Crossing the T

What's Up with the Puffin Picture

I was asked recently about my home page, "What's up with the puffin picture?"

The bird's portrait was taken in July when I was in the arctic. 

Those cute little birds live in the harshest of conditions. Exposed coast. Tons of rain. Wicked winds. The North Atlantic crashes onto their shore more often than not. They have reason to be uglier and meaner than they are.

Yet these little arctic fisherman have great affection for each other. And like great soldiers, they don't leave their wounded behind. If one is hurt or shot, they gather around. Their spouse comes to their side. Their buddies and even strangers fly in, swim round. They paddle around, push the injured with their bill, hoping, helping them to fly. They will not leave the wounded's side, unless the sea takes the injured deep under.

And they mate for life.  In the same cute little burrow.

Who could ask for more?

Getting Off Craig's List

There is a new Craig’s List. It's the list of bloggers packing the internet with a turmoil of hypocrisy over Senator Craig.

The Pot.

The Kettle.

Shiny clean?

Or scalded, burnt and filthy?

They all have an opinion on that. 

There’s no doubt, news can make the world seem scalded, burnt, filthy. 

Today, in particular, we have a seriously perverted Congressman who pleaded guilty to a crime.

Now we have nearly every blogger on the planet in a nonstop verbal hurricane of who’s the bigot, who’s the bad guy, who’s the bad media, who’s homophobic, who’s in the closet, who’s adulterous, who got it wrong earlier, who’s got it wrong now, who’s blind to the truth, who’s hypocritical, who’s right, who’s liberal and wrong, who’s right wing and blind, who’s a switch hitter or base hitter, who’s mean to gay people, who’s not paying attention.

Meanwhile, I’m just glad I don’t ever have to use men’s bathrooms at the Minneapolis airport. And I award Craig the "pitchpoling" award.  (Check out Crossing the T's first pitchpoling winner.)

But there is always an eye to verbal hurricanes. And here goes it.

Craig pled guilty right after doing something very bad.  In a panic to get out of it, he apparently flashed his US Capitol card, as though it were a Capital One credit card that could make those tough guys who call in bad debt go away.

He tried this tactic with the same arrogant dismissal of respect as when he played footsie while on his airport potty. Craig brought our nation's capitol into the same sexually deviated toilet that our President Clinton did with his perverted use of cigars on a girl his daughter’s age. 

So Goodbye Congressman. Your turn at playing is over.

Admittedly, sometimes it takes a verbal whirlwind to bench a guy. But in the fury it's easy to lose grace. To lose site of the ball. To lose the end game. 

There isn’t any good basketball team who, when the ref calls something wrong or when the media pundits call their offense weak, sits down on the 3 pointer line and cries, shaking shoulders up and down, sniffling and wiping tears and phlegm on their jersies and yelling out “You ain’t fair!  You big bad guy you!” 

Let's not give such an enormous platform to the perverted – whether it’s a Craig who thinks any men’s bathroom is a brothel. Or whether it’s the media refs with their perverted version of calling the shots, fouls, and scores who get the "truth" wrong every day. Let's not take the media bait, they're often just noodling for flatheads. Only to pound us on the dock once we fall for it.

Instead, we execute our offense faithfully, diligently, ethically, powerfully, without fail every day.  With honesty, dignity, discipline, faith and deep sincerity as our Guide. The beautiful elements of life and love simply depend on it.

There is an adorable Iraqi boy whose calls the Fighting Sixth Marines his friends.

There are big packs of Afghani children who love our military likes the stars of Hollywood.

There are far more good men and women than bad.

Marginalize the bad. Pull their story off the platform.

Keep our eyes on the ball. Run it to the goal.

Slam the three pointer. 

Send those who pervert goodness and truth to the sidelines. The bench. Or, in this case, to court for a crime.

They may weep on the sidelines, not because we slammed our verbal fist at them, but because of our well executed offensive superiority, offense that simply left them in the dust.

And give the good guys and the good journalists the limelight. God knows, they deserve it.

The Big Pink Stuffed Animal of the Vietnam War

I read a piece about the Iraq/Vietnam comparison over at Villainous Company, and posted a thank you for a reminder that the Democrats like Hillary, Kerry, Reid, Pelosi and the list goes on and on -- prefer a Jane Fonda version of Vietnam. It reminded me all of this:

One morning, back in 3rd grade, my teacher told our classroom that a new little girl was starting class mid year. She was a refugee. From war. From Vietnam. We were to be nice to her.

I had already heard of Vietnam. Not long before my teacher’s announcement, a gorgeous brilliant medically trained woman who played piano like an angel had arrived on our church’s doorstep with not a dime, not anything but the clothes on her back, from that war. My parents took her into their life.

As a little girl, I was awestruck by wanting to be as pretty as she was, to play piano as well, to understand.  One evening, she sat in our kitchen, broken English, pulled the sleeve off her shoulder to show me the bullet lodged in her back. She explained: she was shot bloody in the Tet Offensive while she was running for her life. She said most didn’t make it.  I could hardly pronounce Tet, much less offensive, I could barely read at the time. I was growing up with all brothers and had played with plastic guns, good guys bad guys. I knew bullets come flying while you run. But now I understood they killed people while you ran.  She had a chunk of shot in her back, it still bled memories. She wasn’t smiling when she told me. I wasn’t smiling when I saw it.

Just trying to learn English, you could barely understand her when she spoke. But she had learned one English language distinction.  While in the car one afternoon, I whined to my mom that I wanted lunch, “I’m starving!” My beautiful Vietnamese friend turned around to me and said sternly, “Why do you say that? You are not starving. You are hungry. Do not say you are starving.” She knew the difference and she had had enough of my whining. We were at the corner of Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway, I was sitting in the back seat, it was a sunny summer day. I learned very quickly, I was a spoiled American.

Then in third grade, this new friend arrived at my grade school. Stunned. Quiet. We spoke to her like she understood what we were saying. I invited her to come to my house to play one day. I don’t know how we arranged it, she didn’t speak English. Her mother definitely didn’t. My mom must have figured out a way. Or we just showed up at her house to ask. I don’t remember.

She was dazed, quiet, serious.  While out and about in my neighborhood, we found a large neighborhood sale that had a big tall jar packed full of jelly beans with a sign. Whoever came closest to guessing the number of beans in the jar, would win an enormous cute pink stuffed animal, about 4 feet tall. Being the math geek I was and still am, I did some sort of creative multiplication and spit out a number. I had my new friend also write a number on a sheet of paper. I’m sure she thought I was crazy, writing numbers on pieces of paper and shoving them in a jar.

I got a call later. I had won.

I pretended she had won. I gave her the pink stuffed animal. She probably thought if you shove numbers in a jar, you get big stuffed animals. She hugged it. Cuddled her cheek up against its pink cheek. She smiled for the first time. I remember thinking, she can smile.

Not long after, she switched schools.  I never saw her again. Not long after that, my high school was about 15% refugees from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hmong and we learned to know the difference. All similarly stunned, dazed, trying to make a go in the new world.

I remember one young man who wrestled on my brother’s team badly blew out his shoulder during a match. He had no parents. He came to this country by himself. His family was back home, dead, brutally killed. My parents went to the hospital as his parents. The hospital said if he wasn’t eighteen they couldn’t help him. The boy overheard it. My father looked over at him. When the boy filled out his form, his age was 18. He had the surgery, got pins in his shoulder.

About that same time in high school I took a Creative Writing class. I remember I sat next to the good looking athletic boy who got perfect score on his SAT but became a cocaine user.  Another boy, two rows over, also a perfect SAT score became a Rabbi. Then there was the party girl who lord knows where she ended up but at 16 she’d make Britney Spears proud. Then there was my friend who I’d pass notes to. And the star tennis player who had a drug addiction, broke it, spoke about it, then went back on. And so on. We had an assignment. Write a poem. I wrote a poem in the first five minutes. Then went back to passing notes. I got called on to read mine, a fluffy limerick. People laughed.

Then the teacher called on a young man, a refugee.

This boy sat in the front row every day. He didn’t mingle. The rest of us assumed that he, like many of other classmates, did not speak English. This day, the first time he had been called on to read, he sat up straight, stunned, nervous. He leaned forward in his chair, gripping the corners like he was hanging on for life. He could hardly start. I almost thought he wouldn’t, couldn’t. The room was noisy, kids weren’t paying attention, shuffling their feet, kicking the chairs ahead of them, whispering or working on other homework. The boy about to read his poem was just another kid they couldn’t understand, who didn’t matter to them, who they could ignore. I wish I had a copy of that poem. I wish I remember his name.

He began. The room went silent. Not a kid stirred. I remember even the teacher went still, jaw opened, in the front of the room. After it was over, the room didn’t move. No one could speak. I remember wanting to put my head down and cry.

I cannot do justice to his incredible command of a second language with a poem that gripped our hearts, pulled them out of chests and pounded the message in. The sounds of brutality, the blood that was not mentioned but you felt spilled from your own veins, the feeling of desperation as your flee for your life. When he took up a pencil, he took command of that room. It was like that bullet of the beautiful woman’s shoulder got wedged into mine. And it has never left.

I guess that is one reason why I wrote this below comment at Villainous Company. It is one of the many reasons I write this blog. We have so-called leaders that embrace the evil of others as their friend.

I was just a little girl at the time Jane Fonda was kissing the feet of brutal thugs and doing everything else those 60's spoiled kids were indulging in at the time. While I was learning to walk, giggle and laugh in a peaceful community, she was over there smooching that generation's round of brutal leaders, like they were her long lost lovers, as though they were angels of mercy.

Instead, she was simply evil's willing servant.

We will never look up to people like her, Kerry, and others who dismiss the gift of freedom that I was born into and instead relish the opportunity to disregard the violence that so many men and women suffered under during that era. They would prefer I was born into a community where my parents would be shot on a dime. They certainly kissed the men who did that to many children.

Hillary Clinton just recently asked for funding to memorialize Woodstock in a museum in NY. Clearly, Hillary, Kerry, Reid etc could care less about memorializing the men and women who suffered because of the "pull out". Apparently Kerry never heard of the Killing Fields. Nor understood that there were men who suffered horribly for years in POW camps.

Instead, Hillary wants a million dollars to memorialize the biggest filthy LCD muddy orgy fest of spoiled uncontrolled kids the planet has ever seen. Out of selfish expediency, their opinions and resulting policies fully disregard the dignity and goodness of those of that era who suffered and those who gave their life to stop the people who make violence and viciousness their guide. I don't call that arrogant dismissal, leadership. It's selfishness.

The liberals of that generation ought to start realizing that the generation coming after them isn’t much impressed with their recreated false versions of history. In fact we are disgusted.

That Fight Ain't Fair, Call In the Real Men

Late to work today for a variety of irrelevant reasons, I was in my car watching the clock tick past the time I was supposed to be on a call, wondered why life seemed to be in slow motion and became convinced that the red light I was staring at was stuck on red. And so would I be. Permanently.

Then next to my car was a bulky man who, like I, looked like he just woke up. Yet, for breakfast, he was pouring the remaining portion of a large bag of gummy candy straight into his mouth.  So many of them poured forward that he could hardly shut his mouth when he turned to smile at me. He then proceeded with the kind of chewing where the teeth can’t shut completely due to excessive content, the cheeks go wide and crooked to dislodge chunks of gummy on the side, all the while swallowing the back-of-the-throat gummies whole. 

Then singer John Mayer came on the radio with that song that is played across the country over and over and over again. A creative rhythm, cute song. 

For this first time I actually listened to the lyrics and this part of the song caught my ear. I said, “Amen to that.”

And when you trust your television
What you get is what you got
Cause when they own the information, oh
They can bend it all they want

But listening further, I realized Mayer was obviously never a Marine. Nor Army. Nor, apparently, a ‘good guy doing good things’.

John Mayer, if he really believes his lyrics, is the type of guy that inspired this real man, LTC Randolph C. White. Like White says, there are men you can call better than others. It’s the 'green light go' choices that make a better man. But apparently, there are a lot of us stuck at "Stop. Stop and give up."

Then Mayer's refrain came, and it kept coming about 100 times. By the end of the song, the stop light turned green and I wanted to tell the Mayer man to go. Go and get a life.

Now we see everything that's going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don't have the means
To rise above and beat it

That's why we're waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

It's not that we don't care,
We just know that the fight ain't fair
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

It doesn’t take long to figure out that life isn’t exactly a divvying out of fairness.  Talk to the children like that little girl in that Yezdinar village who just had their parents brutally killed. Or the parents in that other village who recently had their children brutally murdered, probably before their very eyes before they too were viciously murdered.

I don’t think that little girl would feel like prayers get answered when she finds out there are bunch of highly paid, latte sipping, guitar playing goofs who are sitting around complaining that things aren’t going their way then sneering that because the “fight ain’t fair” they won’t join.

That little girl’s “fight ain’t fair” either – and that’s why she needs the Mayer-sing-and-act-alikes of the world to get off our behind and do something about it.

Here’s the truth, while many of us are sitting around in our L.A. latte house complaining or chewing enormous mouth fulls of gummies, there are men and women doing the extremely hard work of making things better.  The simply-better folks don't say, "It ain't fair! I’m going to sit around, pout and wait for things to change."   

It all reminds me of that band, Dave Matthews, the one that from atop a bridge dumped their bus load of excrement on a boat floating on the Chicago River. Just like the rest of life, the arrogant, spoiled indifference of others has the same impact as that bus did – it dumps societal excrement on everyone else. And he didn't just do it with his bus.

Dave Matthews writes, “Bottom line: this war is wrong and this war is un-American.”

I’m not sure what is so un-American about saving young girls and boys from the violence of war – to bring peace back to their valleys of dreams. As much as Hillary, Reid, Pelosi don’t want it to be true -- the green light surge of General Petraeus, our military, and Iraqi leadership is succeeding.  Succeeding in that battle, even trying at great sacrifice, is worth it. It is worth it for that child. It is American. The best of us.

Meanwhile, those who take Mayer's lyrics as their apathetic rule of life aren’t half the men of many out there.  Instead, please, let's refrain from singing their refrain—it’s whiny. Let's stop dumping their excrement of indifference on everyone else. Instead let's follow the lead of those who are doing something with their life for others, at deep sacrifice. Ultimately, helping others requires you to jump in deep where things aren't fair. In fact, it's rough, ugly, gut wrenching work -- but its fruits bring back hopefulness, childhood, peacefulness.

I read this recently, a real man, who writes to those “waiting for the world to change” -- those who are disgruntled at the inconvenience of difficult battles -- “Sorry guys, we'll be done in a second with our efforts to make sure you don't get blown up on your way to your friend's house.”

Can't say it more precisely, Major.  You guys are not only a handsome lot, you’re just better.  Like this man, Randolph White, a real man, said. It's worth a listen.   

Roundabout Way to Glory Part II

I took the advice I wrote about last week and went to see the play Beyond Glory about seven Medal of Honor winners at the Roundabout Theatre in New York.  I will write about the play soon.

But the irony of my trip was the van ride from the parking lot to the airport to catch my flight to NY. The van driver who greeted me at 5:30 a.m. Saturday morning was about the most energetic, smiley, happy guy I have ever met at that hour, in that job -- frankly any job. I've never had coworkers that happy on the job.  You rarely meet people that excited to hear about your trip, to wish you well, to want to know you -- even people who know you well. 

He asked all about my day so far, inquired if I was in a hurry, noted the beautiful sunrise just tipping over the horizon, told me all about the big pig roast he and his neighbor were having later in the day for nearly 150 people. He asked about details of my trip to NY and he heard I was going to see a play, Beyond Glory about men of courage, honor, valor.

I then learned he was a retired pilot, who had flown hundreds of dangerous missions in the Korean War, whose experiences should have given him the Medal of Honor. He summed it up, "I am just lucky to be alive." I hadn't gotten his name so I asked on my way home - who was the man who worked there, a pilot, Korean War veteran.

"Jack.  That's Jack."

The truth is, our heroes are next door. Literally. They are men of honor.

We don't have to see a play to know them.

They are our friends. Our neighbors. The people whose paths we cross every day. 

Jack said about the play, "Well that will be an emotional day."

It was.

I will write more soon.

With smiles of gratitude to our heroes, all of you.

"Boo Chump" Pundits Reviewed

On the home page of Milblogging.com is a good commentary on the Scott Beauchamp fiasco vs. the New York Times Op-Ed article titled "A War We Might Just Win." These two issues have been rumbling all over the internet -- where Beauchamp receives praises by the "liberal press" but the writers of the op-ed piece (who come from the liberal Brookings Institution) receive harsh condemnation by the "liberal press."  (You can click through to the NY Times article via the Wall Street Journal piece by James Taranto linked to above).

But it is simply a situation where both the praises of Beauchamp and the condemnation of the NY Times journalists are considerably off track. 

There is a universal truth -- no one likes to be wrong -- but we all are at some point in our life. 

Yet it’s only the incompetent and weak who continue down the path of foolhardiness and deception just to avoid admitting they're wrong. 

Unfortunately, this latter category is the label easily applied to many in our media -- we have mountains of Scott "Boo Chump" fans who are not willing to acknowledge Beauchamp’s farcical foundations nor can they admit that the surge in Iraq is making progress, and they increasingly look foolish for not doing so. 

With their desperate need to preserve the belief in their own misguided ideology, these journalists will deny to the bitter end that any of the gradual, painful, tenuous –- but always worth it -- steps towards democracy will ever make a difference. In their callous disregard of thoughtful analysis, they help destroy those tenuous but necessary beginnings of democracy, anywhere.   

Had those same journalists been employed in their same career of choice back in the late 1700’s and then 100 years after that, they would be just like those European pundits who wrote or stated that the U.S. fledging democracy would fail. Those who claimed during the Civil War that America was self-destructing, hedged their bets on the confederacy, promoted European-sourced ship building for the confederacy, made concerted efforts to thwart Lincoln's foreign relations, encouraged conflicts with Europe over cotton embargos and so on – all under the assumption that the U.S. was a bunch of fumbling killing murdering folk caught up in a civil war that could mean nothing positive for the future of the country – a war that if it wasn’t worth being hopeful about, you could at least be expedient. 

Those Beauchamp-adoring journalists would be wise to study the complexity of Lincoln’s very demanding, controversial and deeply challenging foreign policy at the time of the Civil War – his battles in foreign policy were as complex and tenuous as the war itself. There were many pundits who thwarted Lincoln’s policies and helped lengthen that painful terribly bloody civil war by encouraging and strengthening people who were against Lincoln’s worthy agenda – simply to preserve their own self-interest. 

Sadly, the comparison isn’t laughable-- it is all too familiar. The ineptitude of many journalists today is encouraging the forces of those who prefer the path of death, violence and loss of hope for the people in Iraq and Afganistan and elsewhere. Their efforts encourage a self-fulfilling prophecy that I think some in the media subconsciously prefer simply so they don’t have admit being wrong.

Tragically, the people who so desperately depend on our strength, courage, hopefulness and perseverance may lose that chance if we lose resolve at the helm of those who are too weak to admit relevant, tactical and hopeful details about success.

That One Pleading Dream

Hiking high in the mountains, the expanse of ocean and peaks spurs thousands of dreams and endless possibilities for our life and love. Moments like that spark our anticipation, our freedom, our imagination, our destiny.

Yet having a thousand dreams is easy.

But to have only one tears at your heart.

      

Sometimes that one dream becomes all consuming. We pray incessantly for that one desperate pleading hope whether it’s to save someone’s life or to be able to give life. To protect our lover’s life or secure the life of the deeply vulnerable. Whether we pray for simplicity in love or to fall in love. Or to know love or to have love stay. To hold love close or to be set free.  We wish for talent to have a chance, for a new job, a new home, a new start, a new path.

In those moments when hope itself seems to cling to that one wish, we tug at the sleeve of the Giver of Mercy, like when a child pulls on a parent’s sleeve and yells out, “Come on! Let’s go!” We beg to have someone, better yet God, give our dream a chance, to make it all come true and if that one dream could come true, we’d be set free.

But sometimes, despite our pleading, a valley of dreams is caught by insurmountable cliffs. That bundle of dreams, once an enormous gift, feels like a burden because none of them, especially that one, can ever be set free.

For that little girl I saw, that little boy too, they are deep in that valley of burdens where dreams are trapped by the violent desert or vicious mountainous terrain they call home. Surrounded by men and women of chaos who wish to crush Hope itself. Help us all hold that little girl’s dream, the little boy’s dream as those of our own.

Their dreams become our Guide, the propellant that gives us the courage to risk sacrifice and the courage to spur that valley of dreams reborn. The efforts of brave individuals who act on this courage set free the valleys of that little girl and the little boy, and so that those children can stand on the mountains they call home spurring thousands of dreams and sparking endless possibilities for their life and love, and ours too.

Sometimes when we merge the dreams for which we tug at God’s sleeve with the tears of someone else’s unfulfilled dreams, we find the courage to pull their dreams ahead of ours. In doing so, we finally plead for the cause God asks of us and we free ourselves from the burden of one dream and trade it in for thousands. Thousands of possibilities for our life and love.

Hillary wins the "pitchpoiling and overboard" award

There are those great moments of cultural pitchpoling, those dramatic end-over-end wipeouts of individuals who, even with the best of intentions, go overboard, go off balance, end up somewhere daffy, entirely different than intended.

Today it’s a Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who wins the cultural “pitchpoling and overboard” award.

Check out the link to the right for the full story.  Read and click through with caution – her servile life and subservient weakness brings loads of vulgarity with her. And, if she wins, also back into the Presidency.

Never heard of pitch-poling?  Check out this example, right at the beginning:

We Come with Strings Attached, Happily

Last week I heard a story.

It doesn’t have a happy ending.

The man doesn’t even know it yet.

A woman was talking, about her friend, a soldier. The story broke her heart.

I overheard.  I wish I hadn’t. 

The man, a soldier, doesn’t have a name to me, but I already know his heart. And I cry.

I read an article the other day, written by a woman, a feminist, who believes women should be able to play around, just like men do.

No strings attached.

That feminist would raise up that soldier's wife as her idol.

The problem is in life when you have no strings, you are not walking free, you’re not flying, you’re not dangling over a precipice with finesse, you’re in a flailing free fall.

That’s true if you are a man.

That’s true if you are a woman.

We are equal that way.

Life is meant to have strings.  We tie our hearts together as family, parents, friends, as lovers, spouses. We tie our hearts, we’d weld them if we could, in a big knot and hope to be close because the world often isn’t. This crazy planet can be a down right ugly, cruel, unforgiving place. But we don’t have to be. It takes guts to love, because life is messy and love can be confusing, imperfect too.

It’s only the weak who believe you don’t need any strings.

It’s easier to believe being close is about being distant. To believe passion is better dispassionate. They believe we can mate like a house fly and buzz off, no strings.

No strings attached is not for the strong, it’s a philosophy for the weak.

Here’s the conversation I overhead, while traveling in another city. My ears can’t stop hearing it, so I had to write about it.

The man was over in Iraq, a kind man. His wife back home decided to have an affair, a brash one. In the crowd celebrating the soldier’s homecoming from Iraq was also the adulterous man with whom his wife had cheated. In front of the husband, the two pretended like nothing happened.

The soldier will never know. Or so she thinks.

In love, you don’t get to lie and keep your strings, it nets out to zero, the vortex of null. You start a free fall. Saying this, triggers anger in some. Truth hurts.

Whether we like it or not, our life is packed full of strings-- we build deep connections, lasting attachments, caring friendships, expressive passions. When pull all that close and never let go, we reveal and fulfill the deepest piece of our humanity and destiny. 

Or we cut the strings, like cutting the cords of your parachute.

It’s fun while you fall.

It’s never pleasant to land.

But our hearts always do. And it crushes. Whether our life does too, is a choice. An unforgiving one.

This woman will have her pile of lies and she’ll loyally pull her clump of illusions around like a security blanket that simply hurts to keep. She’ll have the remaining frayed bits of deep attachments that she’ll keep accusing as being worthless, unnecessary -- treating them like bits of toilet paper stuck to her shoe that she keeps wanting to shake off. But they will drag behind her forever, until she understands their worth, pulls them in and reconciles her deepest attachments and passions with her destiny.

Unlike what that feminist demands from life, there never is such thing as “no strings attached." Thank God for that—us stronger folks love our attachments, our "strings", the people we adore and we pull them close. Strings never go away, they are our deepest destiny.

Until then, we’ll find that woman, and men and women like her, in her elder years dragging remnants of the strings she cut, the shreds of her loves and passions that dangle around her like frayed bits of rope of a failed parachute. Lonely, bruised, with a desperate need to fix something or someone else, she'll rage at anyone who says men and women need strings. Because her life depended on cutting them, every time.

Sadly, that isn’t freedom.

It’s bondage with a crash landing.

Meanwhile, I pray for the perseverance of that soldier’s heart when he finds out, because he will. I hope he knows his passions are never severed when another person flails out on a free fall. When you find out, it hurts, sears, burns like crazy. It knocks the wind out of you. It blasts your heart.  But it is the one who cheated whose destiny is crushed. Meanwhile, the reconciliation of Hope is his to have.

A Roundabout Way to Glory

There are a few who earn the Medal of Honor and most civilians will never really understand what they endured to earn it.

Now they have a chance.

And I might just take it.

The sheer emotional power of the unpoliticized stories of eight Medal of Honor winners has taken a play from audiences as small as three in a little venue off from Arlington Cemetery to much larger audiences all around the world. The play titled Beyond Glory, performed by Stephen Lang, has been performed in the DMZ, Pearl Harbor, on an aircraft carrier, the Middle East  and theaters in Europe. Most triumphantly, this year the play landed in New York's Roundabout Theater to much acclaim, the city whose theater district does not generally herald in powerful yet unpoliticized stories.

War will "sear its way into your mind and linger there forever after."  That is also the description used by the very astute and perceptive theater critic Terry Teachout to describe Beyond Glory. Teachout also writes, "It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I've seen in my theatergoing life."

Men who earn the Medal of Honor experience some of the "richest, most complex" elements of human existence-- those moments, admidst the most hellish, bloodly and evil of circumstances, where a person's deepest character is unmercilessly crushed yet still rises above it to pull out the forces of courage and goodness from the gut of pain. Their stories stand on their own, yet Lang has clearly done justice to them with acting that has left men in tears.

Even if some of us cannot go to see the play, we can read the reviews with encouragement, which I provided links to above. Beyond Glory was also highlighted in an editorial today by Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, titled Faith and Fiber. Henninger writes.

Last Saturday after he'd finished the matinee performance (the play closes a week from Sunday), I asked Stephen Lang: You've now spent several years with these eight guys; what do you think "Beyond Glory" is about. "For the longest time," he said, "I couldn't give it a name. I finally concluded that what binds these men is faith and fiber." Pretty simple. Faith and fiber.

Bridges of Courage

Today President Bush visited the site of the bridge collapse and said, "We have an amazing country where people's first instinct is to save lives.”

When we hear of the heroic specifics in any tragedy, we gasp at the bravery and then an often subconscious element seeps deep inside, “Would I have done the same thing? Or would I have run to safety?”

Recently, I shared the story of a Marine to a colleague of mine. The Marine had risked his life and suffered considerable injuries to save the man next to him. That story had a specific name, it had pictures, it is, and always will be, a dramatic story of someone showing “the first instinct to save lives,” and an incredibly resilient spirit.

After I shared the details, the pictures and the inspiring outcome, my colleague had a serious look on his face, a troubled look. He was quiet as he looked at the picture of the wounded Marine. Then he said to me, “I hear about something like that and I wonder, what would I have done?  I don’t know if I would have.”

The cynics of life get going on their rants about how people act bad and always will and they blog all over the place – invading the internet space with their self-indulged verbal bashing fits spotted with foul mouthed, crude, sophomoric cynicism and self-deluded sense of “activism”.

Contrary to that cesspool, that Marine whose story I shared and many thousands of other Marines, as well as the truck driver in Minneapolis who helped those children, the folks nearly passing under the bridge when it collapsed who ran forward to help, the people who dashed out of their apartment to help someone to safety, and we recall the many heroes of 9/11  –  their stories go deep into our conscience, our heart, so when something like that happens again, we become someone with “the first instinct to save lives.”

President Bush also said, "In times of tragedy, our hearts ache for those who suffer, yet our hearts are also lifted by acts of courage and compassion."

Our country depends on those who instantly become powerful leaders by showing courage and compassion. Their example will always lead the rest of us, so on the chance that we end up in a similar circumstance, we know what to do. In the meantime, we leave behind the snide cynics and let their words get whisked away by the more constructive currents of those with far deeper courage, compassion and hopefulness.

Was World War II a Myth of Gallantry?

There is a new Ken Burns documentary titled The War.  In the clip I just saw moments ago, Burns said, World War II “is wrapped in a bloodless, gallant myth. We can’t leave it that way.”

I beg to differ on one very important point.

Those young men who sailed across all the Pacific on aircraft carriers to face a continual stream of suicide bombers, then known as insane Kamikazes…

Those men who landed in the scorching tropics in order to stop that raging military monster with its Rising Sun Flags and setting sun’s Darkness...

Those young men who sailed across the Atlantic to land on the European continent headed for Dresdon, Dunkirk, Normandy, Tunisia, Palermo, Sicily to put an end to that continent’s marching machines of violence...

All of them did that bloody, gut wrenching work to stop Harm in his tracks.

Make no mistake. Wrapping that effort in gallantry is no myth.

Their gallantry is fact.

To the soldier, battle has no mercy. Doing battle’s requirements has no sweetness. It doesn’t feel gallant, it pulls at the gut. Its memory can trigger tears like the tropics spur sweat. In the middle, you wonder where in that blood does sweetness survive.

Yet prior to Courage arriving on both fronts in that war-- rape, maiming, torture, the vicious killing of children, women, and men of courage, looting, theft and ethnic attacks were happening en masse across both oceans. Kindness, peace, and democracy were losing on a grand scale. 

Yet our gallant men left peaceful communities behind to meet that Evil face to face, to stop it.

Thank God, they did.

I, you, forever know their courage and fortitude was, no question, gallant. There is no doubt, girls who were saved from such a similar fate will call them gallant. No doubt those rescued from prison camps, will call them gallant. The list of those with gratitude can go on ad infinitum, as Evil's agents would have done had not our soldiers arrived on those bloody shores.

I will forever wrap their memory and my arms of gratitude around their gallantry and share their family’s tears of sorrow, even today.

The effort of those soldiers allow you and I, Europeans, and parts of Asia to live in the luxuries of peace now taken for granted – we can sprinkle our lawns and enjoy a lazy Saturday, enjoy a round of golf on the greens or a round of beer at a bar, enjoy a latte or sip a tea, cast a fishing line or cast a vote, find success or find some trouble, catch a girl’s heart or fall in love with a hero, to smile at a child’s laughter or cry peacefully of the sorrows in life, and so much more. 

Yet, reluctantly, I admit that Burns’ comment reminds me that those young men and their families in the 1940’s sacrificed their lives and loved ones so that a bunch of Americans today can ignore History 101 and be foolish enough to believe that “The War” in which upwards of 60 million people died, was bloodless.

That is roughly 35,000 people killed a day, for five years straight.  One soldier I heard interviewed a number of years ago remembered vividly that there was so much blood on the road in Europe that he and his fellow men would slip and fall while walking. They could hardly stand upright as they marched head on into the enemy.  Hardly bloodless. Burns is right, ignorance regarding that sacrifice cannot be left unattended.

Regarding those individuals who aren’t grateful and fully aware of their indebtedness to the bloody sacrifice of those men of World War II, the only myth here is their claim to be an American -- certainly they are fully ignorant to freedom’s never ending battle against its aggressors.

Most troublesome, they are certainly unaware that the agents of destruction seep into every culture while those who forget history are sipping their latte and sneering at those doing that same painful, gritty, bloody work today on their behalf.

So I close with Love to the Gallant. I share your sorrow, your losses and will always wrap my arms of gratitude around you and your loved ones.  Your courage and your painful sacrifice of life and blood make this world safe for the smiling lovable children we welcome into the world. You have my heart’s deepest understanding, its hope and its love.