Sunday, July 07, 2002

Wind Rider, of LGB fame wrote me this moving e-mail (I've edited out some paragraphs that are not of interest to the "general public"):

"I believe you've seen some of my comments over at Little Green Footballs. Hopefully it came across that I believe the current situation is one we share. Americans can be very, very shortsighted, and too often, in focusing on the baseball pennant race, or some movie star's hairstyle or love life, they loose sight of what is going on around them. I don't mean on the next street over, or the next small town over. They loose sight of the earth as a finite space, and miss the parallels or possibilities that the things they see and find occasionally distressing or distasteful on the evening newscasts fall in to the "there, but by the grace of G*d go thee" category.

I don't feel extraordinary that I see these things. It is my job to see them. My career is military […] (and) From this perspective, admiration for the IDF, as they perform daily small acts of heroism under the most trying circumstances a military can face, comes very easily. Even more easily comes my admiration of people […] who maintain hope, faith, optimism and humour in the face of daily life or death uncertainty.

[…] When I first joined the military, it was simply for the boyish dream of wanting simply to fly. I was fortunate enough to be able to realize that, and along the way, as I began to grow into my profession, I came to have a sense of larger purpose to it all. This (and quite a bit of procrastination, actually) have kept me at the profession for this long. Not to impose or to conquer and take. But to stand the wall, so that behind me, no harm will come in the night. Bluster and arrogant gushing, sometimes I'm not even sure; but I do know that my sense of it is that Israel and her people are about the best representation in the world today of what it is I am moved to protect.

I sense a bigger storm is coming, and its fury will be mighty. My hopes and prayers that we live to see the sunrises of the days that follow."