Forty-nine young men and women.

      Dead.

      The reason? A madman shot and murdered them with no feeling or remorse. He systematically killed innocent people before police were able to put an end to the rampage.

      Our first reaction is to fight back. We did that after 9/11 and where did that get us? In a never-ending war in the Middle East and terrorists still vowing revenge on us.

       Sure we killed Saddam Hussein, but another radical stepped up to take his place. When that one’s gone, another will take his place. The list of angry, bitter, hate-filled assassins ready and willing to kill Americans is endless.

      So we decide to search for reasons to peacefully end the situation. In a war with radical terrorists, to back away and do nothing is to show cowardice and weakness.

      More than public perception, Americans don’t want to back away from a fight. We were reared with mythical heroes like Batman and Indiana Jones who fought back and got even. They didn’t cower and they always won.

      There’s no easy answer nor is there a short-term answer to ending terrorism. We have to look at where these terrorists are learning to hate, and that’s in the home. It’s where our core value system is formed. Children reared in homes where parents live compassionate lives, help their neighbors and always strive to make the world a better place usually turn out to be that type of adult.

      Children who grow up in homes where hate and intolerance are taught as a direct order from God are almost impossible to reteach. First of all, God is always right. Secondly, Mom and Dad are always right.

      Each generation decides to change the way their parents think, and mine was no different. I grew up in the 1960s. That was a tumultuous time when young people balked at what their elders taught them – Negroes were property who didn’t need an education, drink from different water fountains and stay poor.

      Minority parents taught their children that an education was their way out. Some preached violence but most taught to patiently and stubbornly stand up for what’s right.

       Many white kids listened to what black leaders were saying. They rode the buses with people of color and stood up to their parents.

       The young generation consistently chipped away at the belief that minorities were sub-standard Americans. They pushed to change the way someone of a different culture, color or faith was viewed in America.

      Blacks and whites went to school together, and young children learned that a person is more than the color of their skin and more than the higher power they worshipped. They discovered friendship crossed cultural and racial boundaries and that they had more in common than they thought.

      They all dreamed of a better life. They all made wishes on shooting stars and they all grew to understand that the only way change happens is when it starts within people’s hearts and grows from there.

      The talk of getting even and showing power and dominance grows louder and louder, and it’s no wonder why candidates who scream for erecting fences along our borders, isolating ourselves from the world and attacking others first are popular.

       But the words of Mahatma Gandhi still ring true – “an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”

        Let’s hope we can continue to search for peace while we can still see.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.

I’m a sucker for “life hacks” in magazines and on the Internet. If there’s an easier way to get dinner on the table, I’ll follow you on Twitter. If there’s a video on 50 ways to use WD-40, I’m all over that.

All that glitters isn’t gold, though. It’s not until you’ve been burned by some seemingly brilliant idea that one starts to question whether or not the idea was really that good.

One article that looked appealing was keeping pot lids in order. Mine are thrown in the middle of the cabinet, so I was eager for a better way.

The site said to take plastic coat hooks, measure the width of the lid and then stick the hooks to the back of the cabinet door.  

I had one of those plastic coat hooks a few years ago. It stuck to the door and then the hook snapped off.

If I followed this hack, I’d have broken coat hooks permanently glued to the back of our kitchen cabinet door and the pot lids would still be all over the place.

Keeping shoes in order is a tough one for me. Most of my shoes are either stacked on a shelf in my closet or shoved underneath the couch. So I looked with skepticism at the picture of a cubby holder with a hole for each shoe.

Most women I know kick their shoes off in the car or at the back door. If I had time to put each shoe in its own holder, I’d have time to grow my own crops and churn my own butter.

One hack looked pretty nifty – use muffin tins for all kinds of chores, including holding stuffed bell peppers in place for baking and as a portable ketchup, mustard and pickle holder at a barbecue.

After 25 years of use, our muffin tins have so many layers of baked on-grease that they’re brown instead of silver. There’s no way I’d put that gunked-up muffin tin out as a serving dish.

This one made me laugh out loud – clean out a plastic ketchup bottle and fill it with pancake batter for an easy and no-mess way to create round pancakes each and every time.

First of all, these people have obviously never tried to get anything back inside the narrow hole in the top of the ketchup bottle. It’s about as easy as scraping off the glue strip from one of those plastic coat hangers after it breaks off on the back of your closet door.

Worse, by the time you washed out the ketchup bottle, found a funnel and waited for the batter to slowly drip from the funnel into the bottle and then onto the griddle, you could’ve already had a 12-inch stack of flapjacks on the table.

Another hack advised breaking the ends off of store coat hangers and using the clips for potato chip bags. I tried that and all I got for my effort was a broken pair of scissors and two broken fingernails.

Another tip called for using a hanging shoe rack to store cleaning supplies. I don’t know what kind of dirt requires 20 different kinds of cleaners, but a bottle of Windex, a can of Comet Cleanser and a squeeze bottle of Ty-D-Bol are all I need.

And, last but not least, there’s a new attachment for your cell phone. You clip a tennis ball to it so you can take the perfect selfie with your dog. Like your dog would ever sit still when there’s a tennis ball in sight.

I guess the people who’d buy that attachment are the same people who have individual cubby holes for all their shoes, make pancakes with a used ketchup bottle and have a dozen bags of chips in the pantry sealed up nice and tidy.

I could save these folks a lot of time and energy – throw the shoes by the back door, use a soup ladle for the flap jacks and eat all the chips in one sitting.

That’s life hack advice I can use.

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.