Heart Happy (cathy_edgett) wrote,
Heart Happy
cathy_edgett

thoughts -




It is gray here again today, misty, cold.   I am enjoying going back through my journal, reviewing my posts.  In November 2007, I was reading Andy Rooney's book, Out of My Mind.  I still find the following excerpt an incentive to look at why we are doing what we are doing.  The thought that LJ was not a given mobilized me to look at past postings and consider what I want to preserve, while I also was very aware of impermanence and how, in some ways, none of this matters, even as it does.  This morning I rose at 3 to meditate, felt called, and I found myself feeling stretched like taffy on stars.  I wonder how many times we are folded, how deeply we can allow ourselves to touch and be touched.


Andy Rooney:


    I boiled over when reporters started using the word "troops" as a synonym for "soldiers."  "Our troops," they'd say.  One reporter said, "Seven American troops were captured."  A troop is not a soldier.  A troop is a group of soldiers and several groups of soldiers were not captured. 

    I'm at a loss to know what to think or write about
Iraq
. We have found no evidence that Saddam had the weapons we went there to eliminate.  It's embarrassing.  It seems likely that if we keep looking, we're going to find some barrels of toxic substances somewhere but nothing with which Saddam could have mounted a massive attack - least of all on us.  

   
The
United States is standing guard now in Iraq but why, with Saddam Hussein gone, is not clear.  I remember a story about a Russian czar who was walking in his palace garden one day and wondered why there was always a soldier standing guard near one little patch of grass.  He asked the guard, but the guard, didn't know anything except that his captain had ordered him to stand there.  The czar went to the captain and asked him, but all the captain knew was that the guard was there because there had always been a guard there.

    The czar looked into the story further and found that Catherine the Great, in a previous century, had planted a rosebush where the patch of grass was and ordered a sentry stationed there to make sure no one stepped on the bush.  The rosebush had died fifty years before but no one in charge ever thought to say it didn't need to be guarded any longer.

    I don't know what I think, but I know I hope we don't stand guard in
Iraq
after the rosebush dies.

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