A Warrior Falls

Like every day before, the officer wasn't late for duty. He sat in the Squad room, paying attention when he needed to, joking with his fellows when he didn't. He climbed into the seat of the car, and settled in for the morning patrol.
Sometime after breakfast, (coffee and a McMuffin for his partner, just a McMuffin for him,) and before lunch (he will wonder, later and only once, if it might have been good), the call comes in. Man with a gun, wife and children in the house. His partner flips an otherwise illegal U-turn he calls flipping a bitch, and puts the V8 Interceptor to work.
The scene is the chaos that finds its home in the heart of every warrior, its meaning and pattern apparent only in his mind. Shots are fired out the window. Tear gas is fired back in. The wife and kids come out. The gunman doesn't. The officer wonders how people can be so cruel to one another at times, doing that to their women, and their little ones. He thinks maybe he'd like to have a pup or two of his own someday, but doesn't have time for deeper contemplation. They're lining up, going in, he's got to go - All thoughts are on the door, the monster behind it, the monster with the gun.
They put flash-bangs through the windows as the great big man in-front slams the backdoor into a thousand splinters, a million motes of dust - Each one lit up for an instant by the flash of the 'bangs.
They're in, dust and smoke clouding the already hazy unlit room. The gunfire comes from within that haze, muzzle flashes - A cheap nine-millimeter, something that any other time might not have even fired. Call it fate, call it irony, call it tragedy, call it life. Gunfire in response, the solider, more reliable, fire of forty-five's and five-point-five-sixes, all well made, well maintained, as ready for action as he. But he's not acting anymore, he doesn't hear the return gunfire - One round, just the wrong side of the edge on his vest, has torn through flesh and bone and gone deep inside.
The Earth trembles when he falls.
He hurts when he breathes, but knows he must keep trying. He doesn't know where his partner is. Where the bad man is. He fights - To breath, to be loyal, to serve. It hurts, deep inside where it hasn't hurt since his heart broke once, when he was young, the last time he saw his mother.
His partner is there then, looking down at him, saying soft, soothing things, calling him "buddy". He likes it when his partner does that. The bad man is there too, but he's not standing up, or fighting. The officer relaxes a little now, but its still so hard to breathe and he has to breathe to make sure there are no more badmen.
His vision falters, he's going to sleep. Somewhere out in the growing blackness what might be a green field, and old friends, are visible. He blinks. The dust is settling in the room, but its all light and shadow.
They take his vest off, he feels them placing something over the wound. A needle sticks him between the ribs. Its easier to breathe now, but he's still so tired. He cant fight sleep anymore. He hears his friends calling him into the soft grass of the field.

I see him as they bring him out of the ambulance. One paramedic just picks him up off the gurney, and steps out into the harsh midday light. His blood runs down the front of the 'medics white uniform shirt, but that's okay. He's one of them, a compatriot, a force against the destruction they all feel chasing them - Chasing the world - a brother, a Warrior.
The other paramedic is holding the door open. Right of the door there is wall of his fellow warriors folding in behind the one carrying him as they go through the door. Tears are in their eyes. I can feel the reverberations in the Earth now, as I see them disappear within, and the Veterinary clinic doors close behind them.

Sweat and Dust

She was a silhouette at first, black jeans and tank top. Surrounded by sawdust. The golden light realized then, into sun-bronzed skin and straw colored hair. Sweat glistened on her muscles, hiding in shadow then rising as she worked.
The sander ate at the top of the sign, shaving splintered pine and throwing it up into the air around her. Sawdust stuck to her sweat.
Strong shoulders bunching and extending, push, pull, coil, uncoil, Braced, legs apart, pushing into the sander from the knees, up rigid thighs, through firm shapely hips.
Sweat sticking black fabric to her firm and narrowed middle, half up in the back. Sweat glistening in the hollow of her spine. It runs off her shoulders and collar bones too, like sap. Liquid amber of the sun itself, reflecting light off her yellow hair as it descends into shadowed hollows beneath the neck line, a vain attempt at carrying the sunsets dying idolatry into another glorious resting.

Winning Hearts and Minds: What We Need to Learn from Hezbollah

In the wake of the most recent Israeli invasion, bombings and blockade of Lebanon some 18,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Hezbollah has come forward in response to this destruction (and the resulting dislocation of families) and, ahead of the Lebanese government, begun reconstruction. They have provided as much as $12,000 (U.S. Dollars) to each family whose home was damaged and brought in their own workers and equipment to begin clearing rubble and rebuilding homes. In many areas Hezbollah stepped up to the plate well ahead of the local authorities, and in others they simply (and quietly, but not so quietly as to be unrecognized) provided money to local authorities for clean-up and reconstruction projects to begin.
Israel had one success in this war - They made Hezbollah stronger by giving them the opportunity to develop even solider foundations within Lebanon and with the Lebanese people. Hezbollah, in an obvious show of un-diminished strength after Israel’s attempt to defeat them, has stepped up as being not only better able to take care of the people than the government, but more willing to do so. 18,000 homes, 18,000 families the members of which may have been completely politically uninvolved previously, and in one fell swoop Hezbollah can win them over.
This is a fantastic success at winning hearts and minds.
(Source 1, Source 2 )

This is where the bar has been set – and set by, effectively, our enemy. This is the challenge that the United States and pro-Western governments, have to meet in the Middle East to be successful. We have to be better for the people of the countries we are operating in than those we are trying to defeat.
Military might only goes so far. It destroys our enemies alright, but it also destroys portions of the lives of those to whom we are trying to bring stability and democracy and we will never have stability or democracy anyplace where there are blast holes in walls, over-crowded hospitals with poor levels of care, burnt out grocery stores and destroyed schools.
People may lament what little they have, but when that little bit they have is destroyed during military actions, and then never rebuilt by those there to make things better whose side looks more appealing? The "oppressor" or the "free’er"? When what little you have is threatened by civil war because your entire country is destabilized by these failures enough for radical elements of opposing religions to become entrenched in a newly disenfranchised portion of the populace? How would you feel? And how would your children, as they grow and come of age during these events, feel?
Create a generation in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) that has been provided with the very best (to Western standards) in secular education, while their parents are working steady jobs (no matter their religious affiliation) and always able to put food on the table, and Iraq (and Afghanistan) will be new nations.

The greatest ally the forces of Radical Wahabiist Islam have is Ignorance. Their greatest strength is that from a position of ignorance the people of the nations afflicted with their blight see the forces of Radical Islam as being positive forces, a better alternative than Western forces and ideals.
We must erase ignorance. We must replace it with education and a living standard of affluence. If we cannot do that, the current generation will follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and their younger brothers will follow them, and these children’s own children will then follow them and we will continue to fight these wars we have been fighting for the last thousand years.

It is well and good to meet the enemy on the field of battle, and to slay him. But we have an enemy that is not an army, not an element of a nation state, but an element of the people among whom he lives. You cannot win over a people, you cannot stabilize a region of people, by killing their neighbor and telling them it was good for them. You have to make it good for them.
When you kill their neighbor, you give them schools, and food, and clothes, and the necessary talismans of affluence. Use his crops to feed their children. Build a school or a hospital upon his lands. Employ them in the construction of the schools and hospitals.
When another of their neighbors then tries to destroy these things that you have not only given them, but involved them in creating for themselves? They will welcome you to destroy him – and they will want to join you in it.
It is not good enough to kill the enemy – Every acre of land we soak with blood, must be tilled into crops, or used to build schools and hospitals for the people of the area. And every threat to those efforts should be met and dealt with the utmost cruelty and brutality.

If we are right (and in the face of Radical Islam I truly believe we are) then we must act it, and not be afraid to wage war without equivocation, to deliver violence swiftly, rapidly, and unmercifully to those who stand against us.
But we must also be unafraid (and willing to spend the money) to give the children of our enemy, and the children of his neighbors, an education we would give our own children with the courage to provide it ourselves if necessary to keep it secular and free of the ills and evils of the regions past. If we are right, we must employ the men and women who do not stand against us, and we must help them to rebuild their homes, lives and families.
Our goal should not only be to defeat our enemy in the conventional sense, but to replace him in his own house and do far better than he ever did at keeping it. Give his neighbors something to lose, and let him show himself for being the one who wants to take all that away from them. Our primary goal, our focus, should not be the wholesale slaughter of their warriors, but the fulfilling of the basic needs of the people we desire to save in order to make our enemy and their ideology irrelevant. The force necessary to do that, to protect the good works we establish in the wake of our first-line offensives, the violence and the extent of that violence, should be enough to slake anyone’s desire for retribution or war, if for no other reason than not leaving alive any of the enemy who would wish to continue.

I fear however that we do not have the constitution, the resolve, or the power within our own government to stand together, free of partisanship political jockeying and games playing for increased revenues, to do that. The current state of our government, our nation and our military, is so poor that our hope of success seems quite dim. I truly (and regretfully) believe we wasted our opportunity for this kind of massive action, and now several years down the line are too spent, too worn, too divided amongst ourselves (and those divisions too set into their own trenches) to ever achieve this kind of success.
We’re going to be at this a very, very, long time.

The Philosopher in the Neuroscientist

Another golden nugget from Seed Magazine (If you are at all interested in science, do yourself a favor and go to www.seedmagazine.com and subscribe! Seed Media Group is also behind Science Blogs, see link @ right), the following is the following taken from the segment on Neuroscientist Sam Harris in the article "Year in Science: Icons":

"While there is interesting work to be done in the philosophy of mind, philosophers are now very much beholden to the work of neuroscientists.” Sam Harris

Fantastic thing to say.
(The entire segment on Harris begins here: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/12/year_in_science_icons.php?page=11 at the very bottom).

9/11 Generation - No Other Option

I was just over a month shy of my 16th birthday on the morning of Tuesday, September 11th 2001. I was a boy then, a mature, strong, well educated (I finished high school the following spring) boy, but still a boy. Today, I consider myself a man. The events of September 11th 2001 are a great part of the influences and experiences that helped to shape me in those formative years.
I said last year that 9/11 is, for a great many of us, what the Kennedy assassination was for our parents, in that its the new "What were you doing when..." question. I think it was a more fundamental event, for everyone, than the assassination of a president - It shook foundations harder, deeper, and changed more. Everything is now Before 9/11 or After 9/11.

After 9/11 I became an EMT. After 9/11 I decided the military was in my future - Elite Light Infantry, come hell or high water. There is simply no other option.
I'm stuck in that day - I was angry, I was shocked, I was hurt, and as a teenager 3000 miles away there was nothing I could do. I heard about the deeds of the passengers of Flight 93. I watched fire-fighters and police strive, and die, and survive, and help others, and lose friends, and go back again - I felt proud that these men and women were of my nation, my species. I felt sad I wasn't among them. I was angry that I could not partake in retribution against those responsible.
As these few short years have passed from that awful day, as I have gotten older my desire, my drive, my belief in the necessity of being a strong hand, a helping hand, in times of need and disaster and chaos has only gotten stronger. It will happen again - The "front line" will again come to our home, our cities and we will need to bring another front line to their homes, their cities, to match the flexibility of the non-nation state warriors of our enemy. There will need to be people ready to meet those challenges head on, with heart, and with strength. I don't know if I have it - All I know is that I have to try. There is no other option.

"Thats the word! Give it to me!"

The librarian approaches the younger, smaller, rounder, woman. The Californiated hispanic staring down at the Puerto Rican with the eyes of a septegenerian vulture, occularly staking claim upon the rotting, torn, desecrated flesh of South American politics.
"If you'd like a bumper sticker for your car, or sign for your yard, I have plenty in the truck" the whitish grey hair, grey skin, bleached in the florescent lighting of American affluence says.
The earthy brown woman, stocky and wide, turns her face upwards in a question the florescent lighting reflecting back an illusion, a foreshadowing.
"The Democratic candidate for congress..." answering the unasked question, librarians know so much.
Before candidate passes even halfway from the California accented lips, passing into unnoticed oblivion, the brown round face lights with the unknowingly false hopes of true belief, "That's the word! Give it to me!"
The false idols so easily tricked into the primary deific role in the mythos of poverty dreams and minority fairy-tales, flashing starbursts in the round brown eyes. Unquestioning blindness of the fairy-tale entitled, gazing upon the telluric talismans of tutelary man-gods stepping corporeal from political myth.

Enriched Environments, Delayed Brain-Disease and Neurogenesis

I wrote previously about Dr. Elizabeth Gould's work with marmosets showing that enriched environments promoted neurogenesis, while less complex environments promoted something more like a "survival state" of base functionality without neural development. I likened it to the general modern condition, and the modern malaise present in our society. It was a philosophical reach, not a scientific one, but it seems I am not far off...
Nature Reviews: Enriched environments, experience-dependent plasticity and disorders of the nervous system

Originally found here: The Frontal Cortex, Brain Diseases and the Environment (Note his comment on piblic schools.)