This morning I am fighting off what I am sure is the beginning's of a cold, caught after spending time with family over the holiday.
The fight is being lead by my trusty friend the Flavia machine. Blueberry echinacea and green tea by the boat load. Never a bad idea, but where is the lesson? Besides a hearty endorsement of fighting illness/ailments as naturally as possible?
I can not fit the mix of the two into our office paper cups, they only manage one serving, and barely at that. So I have to use one of the larger office glasses we have. So two hot teas, alot of honey, and a glass cup. Great, sounds delicious, but the lesson, right? Ok so walking with the cup filled to the brim with smoky hot tea from the kitchen to the office, it is really putting a good burn on my fingers. Walking any faster will surely result in the liquid meeting the limits of the lip, and burning the rest of my hand, probably resulting in me dropping the glass, yelling an expletive, and having to start the process all over what is sure to be an eventuality.
Ok, great, so do not walk with hot cups, thanks alot bub, right? No, not quite; it hit me, that with all of the debate, and recent (irritatingly FEAUX media concern, see special coverage of the "Afghan eight", even the DoD is playing its part), the connection hit me. I could walk faster, and try and get to my destination more quickly, the thought being, if I limit my exposure to this discomfort, then I will have achieved a victory of some scale, over the situation at hand. This of course, as I realized, posed its own, even more perilous set of danger's, not the least of which would have been wasted time. I could always have done it the right way from the beginning, wrapping the cup in paper towels beforehand, but I hadn't, so time machines aside, history was not going to be rewritten. It came to pass that the proper decision was to persist, patiently, professionally, that the fingers could stand the burn, so that the entire hand not suffer.
With all of the recent call to action, one has to wonder, where is it all coming from. DoD having the soldiers do live interviews with CNN, Facebook broadcasts of the details of the attack. Where was all of this concern for the (checking icasualties now) 873 servicemembers who passed, some in much more perilous situations. Not to serve any discredit to these fallen servicemen, believe me in that, but the timing, and the sincerity would be served by skepticism.
What about Wanat? Does anybody see the foolishness of all this? Of course, but those voices are not loud enough.
Must watch TV tonight, by all account's, and judging from the excellent preview currently posted on PBS Frontline. So let's all do ourselves a solid, and take a moment to remember what it really looks like over there, and what it really feels like. Because to watch this footage and not feel, is to be a ghost in a shell. A fragile existence of what it means to be human. Count among those items compassion, concern, consciousness.
