nurturing thursdays: those who serve…

Posted on December 17, 2015 by hugmamma

Two news pieces reported on MSNBC today, made me pause to reflect upon the sacrifices made by those who keep the rest of us safe.

The first was about firemen who helped in the aftermath of 9/11. As usual, they did not consider the risks to their own safety and well-being. Only years later did that horrific day return to haunt them, many suffering the effects of cancer. Mounting medical bills in addition to an emotional and physical roller coaster ride puts the victims and their loved ones at high risk for depression and serious loss to their quality of life.

Following that report was a piece about a military family whose husband/father has been deployed to the Middle East multiple times. Of the 19 years they’ve been married, the couple have been separated 9 years. Their two sons, now teenagers, have missed their dad tremendously. While the family understands their sacrifice as a career choice, it doesn’t lessen the impact of losing a member for years on end. Especially knowing that each deployment could mean the death of their loved one.

It’s easy to shed a tear or two for the plight of these folks whose lives are spent protecting us. Having compassion, however, also includes giving back…not “sitting back.”

Rather than pay for “pork belly” projects put forth by representatives in Congress, our tax dollars should be spent accommodating the financial needs of those who risk their lives to save ours.

I think that’s what’s so frustrating about many members of the Republican Party. They want “boots on the ground,” but they ignore the fact that these folks have needs. They’re not wind-up robots. They feel. They break. They bleed. They die…and leave behind loved ones of their own.

President Obama is walking a tightrope between keeping our country safe during these perilous times…and showing compassion for the men and women who must answer the call to lay down their lives for their country. Not an easy decision, although the president’s critics rant and rave that it’s a no-brainer. Scary to think what Obama’s successor would do if he or she is a Republican intent upon spilling blood.

…when did we become a dispassionate people?

………hugmamma.

(Note: For more inspirational writing, visit…
https://beccagivens.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/nurt-thurs-you-are-2/

weekly photo challenge: surprise

Posted on December 21, 2012 by hugmamma

This particular photo never ceases to amaze me. And although I’ve used it before in various and sundry other posts, I am compelled to bring it to the forefront yet again…in response to this week’s Word Press photo challenge…surprise!!!

That’s Sitka, named after a charming Alaskan village. I was there once, as a voyager on a Holland America Alaskan cruise.

A year later, 9/11 happened. The following day I adopted Sitka from the local Humane Society, along with his brother Juneau, also a namesake for a town in Alaska.

These two are daily reminders of both…the best and worst experiences I’ve known…cruising the glacial fjords of Alaska with 25 family members…and suffering through one of the saddest days for our country and, indeed, the world at large.

…life is…full of surprises…both good and…not so good…

………hugmamma.

justice was served…but the memory lives on

Posted on September 8, 2012 by hugmamma

As 9/11 fast approaches, it behooves us to remember the severity of Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States.

National Geographic documented the steps leading up to the massacre in mind-numbing detail, as does the following video shot by private citizens with a bird’s eye view of the catastrophy.

For more than a year the four Al Quaeda Jihadists who learned to fly the jumbo jets lived among us…breathing our air, walking our sidewalks, driving our roads. They shopped, ate, and slept…only steps away from us. While they worked at their horrific mission, we went about our own business…working as usual.

Thousands of American lives were lost on 9/11. Families were forever torn apart. Children, even newborns, lived on without parents. Gaping holes were left in all our hearts. Not to mention the one in NYC…a tangible reminder of our country’s vulnerability to enemies intent upon our destruction…at any price.

President George W. Bush retaliated by taking us to war against Saddam Hossein. The dictator eventually met his maker, Allah. The cost to the American taxpayer?

We’re still paying it off.

And the man who admitted to masterminding and financing 9/11?

Osama bin Laden was silenced forever by President Obama in April of 2011.

No war…no astronomical price tag…

…just good, ole-american know-how…and guts!!!

………hugmamma. 😆 😆 😆

a warm, fall day…then gun shots

Posted on September 25, 2011 by hugmamma

Image via Wikipedia

I’d sometimes wonder what it felt like to live in Israel. Terrorism literally at one’s doorstep, 24/7. How did people go about their daily business? How were moms able to feel secure about the safety of their children when they were sent off to school each day? Were shoppers constantly on the lookout for suspicious activity? Did commuters ride the buses wondering if that day would be their last? And even now, how do the Israelis accept that life goes on, such as it is? Death staring them in the face in the form of any passerby.

I now know the answer to all these questions…yesterday there was a shooter in our midst.

The day was warm, my husband even commenting he thought it was hot out. “Pleasant” I thought, as we drove leisurely through the neighborhood on our way to visit a nearby flea market, and then lunch at Molbak’s, my favorite garden nursery. Pulling out onto the main road, then making the first right onto another road which we frequently use to get to the freeway, we quickly noticed a commotion ensuing.

A police car blocked the road just before the high school. Cars ahead of us were furiously making u-turns. As one SUV slowly approached our car going in the opposite direction, the driver slowed down as if wanting to explain what was happening. Not comprehending at first, my husband was slow to react. Female intuition led me to believe something was definitely amiss so I insisted he roll down his window.

The driver of the SUV, probably a student, told us that we should turn our car around because the school was under lockdown and that there was a shooter. As she spoke these words, we could hear a volley of gun shots ring out. Even now as I sit here typing, a chill runs through me as I think back to that moment. That was the first time I’d ever heard the sound of live shooting.

Not waiting to make a u-turn further ahead, my husband turned our car around as soon as the SUV drove on. As we made our way the short distance back to the main road we could see people collecting on the sidwalks, obviously wanting to view the action. “You crazies!” I thought. “You could soon become embroiled in the action!”

We soon discovered that trying to make our way through town via the main road was slow going. Traffic was beginning to back up. Fear had me in its grip moreso than my husband, always the calm one. So I asked him to turn around and head in the opposite direction taking the long route out of town. As we drove onto the graveled parking lot of a Lutheran church I asked him to roll down his window. I wanted to tell a woman sweeping the nearby sidewalk to be careful because there was a shooting in the area. Smiling, she thanked us. But as we pulled away it didn’t seem she took the situation too seriously.

Image via Wikipedia

(Am I the only person with a vivid imagination approaching that of Stephen King‘s? Tell me there’s a shooter walking around blasting gunshots willy-nilly, and I know to run for my life…away from the action!!!)

Leaving town, my husband and I commented on how surreal everything seemed. Everyone going about their business, including us, with only several handfuls of people at the heart of the shooting, caught up in a life and death situation. News reports trickled in from the car radio. And when I stopped in at the flea market where my friend Cindy had rented a table, my husband searched for news of the shooting on his laptop.

Shaken by the news, Cindy immediately called home to ascertain the whereabouts of her 2 high-school children. Thankfully neither were attending any of the scheduled activities held yesterday. According to the news, a football game had been underway when the shooting commenced. Coaches were instructed to hunker down under the bleachers with their players, along with those watching the game, until given the all clear by the police.

Not only did I share the news with Cindy, but using my cellphone I also called a neighbor and alerted her to what was happening. Her daughter, also a neighbor living across the road from us, often jogs past the high school. Sometimes her young son and daughter accompany her on their bikes.

I also made a call to the veterinarian where I take my cats. Sandy, who answered, said they had no idea that anything untoward was occurring in the streets around them. The office was only a few blocks from the shooting. Before hanging up, Sandy half-jokingly exclaimed that she would lock the door. Heck! I’d have bolted the door and crawled under the desk, or hidden in the back rooms!

Image by kenjonbro via Flickr

Getting home was a trick. We thought we’d stayed away from town long enough, returning in the early afternoon. The news confirmed that the shooter had been killed. But after 2 attempts via the normal routes, we made our way back along the route which we’d taken when exiting town. As expected, the police were stopping cars from entering that way as well. Fortunately the state trooper who peered into my husband’s window let us pass when told where we lived. Otherwise we’d arranged to chill at friend Sylvia’s, the next town over, until permitted to return home.

What we learned from the evening news is that the shooter was a 51 year-old man who parked his car at the intersection of our town’s main road and the road leading into the middle-school. Exiting his car with a couple of shotguns, he made his way through the school compound, over the hill and past the community center, headed toward the elementary school and the nearby high school. Somewhere along the way the shooter began blasting.

A young boy standing within in gunshot range, felt the bullets whizzing past. He high-tailed it home. A man who was also interviewed in the broadcast said that when he stepped outside at the sound of gun shots, he saw a group of teens running towards him. Once they gathered inside his locked garage, the man said some of the boys were so shaken, they wanted to vomit. One asked if the man was prepared with guns of his own if confronted by the shooter. The reply? In a town like ours, who’d have thought guns were necessary.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m certain the fact that a shooting range located behind the high school, having been there for many years, will not figure into what happened yesterday. But for one who has never grown up around firearms, the range’s presence in our midst remains disconcerting.

On September 10th when my husband and I flew to Amsterdam enroute to Southamtpon, England where we boarded the Queen Mary II for a dream vacation, we were glad, as was our daughter, that we wouldn’t be touching down in the U.S. on 9/11. Like everyone else we were skittish about air travel on the anniversary of the “Mother” of all terrorist attacks. Needless to say, Americans everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Times have changed. Life holds little value for some. (As yet, the shooter’s motive has not been determined.) And with that reality, all our lives are on the line…everyday…everywhere. Now I understand how the Israeli people have managed to eke out a semblance of normalcy amidst the daily threat of being extinguished.

…life is precious…a gift, really…to be treasured…until destined to be returned…

………hugmamma.

in the aftermath…#4

Posted on May 5, 2011 by hugmamma

Image via Wikipedia

This, the final post in the series, speaks directly to how Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda came to undermine their own efforts in waging war against America. They like others who use their own people as pawns to acquire what they desire, at any expense, proverbially “shot themselves in the foot” and “cut off their noses to spite their faces.” How is it that many with power feel they can forever hold an axe to their victims’ necks, without realizing the possibility, however slim, that the axe will ricochet cutting off the head of the one wielding it? I think working at long-term compromise to satisfy everyone’s needs is truly better for everyone’s health, welfare… and survival. Easier said than done…but worth a try. Better than the alternative…don’t you think?

The Slaughter That Muslims Could Not Ignore
by Reuel Marc Gerecht

Like all fundamentalists, Osama bin Laden was attuned to the past. When his speeches weren’t about the economic decline of America, they recalled Islam’s classical age, especially the rise of the Prophet Muhammad through the Rashidun (“rightly-guided”) period, which ended in 661.

Bin Laden saw himself as an Islamic Martin Luther: a protestant who was willing to go to war with the Muslim world‘s Westernized, U.S.-aided kings and presidents-for-life. He hoped to arouse, by the strength of his example, a global movement that would drive the U.S., the cutting edge of the West, out of the Muslim world. Showing American feebleness would bring the inevitable collapse of the unrighteous and the restoration of a more virtuous age.

He sustained himself for so long in the Middle East and Central Asia because lots of Muslims–especially in powerful places in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan–were sympathetic to his cause. For a time, he tapped into an angry, shameful intellectual current among Muslims, who after World War II were increasingly immiserated by their ever more lawless rulers.

The Westernized police-states (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) and the corrupt “Playboy” monarchies (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Jordan and Morocco) all became breeding grounds for violent fundamentalism. And even among most Muslims, who did not drink deeply of this creed, the spiritual depression and conspiracy-mongering of these societies made bin Laden an admired celebrity, if not a hero, since he at least scared and hurt the all-powerful United States and openly belittled the detested autocrats.

Image via Wikipedia

Historically, Islamic societies have had a fairly high tolerance for the use of violence for a just cause. Bin Laden knew well the line of thought that sees rebellion against unjust rulers as a moral obligation. This was a defining theme of early Islamic history, when Muslims as a community wrestled with what constituted legitimate authority after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Among the Arabs, Princeton’s Michael Cook has written, “political and military participation were very widely spread, far more so than in the mainstream of human societies–whether those of the steppe nomads, the later Islamic world, or the modern West. It was the fusion of this egalitarian and activist tribal ethos with the monotheist tradition that gave Islam its distinctive political character. In no other civilization was rebellion for conscience sake so widespread as it was in the early centuries of Islamic history; no other major religious tradition has lent itself to revival as a political ideology–and not just a political identity–in the modern world.”

Image by Guillaume Cattiaux via Flickr

Bin Laden, who believed that only the most virtuous had the right to rule over the community, was undone by his love of violence. He pushed it too far: Slaughtering innocent Africans in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 was tolerable since the targets were American embassies (and black Muslim Africans were too far from the Arab world to compel a scathing moral critique). Killing American sailors on the USS Cole in the port of Aden was praiseworthy since no modern Muslim power had ever so humbled an American man-of-war. And destroying the Twin Towers and punching a hole in the Pentagon was just astonishing.

But then came the slaughter that could not be ignored, as al Qaeda affiliates started killing in Muslim lands. The suicide bombers who hit Casablanca in 2003 and Amman in 2005 made an impact. But the war in Iraq was bin Laden’s great moral undoing.

Iraq was supposed to be where al Qaeda and other “good Muslims” broke the American back. Instead the carnage there, carried in all its gore by Arabic satellite channels, produced a backlash. There was a limit to the number of Shiite women and children that Sunni Arabs could see murdered. Blowing up hospitals, mosques and shrines–even Shiite ones–became too ghastly to sublimate into an acceptable war against the Americans.

Al Qaeda had helped to provoke one of the worst bloodlettings in contemporary Arab history. Voices within Islam began to rise against its ruthlessness. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s intellectual, knew that his kind had gone too far but there was little that he or bin Laden could do once the jihadist beast had been let loose.

In Iraq, al Qaeda effectively became a takfiri movement: Holy warriors “legitimately” slaughtered other Muslims because they deemed them no longer Muslim but kuffar, infidels, who may be killed in conflict. Bloody takfiri movements can outlast one inspirational leader, but they never win.

It’s entirely possible that if the Taliban win in Afghanistan, al Qaeda could get a new lease on life. The Pakistani and Afghan Taliban movements have absorbed much of the ideology that ignited al Qaeda in the early 1990s. The operational support–free passage and refuge–that Iran gave to al Qaeda before and after 9/11 is probably still there if al Qaeda can organize itself into an effective strike force, especially against Saudi Arabia. And Zawahiri has long been Tehran’s favorite Sunni holy warrior. He certainly has the ability and perhaps the means to maintain al Qaeda’s global networks.

Image by Tom Szustek via Flickr

But networks must be nourished. If this spring’s great Arab Revolt continues–if the brutalized societies of the Middle East can establish more lawful, representative governments, if their ethics can recover from the years of powerlessness, shame and conspiracy–then al Qaeda will surely lose its future among the Arabs.

It may raise its head now and then. If it could get its hands on the right type of weapons and the deranged young men to use them, it could still kill on an impressive scale. But the group will most likely wither, perhaps rapidly, as Sunni Arabs construct a moral universe in which militants cn no longer compellingly call upon Islamic history to justify rebellion. Bin Laden understandably loathed democracy: It’s the end of the political and ethical order where his world makes sense.

(Mr. Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is the author of “The Wave: Man, God and the Ballot Box in the Middle East”-Hoover, 2011.)

in the aftermath…#1

Posted on May 3, 2011 by hugmamma

President Obama confirms death of Osama bin Laden

Just as the media was rife with coverage of the royal wedding, so now the spinmeisters are squeezing every last bit of life out of the latest news, Osama bin Laden’s demise. All the details have been revealed and recycled ad nauseum. So too have the endless probing questions put forth by the journalists. It’s made me realize that they’re just doing their jobs, as we all are, prince and princesses, presidents, housewives, reporters. So rather than regurgitate the known facts, I prefer to share some insightful opinions from different perspectives.

Obama’s Finest Hour
by Bret Stephens

There was only one discordant note in Barack Obama’s otherwise masterly speech Sunday night announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden. It came when the president invoked the word “justice” to describe what had just been done to the architect of 9/11.

It wasn’t quite the word he was looking for. But actions speak louder than words.

Justice as we in the West have come to know it, requires due process. It takes place in a courtroom under the supervision of a judge. Prosecutors must prove their case; defendants are entitled to a competent defense; rules of evidence and procedure must scrupulously be followed. A jury must render its verdict. Punishment can be neither cruel nor unusual.

Image via Wikipedia

This is the sort of justice the hapless Attorney General Eric Holder had in mind when he sought to have bin Laden’s operational lieutenant, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, tried in a civilian Manhattan courthouse. The people of New York City revolted. KSM will now get better than he deserves in a military tribunal.

As for bin Laden, what was meted out to him was vengeance. Vengeance pure and simple, sweet and sound. Vengeance cathartic, uplifting, necessary and right. Got a problem with that?

I don’t. Nor did the people who poured into the streets Sunday night to cheer outside the White House, or the crowd I saw Monday morning as I walked the perimeter of Ground Zero.

“Why does everyone root for the avenger in feature films?” asks my friend Thane Rosenbaum, who teaches law at Fordham and is writing a book about revenge. “Is it because people are immoral in the dark, or is it because we all realize that the avenger’s quest and duty is righteous and true?”

Thane’s point isn’t that vengeance is better than justice. It’s that there can be no true justice without vengeance. Oddly enough, this is something Barack Obama, Chicago liberal, seems to better grasp than George W. Bush, Texas cowboy.

The former president was fond of dilating on the point, as he put it just after 9/11, that “ours is a nation that does not seek revenge, but we do seek justice.” What on Earth did that mean? Of course we sought revenge. “Ridding the world of evil,” Mr. Bush’s other oft-stated ambition, was nonsense if we didn’t make a credible go of ridding the world of the very specific evil named Osama bin Laden.

For all of Mr. Bush’s successes–and yes, there were a few, including the vengeance served that other specific evil known as Saddam Hussein and those Gitmo interrogations that yielded bin Laden’s location–you can trace the decline of his presidency from the moment he said, in March 2002, that “I really don’t care (where bin Laden is). It’s not that important.

Outside of White House after death of Osama bi...

Wrong. It was of the essence. Americans didn’t merely want to be secured against another attack–an achievement experienced only in the absence of fresh outrages and appreciated only in hindsight. Americans wanted vengeance. It’s what they had wanted after Pearl Harbor, too: what took the Marines up Mt. Suribach, the Rangers up Point du Hoc. Revenge is a glue that holds a fractious nation together in the service of a great and arduous cause.

Mr. Obama, for all his talk of justice, understands this. Or, in the education that is the presidency, he has come to understand it. Maybe it’s true, as his critics allege, that his steady focus on finding bin Laden was done for the sake of declaring victory in the war on terror so that he could start rolling up America’s commitments in Afghanistan. If this is his “Mission Accomplished” moment, he will come to regret it.

But I doubt Mr. Obama is that dumb. Nor is there any reason not to take him at his word when he said Sunday that bin Laden’s death “does not mark the end of our effort.” Osama is dead; his franchisees carry on. Count on a self-styled bin Laden Martyrs’ Brigade to take credit for whatever terrorist atrocity comes next.

But even if it does, it will lack the sinister potency of previous attacks. The air of mystery that sustained al Quaeda all the way through Sunday night has finally been laid bare, and it looks like an ugly house that can be located in seconds on Google Maps.

Here is something that Mr. Obama, more than most Western leaders, deeply understands: Symbolism matters. It matters that the ultimate symbol of Islamist rage did not wear a ring of invisibility. It matters that he was taken out not by a laser-guided bomb, but by American fighting men whose names we may someday know. It matters that the story of 9/11 has been brought full circle, even as the fight against terrorists carries on.

Image via Wikipedia

There’s been a whiff of sour grapes in some of the right-wing commentary about the president’s speech. Too much emphasis on the first-person pronoun, not enough credit to President Bush, and so on. It’s unbecoming. If ever there was a doubt about just how American Mr. Obama is, Sunday’s raid eliminates it better than any long-form birth certificate. This was his finest hour. It’s for the rest of us, avenged at long last, to rejoice.

(Write to bstephens@wsj.com)