he was right.

What are the lessons of Eagle Mountain?
First, don’t underestimate the public’s strong desire for preservation of our fragile lands and species. It’s something that’s ingrained in our culture, part of our love of open spaces.

But aside from the coffee mug I have on my desk printed with the words “Eagle Mountain Landfill and Recycling Center,” what did we get from this effort?
Eagle Mountain was a symbol that led to the closure of the Azusa Landfill, Spadra Landfill and the BKK Landfill in West Covina. It was seen as an alternative to close-in landfills near millions of residents.

Though now you can replace the words “Eagle Mountain” with “Mesquite Landfill,” Eagle Mountain represented the Valley cities’ drive to remove the “Valley of the Dumps” sign formerly taped to our backs and begin a new era in trash management. That era began with aggressive recycling and will continue in November 2013 when trains leave filled with Valley trash for the Mesquite Landfill.

And that coffee cup?
“That could very well be a collector’s item,” said Shteir.

Should California split in two?

Check it out. In case you missed our editorial today, it is about that whacky idea of splitting the state into two states and creating a state called “South California. Here it is:

Our View: One California, for ever and ever

Sometimes it takes a really bad idea advocating radical change to make you appreciate the status quo, lousy though it may be.
Such an idea is the proposal, which appears to be seriously made, by Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone for 13 counties to secede and form a new state of South California.

No, not Southern California, the informal nomenclature for the seven counties south of the Tehachapis, somehow not including Santa Barbara, on the grounds that it’s too rich or too balmy, or something.

There is nothing to do with geography in the proposal, in fact. Mono, Mariposa and Madera counties are in the crazy mix, places that could even be called “northern” rather than “central.” Whereas Los Angeles County, the heart of the true Southern California, is not. The crackpot suggestion is more along the lines of “Inland California plus San Diego and Orange just not including those wacky pot-farming regions way up in the north.”

But, again, Stone is an elected official, not a wild-eyed gadfly at public comment. He says he will present the notion to his colleagues at their Tuesday meeting. He’s frustrated about welfare and taxes and border security and whatnot. “He is so disenfranchised with the state’s inabilities,” Stone’s chief of staff told one media outlet, in a marvelous mangling of the mother tongue we speak in that Other California.

The L.A. region does indeed include a lot of poor people – as if Riverside and San Bernardino

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didn’t – but it’s also the economic engine that drives the state. And yet Stone wants to leave us unturned, apparently because of his dislike of coastal liberals. Or something.
In fact, an editorialist in Kern County, which would be included in the scheme to add a 51st star to the flag, has written that a better name for the proposed state would be “West Mississippi” – though we’re not sure what the folks in La Jolla and Balboa would think of that.

We acknowledge that this proposal comes out of a frustration we very much share with politics as usual in the tarnished Golden State. We’re on board with his suggestion for a return to a part-time Legislature, seeing that the full-timers create more problems than they solve. But the creation of two Californias is not a new idea – it is older, in fact, than the current state of California itself. And it remains as seriously bad an idea as it was back in the 19th century, when pro-slavery advocates wanted the “cow counties” here in the south to enter the Union as an offshoot of old Dixie.

There are small ways it’s bad: Americans like round numbers, and so there will likely never be a 51st state – sorry, Puerto Rico. And Doheny would likely start charging a longboard tax on visiting L.A. surfers, forcing Malibu to retaliate and Rincon to raise the ante.

And there are very big ways: The University of California, the California State Universities and our community colleges are the hope for our economic future, together. Our great geographic and ethnic diversities are a strength, not a weakness. Our economy, the eighth-largest in the world, needs Californians to work together to strengthen it, not waste energy pulling it apart.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Bay Area snobs would occasionally suggest splitting California in two, on account of simply not cottoning to the rubes down here. It was grist for the mill for a funny discussion – but was a very silly idea. This is just as flaky. California is one.

The other San Gabriel Valley river

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A bicycle rider approaches the covered portion of the Rio Hondo River Bikeway

AT the risk of offending some of my friends and co-workers who are bicycle enthusiasts: What’s with the 32-mile bike jaunts, the male riders wearing tight, lycra shorts and vacuum-sealed rubberized tops sporting eye-taxing colors that look like they were taken from an episode of “Sesame Street” from the ’70s?

And what’s with the $5,000 bicycles (and that’s just the frames) that are such fine-tuned machines it takes someone more schooled than a BMW mechanic to work on them?
These haute bicycles and their Lance Armstrong-esque riders dominate the San Gabriel River Bikeway on weekends at Puddingstone Lake, the rim of Santa Fe Dam, and the Rose Bowl loop like USC athletes do the Coliseum or professional drivers the brickyard.

It’s all so intimidating. They might cause a weekend bicycler like myself, sporting tan cargo shorts and Sketchers, riding atop his “comfort bike” with fat tires, to stay on the living room couch instead.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. I think average bicycler riders outnumber the elitists. Yeah, we can overcome … at 10 mph! It’s time we teach to the B and C students, instead of those already at the top of the bell curve. We are the troubled middle, in more ways than one. We have no choice but to hop on our beach cruisers or our rusty 10-speeds and hog the road.
It’s time for the gut-spilling, middle-aged weekend pedalers to take their rightful place on the public bike paths of the San Gabriel Valley.
It’s our destiny. It’s do — or die from heart disease. So, are you with me? Yes? Great. Here’s my plan:
We cede the larger and more popular San Gabriel River Bikeway to the guys in the sculpted aerodynamic helmets atop composite bicycle frames. And we dedicate the other bikeway along the east side of the region’s other river, the Rio Hondo River Bikeway, to us fatties.
Never heard of the other river? It starts at a spent rock quarry turned park, Peck Road Water Conservation Park at the Arcadia-El Monte-Monrovia-Irwindale-Temple City border. Our group, Friends of Peck Park, wants to hold bike rides starting here, where this river bike path originates, and winds through El Monte’s newest parks — Lashbrook Park and Rio Vista Park — as well as oldy-but-goody Pioneer and Fletcher parks. We can enjoy a real river view at Bosque del Rio Hondo Park and loop using the Lario Trail, through Whittier Narrows and going north on the San Gabriel River bike trail. Then, if and when the county finishes the connection, traverse via bike path back to Peck Park.
If this is too long (it’s at least 15 miles), we’ll need to create more short loops in the area called The Emerald Necklace. Amigos de los Rios President Claire Robinson calls these “Ts and Os.” No long, grueling bike marathons for us. Just a short “T” or “0” trip, thank you very much.

Think of what having our own bike loops will do for weight loss, not to mention the fight against obesity, adult-onset diabetes and empty-nester boredom.

My wife Karen and I did some exploring a couple weekends ago and found the Rio Hondo River Bikeway. Its smooth surface features a covered S-curve structure designed to give you shelter from the sun, as well as those radio-controlled airplanes that buzz overhead.

When you exit the covered structure, you ride a mile or so along a path edged by golden sunflowers, mustard and buckwheat. The Rio Hondo River, just to the west of the path, lies hidden. It appears suddenly like a monster from a thriller movie, providing a glimpse.
Later, near El Monte, you can see where the river becomes a concrete channel, and you cry. One of the most environmentally ignorant projects ever built in the SGV — the concretization of the Rio Hondo.

It was good while it lasted, you say. Then you spot Lashbrook Park on the right (thank you, Amigos de los Rios) and eye a bench half covered in shade from an elm tree. The spot is perfect for eating your peanut butter and honey sandwich that you wash down with a chug of water.

Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Are you ready to ride?

Steve Scauzillo is opinion pages editor and co-founder of Friends of Peck Park. Next meeting is Saturday, Aug. 6..

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A river runs through it

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Have you heard about the newest wilderness park being built in the San Gabriel Valley:

On June 18, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., the Watershed Conservation Authority will unveil the Proposed Park Plan for a new, 75-acre River Wilderness Park at the entrance to majestic San Gabriel Canyon where the city of Azusa meets the Angeles National Forest.

This may be the first wilderness park that once was a biker bar. The Canyon Inn was razed in 2005, not long after the Bruce Willis movie “Hostage” was shot there. The final scenes, which I’m told included a bloody shoot-out, were filmed at the old biker bar. You may remember the brown sign with the white lettering.

Also, the former El Encanto restaurant, just off Old San Gabriel Canyon Road, is part of the park. The building was remodeled to house the offices of the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy. The new park will include an extension of the San Gabriel River Bike Trail, along with new trails, picnic areas, group camping and even a cafe and store for tired and hungry bicycle riders, hikers and sightseers.

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I went up Azusa Avenue-San Gabriel Canyon Road to check it out on Thursday and met up with Jane Beesley, acting executive officer for the Watershed Conservation Authority, which is designing the park.

The selling point of this park is its location at the entrance to the Angeles National Forest and at a S-curve in the churning San Gabriel River.

“That sycamore tree is actually in the forest property,” Beesley pointed out, illustrating how the park is literally at the juncture of civilization and wilderness.

While that presents some planning and design challenges, such as encouraging a river view but not river swimming, it’s the perfect place for a wilderness park. Plus, there is no other river park on the San Gabriel until you drive down to South El Monte and reach Whittier Narrows. Not even the duck farm park will have access to the river itself.

So often, most people’s “view” of the San Gabriel River is out of their car windshield. Beesley said she’s working to design a park where “most people can contemplate the river … through benches to sit on, paths to walk on, through picnicking and even at a cafe where you can get a meal.”

Plans that have come out of the heads of landscape designers as well as members of the public who’ve attended meetings, include extending the bike trail through the park and under Highway 39 at the bridge. To slow traffic down, designers envision a roundabout on 39. A new trail would follow the western bank of the river, including a lookout from where you can see the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles.

The WCA and city of Azusa are working to preserve the Taylor House, an old home that was part of property north of El Encanto, and use it for composting classes or perhaps a farmer’s market.

To complete the park, along with road improvements, an extended bicycle trail and hiking trails, will cost between $10 million and $12 million — money the WCA does not have. It hopes the attractive design will put it in the running for state, federal and private grants.

Until then, the park is open. Beesley said some folks are walking the dirt road from the parking lot down to the river and the base of Morris Dam. It is a nice walk and one that is easy to accomplish.

To get to the park, take San Gabriel Canyon Road toward the mountains. Just beyond Mountain Cove, turn right onto Old San Gabriel Canyon Road and into the parking lot of “El Encanto.” Best of all, since the park is outside the forest limit, you don’t need an Adventure Pass. In fact, the parking is free.

No Ferraris in the parking lots

A Facebook friend posted he was attending a conference at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., when someone immediately asked:
“Are there Ferraris in the parking lot?”

“No. I checked. That was the first thing I thought,” he answered.

Maybe only Priuses or Hybrid Lexuses, I thought to myself. These gazillionaires keep their Ferraris at home.

The question in a funny way attempts to take the temperature of our economy. It implies what a lot of people are thinking: That big companies in odd segments of the economy are cash-rich, while small businesses or manufacturing concerns can’t get a loan to expand. It’s a picture of a U.S. economy out-of-whack. The economy is like a knotted up garden hose with expansion points in the wrong places.

For example, take the Silicon Valley. There’s so much dough in that Northern California tech mecca that the digital giants can afford to give their employees Ferraris.
On May 10, Microsoft acquired an Internet phone service called Skype for $8.5 billion. Skype is free and used by college kids or folks living abroad to video chat by computer with friends and family living in the states. It doesn’t make any money. Incredibly, the Internet start-up bought by EBay Inc. in 2005 for $3.1 billion was sold because — you guessed it — it never made a profit. I even read in a national magazine that Meg Whitman, remember her?, defended the purchase she oversaw while at EBay. When asked if Skype was worth $8.5 billion today, she said yes, probably.

Now, there’s so much stored up capital in these select Silicon Valley giants that they’re buying up other companies just for the engineers. As nytimes.com reported last week, Facebook bought several small companies — “with names like Parakey, Hot Potato, and Octazen” only to kill their products and hire their engineers. The demand for information engineers is so high, Facebook is willing to pay up to a $1 million per employee.

All this while basic manufacturing companies in the Southland go out of business and unemployment in the county is still way too high at 12.1 percent.

Seems like only the whiz kids with a 4.0 from Stanford gets hired these days. The economy is feeding digital companies like Facebook and Microsoft, while it starves bread-and-butter ones making airplane parts, clothing, or building new homes. This is a problem. One I don’t know how to fix. But one that I don’t see our leaders working on.
Capital is hard to come by if you are a small business. Yet, if you’re Microsoft, you have $8.5 billion laying around to buy up unprofitable companies on a whim.

We need more investment in manufacturing and construction. Or we’re doomed to see the economy continue in a stop-and-go, sputter-and-explode, garden hose trajectory. That starts with capital or dough to grow.

Many criticized the Obama administration for loaning money to American car companies. Yet, that program has been a success. On Tuesday, Chrysler paid back the $7.6 billion it owed to the U.S. and Canada.

When our editorial board met with a delegation from China, they emphasized they are loaded with yuan but regulations prevent them from fully investing it in America. Why not let them open a Chinese auto manufacturing plant in Pomona that will put Americans back to work? “We’d like your government to encourage more Chinese companies to come here and open up more factories,” one government rep told us. We should be jumping at the chance.

The mayor of Toledo, Ohio is doing just that. He just signed a deal to sell a city-owned (redevelopment) dining and entertainment complex to two Chinese investors, Yuan Xiaohona and Wu Kin Hung, who hope to revitalize the recession-plagued site.

I’d rather see more investment in local shopping centers and job-producing plants than more money get siphoned out into cyberspace. That kind of revitalization — the Toledo kind — is what our Valley, our country needs. It may not put Ferraris in the parking lots, but we’ll settle for some new Chryslers.

Wildflowers at Santa Fe Dam

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THEY tower over the short San Gabriel River sage-scrub landscape like welcoming giants, almost beckoning people to come in and take a look.
Yucca whipplei. Foothill Yucca. The Lord’s Candle. Their columnar stalks shoot up on average 6 feet but can reach as high as 17 feet. Their creamy yellow flowers resembled candlelight to the eye of the Tongva, our region’s native habitants.

“They really light up the landscape,” said botanist Ann Croissant, who took me on a tour through the back trails of the Santa Fe Dam alluvial fan sage scrub.

It occurred to me last week to check out the yuccas while I was driving east on the 210 Freeway through Irwindale and saw the yucca stalk pop into view. I smile when I see the California poppies along the transition road from the 10 to the 57 freeways. I’ve gone chasing after wildflowers during my 25 years working for the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers. I spotted rare plants in the crevices of Clamshell Canyon and was the first to report the discovery of the endangered thread-leafed brodiaea up the Colby Trail in Glendora in the late 1980s. But I suspect for many, these “freeway flowers” are the only wildflowers they’ll see. And that’s a shame, since all it takes is parking the car and getting out into nature.

So today, I want to introduce you to the Santa Fe Dam backcountry, where one of the greatest arrays of wildflowers are on display.

“This is the purist area of the alluvial fan sage scrub in the county. We really need to protect it, yet still introduce people to it,” said Croissant, president of the San Gabriel Mountains Regional Conservancy (www.sgmrc.org), which helped rebuild the nature center in 2004 and restore the habitat.

There is much more than those skyscraping yuccas, which are still my favorites. Prickly pear cactus cluster the landscape, their yellow, red and purple flowers blooming from each porcupine leaf. Scarlet larkspurs wave 18 inches tall in the wind, their brilliant flowers resembling a hothouse orchid. There are 150 or more species of flowers here, from foothill penstemons and dainty purple nightshade to yellow sun cups and bushes of buckwheat and black sage.

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Along the bicycle and walking trails of Santa Fe Dam, these flowers are everywhere. Thursday morning’s 90-minute walk/ride with Croissant easily out-wowed my two-day experience at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park last month, proving you don’t have to drive hours to see nature if you live in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s right here off the freeway. But you’ve got to exit and take it by foot.

Croissant, a botanist who teaches at APU and Cal Poly Pomona, stopped to show me her favorite plant, the cobweb thistle. “It’s absolutely gorgeous — a natural thistle. This is the first year I’ve seen it multi-stemmed.”

The dudlea, which is sending up stalks of fluorescent yellow-red flower buds from a succulent leaf base, also is flourishing. “I’ve never seen them this high,” she said.
The rains of winter — not just heavy but spaced out throughout the season and into spring — are partly the cause of the wildflower bounty. But sometimes, the rains can have the opposite effect and limit a species’ appearance, she said.

“You need to taste these — these are called lemonade berries,” she interrupted. A lemony tang rang my taste buds as I touched a tiny red berry to my tongue.
It’s relaxing to stroll amid these ancient landscapes and discover new sights, sounds and tastes.

Another rich wildflower area is the Colby Trail in the Glendora foothills, where the once obscure brodiaea is in bloom. “You see purple everywhere,” she said.

Back at Santa Fe Dam, we came upon still more yuccas as we closed in on the two freeways. “They really thrive in poor conditions. Adversity is something they are attracted to. Maybe there is a message there,” she said.

The conservancy’s master plan includes more hiking trails behind the dam — some as dirt paths for mountain bikers and some improved trails for wheelchair access. “We need to make learning about nature entertainment,” she said.
After emerging from the bumpy ride, she turned to me and said: “I think we’ll name that trail after you: the Yucca Valley Trail.”

It’s freeway close but foot accessible. That’s the secret of the Santa Fe Dam backcountry.

One New Yorker says: bin Laden’s death makes no difference

The death of Osama bin Laden set off celebrations in Washington, D.C., and at Manhattan’s ground zero. But, though all Americans have strong feelings this week, I still suspect it means less to you and me, 3,000 miles away.

Back on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, I turned to my best childhood friend from East Meadow, New York, Dennis Morgan. We grew up together and are still close. Morgan lives in a leafy suburb just 15 miles from Manhattan. My column “It’s not over in New York” (Sept. 6, 2002) chronicled the feelings on his block after Bill, his neighbor, was killed when the World Trade Center collapsed. Bill left behind a wife, who was pregnant, a 3-year-old son, and friends who cared. I remember writing that his green Ford Explorer remained in his driveway.

I had never heard my friend so shaken, so vulnerable. He was in Manhattan on 9/11 – in Midtown – and left the island by walking across the 59th Street Bridge with many fellow New Yorkers. On Wednesday, just days after the Navy SEALs raided bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and shot him dead, I asked him: How does this news affect you and your neighbors?

“I’m glad he’s gone. But that doesn’t bring Bill back or Ann’s Uncle Herman,” said Morgan, 52. Ann, his wife, lost a relative she called “uncle” who was her father’s first cousin. Like Bill, Herman didn’t come home that day 10 years ago. Their family never heard from him again – not a phone call, not a memento found in the rubble, not a scrap
of clothing, nothing. Living with that kind of loss can’t be erased through a 40-minute helicopter raid and probably not even after seeing a corpse photo of the man responsible.
“It just doesn’t pack the same emotions as when I talked to you then,” he said. “This (news) is totally different. Besides, as a person, I am not big on revenge.”

Although other New Yorkers celebrated and many were buoyed by bin Laden’s death, Morgan was not. Nothing could reverse the pall cast on his life.

Ann’s uncle was in the south tower of the World Trade Center on the 78th floor. The plane plunged into the 77th floor. His wife’s family was told a vague story from witnesses who said Uncle Herman started down the staircase and then went back up to help someone. “It was the exact same thing as Bill” (his neighbor), Dennis explained. “He just never came home.”

Bill had helped Dennis install his air conditioner. He and Dennis shared lawn and garden tips. The day before 9/11, Bill had missed his usual train and was very late for work. On the morning of 9/11, Bill made an extra effort to get to the train station and was at his desk in the WTC on time.

My friend said New Yorkers held on to hope, half expecting their missing loves ones to return home. “I kept hoping he’d rode a beam down … that was the kind of thought that went through your head.”

Dennis continued working in Manhattan at the American Bible Society as chief financial officer for five more years. But the anxiety that blanketed New York City like a fog in winter took its toll. He decided to become a tax consultant and work with clients in the suburbs. The last straw was the New York City blackout of August 2003 when he didn’t make it out of the city for 48 hours.

“I went through a time … when I’d be walking to my office and ask myself `Why am I doing this? I could get killed.’ ”

Dennis only visited ground zero once, and that was by accident. A client’s office was nearby.

“It was a big, ugly hole in the ground. It was very sad,” he said.

We caught up a bit and then he told me he had to hang up. His wife had asked him to pick up some groceries and he had arrived at the neighborhood market.

He intimated that truly big events, from 9/11 to bin Laden’s death, take time to sink in and “evolve.” He was glad that our government did what it did and hopeful new intelligence gathered from the raid would stop future attacks. But in his heart, I could tell that not much had changed.

“I was walking my dog past my neighbor Bill’s house. I thought that would bring some closure …” Then my friend’s voice trailed off.