Family Weekend in the Country; 9/11 One Year Later; Regional Politics Selected Issues; 
State of the World at the High Holidays: On Internet Connectivity, Evil, Knowledge and the Ever-Increasing Value of 1:1 Human Relations. 

Most of the gang. Getting everyone together for a picture is Impossible.

Cute photo, eh?

Global Thoughts.   I haven’t written lately because I’d rather not write than write trite. Much of what is important to know is out there in print, but it is the synthesis and spin that makes GlobalThoughts unique.

What has changed during the past year and, indeed, did 9/11/01 represent a change in anything?

Economics. Jobs left downtown but residents are returning. Economic performance is down because of the Internet bubble that burst and the wave of corporate scandal that proved the bubble’s existence across the board. Even Martha Stewart and GE were popped bubbles. Enron was the country’s 7th largest company, and that was nothing compared to Worldcom. The biggest economic danger right now is deflation – prices in some sectors seem to be dropping. Real estate is overvalued; I have warned about this for awhile. It is the next bubble to burst.

Security. We are beginning to realize how naked we are, securitywise. We are more alert and catching more suspicious things. The problem with airport security is that we are finding electric shavers inside passenger baggage but not things that people want to hide. And someone with 10 syringes claiming they are filled with insulin will get through without question but someone with nail clippers will get frisked and have his goods confiscated. It is more stupid than safe because we are still screening things according to lists, not people based on intuition. Because the determined terrorist will still win. It is not very comforting to feel that at least next time we will be caught because we missed something and not because we weren’t watching. Prediction: The next terrorist attack on an airplane will not come from a passenger but from checked luggage. Such a bomb will probably kill the Airbus double-decker jumbo-jet program.

US Foreign Policy. We still prefer to react to crisis than invest in the future to avoid crisis. We are doing only the minimum in Afghanistan and the world sees a puppet running the city-state of Kabul and knows he wouldn’t last through lunch without his contingent of American bodyguards. The picture fills leaders of nations with a lack of confidence that America will know what to do after it tears Iraq apart.

American Moslems. It was inevitable that racial profiling would begin and that non-Moslem Americans would become suspicious of all Moslems as it became clear that supporters of Al-Qaeda were hiding within Moslem communities inside America. A year ago I immediately suggested that the amount of the fear would be inversely proportional to the extent that the Moslem community took the lead in exposing these people and condemning their actions. Americans feel that Moslem and community leaders, both in Saudi Arabia and inside America, missed the opportunity to get in front of the issue quickly and are paying the inevitable price. Regardless of the logic involved, the result will be that Moslems in America will become more insular like their counterparts in Europe and the danger to America from alienated Moslems inside America will increase. Remember that half of the 19 hijackers were alienated Moslems living in Europe that were radicalized in Europe (the rest were Moslems from Arab countries) that came to America and did most of the creative work that led to 9/11.

Bush.   I always joke with customs agents when they see me carrying my own pillow: “The Leader of the Free World also carries his own pillow.” Bush, they say, is not so smart. Well, I answer, maybe that isn’t such a good example. If you’ve noticed, Bush always has a sign up next to his podium telling you some kind of message of the day to put a one-liner behind the subject of the news conference. He recently had a press conference standing in front of Mount Rushmore and actually had a poster of Mount Rushmore behind his podium right in front of Mount Rushmore. Sometimes, you just wonder, like duh? I’m just waiting for the press conference that features him in front of a huge poster that says “Press Conference” with a picture of a lectern on it.

Pakstian / India.  There is a big story going on here. US planes are being shot at more on the Pakistani side of the border than is known. The Pakistani side of the border is housing many hostile elements that are not being controlled by the Pakistani government. I think Musharaf is making a mistake by not letting any democracy in his country and making this month's coming elections a farce; if there would be a real vote, the extremists wouldn’t poll 10% and would be discredited. Instead, they will loom larger than life, feed on whatever discontent exists, and eventually kill him. There will be elections this month in Kashmir and hopefully it will lead to peacetalks afterward. The Indians realized this past summer that saber rattling with regard to Kashmir was endangering any foreign investment in their IT sector because companies didn’t want to be associated with an increasingly unstable region on the verge of a nuclear war and were threatening to pull out of the country. There will be a good chance this year to settle the Kashmir conflict if Musharaf doesn’t insist on playing games with Kashmir in order to keep his extremists at bay – in other words, if Musharaf doesn’t act like Arafat with Hamas.

IRAQ – No doubt in my mind that the US will act forcefully sometime during the next few months, but not before the end of November. I’m not going to try and figure out its military strategy. I assume the Israelis and the Iranians will try to make as little trouble as possible for a while so as not to disrupt the US mission. The best strategy goes for the head of the snake and leaves the physical assets of the country intact. Because Saddam keeps much of his army outside Baghdad because he is afraid of a coup, this actually makes the job easier. Regime change in Iraq holds the following possibilities: (1) A more friendly Iraq will produce lots of oil, decrease Saudi market share and help stabilize the market in the long run, despite any short-term price spike. (2) A more democratic Iraq (and the pressure on Saudi Arabia as a result of (1)) will accelerate change throughout the Arab world. It may prevent Saudi Arabia from turning into a fundamentalist country, which is what I think will happen if the status quo is allowed to continue. Prediction: Saudi Arabia will be under a different sort of government within 5 years; either solidly within the pro-West camp or fundamentalist, but not under the monarchy it has now. (3) The pace of change in Iran will quicken. (4) The Palestinians will lose a major source of financial backing for extremist resistance which has in large part hijacked moderates from pushing leadership toward progress. (5) Syria will not want to be isolated without having gained anything in the transaction and will seek to become more integrated into the region.

Life sucks right now in the Middle East. People know that what they are doing right now is not working for the long term, even if it makes them feel somewhat OK for today. An internationally famous rabbi I sit next to in synagogue who goes around making speeches about how great Israel is tells me privately that he just returned from Israel and is depressed because people in Israel see no future. He himself said he wouldn’t move there right now, no way. My main argument for action is that things in the region are so screwed up that only some kind of Big Bang will shake things up and force real change throughout the region, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The powers that be want things to stay the same and they profit from this mess. It’s good for them; it allows them to do nothing and promises nothing for Real People. Maybe change will not be good; but I think that over the next 5 years, there will be many more beneficiaries than victims in Iraq if the US goes in and gets rid of Saddam. That’s been the case in Afghanistan where a few lives were lost, but many more saved and improved.

This doesn’t mean that the US will manage regime change well and bring about any of the above scenarios. There will be no progress as to item 4 if the Palestinians are still facing Sharon or Bibi leading the Israelis. But these are possibilities and I absolutely believe that within 6 months of some moderate leading the Palestinians, the Israelis will change leaders and perhaps the next leader won’t be a former general but someone who represents the aspirations of Normal Society. One thing is certain: Keeping the status quo in the region will only ensure the threat of nuclear blackmail by a powerful neighborhood bully either directly or via a leak to a friendly ally, nuclear buildup by everyone else who will be afraid to do otherwise, a certain security for parochial self-serving monarchies that have no interest in bringing about progress, and keeping alive the main source of funding that permits extremists and governments to hijack the Palestinian issue to divert attention away from anything else for everyone in the region.

Should the US act unilaterally? The UN has been ignored by Iraq for the past decade. Several countries on the security council have tried to play both ends of the game with Iraq. At the end of the day, more than half the US Dollars in circulation in the world are held outside the US.  9/11 reminded the world that rogues with bombs and hostile intent are a danger to the US and to everyone else because we all rely on the stability of the American system. In the years leading up to World War II, there were similar cautions by mulilateralists and isolationists, each for their own reasons, but it was American action in a war that had no reason to involve them until they were attacked that was ultimately necessary to bring about a new generation of renewal in Europe and Asia. France and Russia can debate all they want, but they cannot accomplish change in the Middle East or anywhere else. They can cause trouble, but they have more to gain over the long haul by cooperating. I think both countries get the point now and the changes in France, Denmark and Italy have been noticeable. I expect Germany will get with the program after their elections.

A few thoughts about what people think they know: It is important to realize how much money Iraq is spending in the region paying off journalists and government officials. Ministers in Jordan are receiving new Mercedes cars paid by Iraq; journalists are being given huge bribes to guarantee favorable press coverage. This is documented stuff; not fluffy allegations. We know the Saudis paid Al Qaeda $300 million a number of years ago to promise not to bomb Saudi targets. Remember that money makes things go round in this region. It’s not something we read about in the newspapers. You won’t read these facts in those Arab newspapers which are not free and where payola dictates what gets printed. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about what’s in the Arab press. But realize that agendas are at work here. And as long as people as high as Saudia’s Abdullah are relying on such media to get his information about what is going on here (see detail later) and actively permit their media to be used as propaganda to divert attention from real news and debate about real issues, something will always be out of sync.

I know of a family in Pakistan whose kids heard in their Madrassah that on 9/11 4,000 Jews didn’t go to work in the World Trade Center because they were told not to come. This rumor has been making the rounds all over the Middle East during the past year and I suppose that as many Moslems believe it is true as Blacks in Los Angeles still believe that OJ Simpson is innocent of murdering his wife. The parents explained to their kids that this was ridiculous. Some omnipotent organization would have had to gather such a list of Jews (Jews themselves can hardly come up with such lists in today’s American assimiliated society), call up 4,000 people spread across hundreds of companies in these buildings, make all these calls in one night without anyone raising any suspicions to tell anyone else, and then afterward no one can name a single person who was told not to go to work that day. The kids raised the point in school the next day. The parents were called by the Madrassah and told to stop challenging the propaganda or that their kids would be ostracized. 

What does this mean in the context of 9/11?

America looks at this, asks why Moslems hate us and figures it's all about propaganda and that the solution is to start selling US Foreign Policy the same way we sell Big Macs. No wonder we haven’t made any friends in the region this past year and instead have created even more resentment and instability, especially with all this talk of unilateral action.

9/11 was a result of America’s failure to engage the rest of the world in a full way. America engaged the world partially (ie: comes in and busts up a place and then withdraws leaving people to their own devices which leads to chaos), and was resented for it. America was faulted for cheerleading values but applying them selectively with double standards. It is not that America tried to avoid the world and the world came to it or that America was too involved in the world and the world struck back. It was the backlash of an inconsistent policy that came back to haunt America. That is my assessment as to why 9/11 happened. 

What follows is that America is wasting its money and effort trying to comb every last sand dune in Afghanistan and Pakistan hunting for Taliban. To listen to our generals speaking to the troops in Afghanistan put it, "You boys are there to kill Taliban." We are not going to find many Taliban and I hear the Afghans are starting to throw rocks instead of rice at our special forces guys in the hinterlands; we are overstaying our welcome if we are only going to have a peace force in Kabul and hunt Taliban everywhere else. We should expand the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan because that aspect of the operation has popular support. Beyond that, we would be much better off (and it would be much cheaper) funding schools in these and other countries and improving the lives of people so that they wouldn’t want to shelter and support these people. That Saudi or Iranian funded Madrassah in Pakistan wouldn’t be there had the US put money into Pakistan education instead of abandoning the country during the 80's leaving them with an education system in tatters. Forget about PR – focus on the policy itself. Our policy needs to be more dynamic. The Bush Administration is filled with cold-warriers left over from the Reagan years who know the world has changed but are still clueless to deal with it. The Democrats don’t have any ideas either; they will run simply on the idea that the economy has soured since the Republicans took over (a fact which isn’t true but which will sell well in the coming elections).

We’re not that bad and the people judging us are not perfect either. Remember how all the Arabs warned against change in Afghanistan. When the Taliban were thrown out, the people partied and it became open season against the Arabs who in fact were the foreigners screwing up Afghanistan. We could do better but at least you know that when you see American soldiers sitting in Afghanistan, you see Blacks, Whites, Women, Hispanics, Asians, etc. (Think of that Taliban dude being guarded by a blond soldier holding a machine gun. Our women drive helicopters, not just cars.)  They are keeping the peace in an area where the various factions who live there can’t figure out on their own how to get along. We have a society in which people get along. Democracy and religious pluralism is a messy system, but it still works better than the other systems. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Our challenge ought to be to help people realize democracy and not excuse the lack of it because some dictator we are aligned with says that his people aren’t suitable for democracy. I think that over the past year America has become more sensitive in this regard; the governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are getting the cold shoulder from us because of it. This may ultimately work to the benefit of the people of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I have written angry words about the government and condition of Saudi Arabia this year but I have not meant to offend the people of Saudi Arabia.  Instead of getting angry at each other, we ought to be talking more because, on a personal level, we do want the people of these countries to succeed and be our friends, not just because it is conducive to security and economy, but because we are all good people who share common values, university, enjoy the same DVD’s, fast food and Disney World, love our families, and we should remain friends.

I just bought several copies of a photograph that appeared from the AP in mid-August, one for myself, one to send to the family of an officer who served in Afghanistan, and one to hang in my niece’s bedroom. The picture shows a little Afghan girl catching a softball and she is doing so with great determination in her eyes. She is the only girl with a catcher’s mitt and she has now been allowed to practice on the sidelines of the boy’s team; a girl’s team is soon to be formed. This is inspiring to me; it is the side of America and humanity I want to believe in, even if it is somewhat romantic. It means that anyone can be what they want to be, and that America is a force in the world to help people be all they can be. We are not perfect in our actions, but it is an ideal we all share in our hearts which is why the bottom line is that the people of the world do like Americans.

ISRAEL/PALESTINIAN AFFAIRS

America hardly understands Israel or Arabs, but right now is not acting as a broker in the region; this administration has sided with Israel. It is a strange breed of people that have joined hands that have come to dominate this administration. There were more Jews in Clinton’s administration and the Clinton administration was more balanced with regard to the Israel-Palestinian issue; in this case, you have Christian evangelicals who show up to Jewish rallies for Israel and say things the Jews wouldn’t dare say out loud. That is not in America’s long term interest because Israel is not America, and the Jews will ultimately pay a price for this temporary imbalance because it is not natural although it is providing a temporary benefit. But these close ties are necessary right now because close coordination is useful toward getting rid of Saddam. Because the Arabs are supposedly not going to be part of an anti-Saddam coalition, it actually makes it easier for the Americans and Israelis to coordinate. But really – don’t believe everything you hear. When the Americans hit Iraq a few weeks ago, the Saudis provided the air cover even though publicly all the talk is that of non-cooperation. When push comes to shove and the end game is in sight, everyone in the region will get behind the American program and I assume the Israelis will stay out unless they have to get involved; why take the risk of landing a punch when Big Daddy has come to the playground to get rid of the bully.

The root of the existing problem here is that Bush, Sharon, Barak and Yaalon (the new chief of staff who seems to be rather robotic) all seek to REACT to the Palestinian issue, not SOLVE it. The debate in Israel today is between those who view Palestinians as a Cancer that is incurable or a Virus that can be vaccinated against. A disease carries no legitimacy. If the Palestinian issue will be viewed solely as a disease and not as a competing interest that requires engagement, compromise and accommodation, it can never be solved. This is a psychological thing and Israelis both on the Left and Right have yet to get over this hurdle. Even the bleeding-heart Left insists on imposing solutions because “they know better what is good for them.” The Arabs find this patronizing and are not sure they can deal with such people any better than the Right-wing fanatic who at least makes no effort to camouflage his attitude of superior hostility and determination not to budge. This arena will simmer for awhile while Palestinians work out their affairs and decide who represents them when the deck of cards in the region is reshuffled and they determine what they want to achieve and where they stand in the scheme of things. No doubt they are in the process of re-examining old assumptions and making adjustments. More than anything, they are in the process of figuring out what they truly want, something the Oslo process didn’t force them to come to grips with. I believe Dahlan who says that the dance of death is coming toward the end; the last 2 years was a waste but it was part of the shakeout that was inevitable. Progress is being made here and I am optimistic. The Israelis are realizing Jerusalem is not a united city; the Palestinians are realizing they can't talk about the right of return to pre-1948 Israel, and the world is just bored with the whole conflict and so neither side can get any attention or sympathy from outside unless they face each other and get down to business. Yes, it can get better than this.

STATE OF THE WORLD

A disturbing trend – the world is more interconnected with regard to information via the Internet and satellite television than ever before, but people are tuning into the versions of the truth they want most to believe and this is leading to less understanding than ever before. Someone met this year with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah who doesn’t speak English and who holds court in a big room with 20 TV screens tuned to all the Arab satellite TV stations for his news about the region. The view of the region from Al-Jazeerah is quite different from that of the BBC or CNN or even ANN (Arab News Network). This person wound up having a long talk with Abdullah and was amazed at things Abdullah didn’t know. I personally know this kind of thing is true, because I have visited places where people don’t get their news from anything beyond local official sources and are completely ignorant about certain things. By the way, this is true among Jews in America who only want to view the Middle East via their favorite website. Right now it is in fashion for Right-wing Jews to boycott major metropolitan newspapers as "anti-semitic." No matter that half the writers and editors are Jewish. I have met important  leaders of major organizations who say they don’t read the New York Times or the Economist because it’s “anti-Semitic.” It has become a bit nutty. My personal view is that I read anything with news that is reliable, whether or not I agree with the political point of view. I wrote about this disturbing phenomenon in Global Thoughts: Musings / Media Bias 20 January 2001.

Some good books I'm reading: Tom Friedman's Longititudes and Attitudes, a collection of recent columns and diary of things that inspired those columns. I really think he gets it. Another book: What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis, reknown Middle East historian.
 

Tonight is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. It is a time of repentance, charity, prayer and fasting, much like Ramadan for those who take it seriously. I pray not only for the peace of my family and the House of Israel, but for all of the people in the world – not only in the abstract, but for the people who I know personally and their families. It is believed that on Yom Kippur God seals the fate of all mankind, not just the Jews. It is a time to take stock of where one is in his or her life and to look at the broader scheme of things in the world.

Last week during Rosh Hashana (the New Year), the Bible reading is, as it is every year, the chapter from Genesis about the Sacrifice of Isaac. It takes on a special meaning this year because Abraham wanted to sacrifice his son but the angel of God pulled him back saying in 22:12 “Do not stretch out your hand against the lad nor do anything to him for now I know that you are a God fearing man, since you have not withheld your son, your only one, from Me.” You could read this two ways: (1) Child sacrifice is good because the fact that Abraham was willing to do it showed his perfect faith. (2) Child sacrifice is not good because God told him that the willingness to do it was worth more than the actual doing of it. I think that the conventional interpretation is the second one. I don’t know how Moslems extremists read this, but I suppose that moderate Moslems also follow the second interpretation. Notice that, in any event, there is nothing here about someone committing suicide as part of a jihad against someone else; it is an isolated incident based solely on the attestation of faith to God in an allegorical sense, especially since God puts a stop to the activity which he himself had proposed.

There is another story involving Abraham which is instructive to Global Thoughts and which I think also takes on particular meaning this year. Abraham beholds the city of Sodom and Gemorah, defined as Ultimate Evil in his day. He yet begs God to save the city if he can even find 50 good men, or 40, 30, 20, 10 or even just one. Having found not one, God destroys the city. It is a lesson that sometimes Evil exists and must be eradicated and that the result is inescapable, despite Koffi Annan or Abraham’s protests to the contrary.

We live in a world today where 9/11 forced a sleeping giant and the rest of mankind to confront the manifestation of an evil act that few could have imagined. It has forced us all to change something in our lives because we are being forced to imagine all kinds of possible evil things that could happen. It brings out the darker side of good people, because people are now suspicious of each other, prejudices find some justification in reality, and because evildoers are willing to take advantage of the weakness of our better nature to do things that we believe are beyond the pale of civilized people. It forces divisions and makes people want to retreat into their tree houses and avoid engaging others. “Who needs them; we can live without them; we should have known all along that they are no good” are the common refrains on all sides.

If we shall do this, we shall give Bin Laden his ultimate victory. He wants Moslems in America and all over to be ostracized and forced by the rest of the world to retreat into their own world and he wants everyone in the world to sit home or in a mosque reading the Koran, hate anyone remotely different than himself, and die. This one sentence to me sums up his whole ideology. It is a flash in the pan for anyone who takes him up on it -- a promise of eternal glory in a world we don’t live to experience and do not know exists, but there can be no future in this world we do know exists in death, stagnation, hate and isolation. I think the cult of martyrdom has hit its peak in Palestine; the people are too educated to go on for too long believing that the past two years has done anything for their cause besides turning back the clock 15 years and bringing Sharon to power. The Iranian youth want their futures back; only the Saudis are so alienated that they are on the verge of first tasting the fruits of Islamic fundamentalist revolution before they realize it is fruit from the Tree of Knowledge – it will make them realize the nakedness of their idealized society in the face of the rest of the world’s presence and progress. Think back about Adam and Eve; they ate the apple which was to make them know the Meaning of Life and then realized their nakedness and then found they couldn’t hide from God. What does it mean to us today?

These stories mean something today. They mean that we can’t retreat to our tree-houses post 9/11 and say we are angry, no one understands us and it would be better to avoid the rest of the world. Rather, we must stay engaged and keep the lines open. The Internet is useful to an extent but it also lies, just as we have learned over the years that the camera lies. Real information exchange still comes face-to-face, mano-a-mano, and we must allow for a world with shades of grey and seek solutions that are adequate if not entirely just and perfect instead of waiting for all the cosmos to be in perfect alignment before we do anything. You cannot substitute the efficiency of technology for the warmth of humanity, either in terms of intelligence gathering, security screening, or just plain understanding what people are thinking and intending. There is no Tree of Knowledge that contains all the simple answers to our complex world in one fruit. Try to imagine you can eat that fruit and know all, and you will only come to realize how much you truly don’t know. The fundamentalist doesn’t believe – he is sure that he Knows. Therein lies the crux of the matter. He cannot live with contradiction on such heavy issues; better to die by it.

I am not against Islam; a modern political state based on Islamic principles would be an important addition to the world. The Jews still haven’t figured out how to combine religion and politics in Israel; the West is religiously secular and anyone who travels in the region realizes that secular Moslems are more religious than secular Christians or Jews. I was hoping that Pakistan might figure out a balance, but Musharraf is not looking for balance. But look in India, Indonesia and Malaysia and you can see that democracies with Moslem majorities can work; there are conflicts in these countries, but they are resolved in conventional ways. 

One more Yom Kippur thought. At the height of the fast when we feel weak, pure and righteous, we sit for half an hour every year and read aloud the story of Jonah (you know, Jonah and the Whale). He wanted God to destroy the nation of Nineveh that he thought was evil. Jonah wound up inside the whale as a punishment because he was more interested in imposing his version of heavenly justice than in trying to cope with humanity. He ultimately was so angry that he was willing to die and let God destroy the vine of shade that had grown around his treehouse to shield him from the burning sun. It is clear from the text that God didn't approve of his self-righteous attitude, either in wanting Nineveh to be destroyed, or even for him to enjoy the vine and then let God destroy that too. Jonah was sort a fundamentalist of his time, and the kind we see today who values death over life. The point of the story is that there was good and evil in his day as is ours, but neither God nor Man must want destruction of mankind or for even his designated prophet to be excessively self-righteous about it. We are not supposed to be running around feeling superior to others and trying to impose on them; we are supposed to figure out how to get along and keep the peace. God wants us to work these things out on Earth among ourselves. Anyone who thinks he knows better will have to contend with God, be he thrown over a ship into the seas and the waiting whale, or be he in a cave in Afghanistan. Fundamentalists of all stripes and religions beware.
 

Now is a time of great decision. America will do things in the world that will affect your life, no matter where you sit. Even in Switzerland, a bad NASDAQ day ruins your day and a plane hitting the World Trade Center could set you back for months because we’re all in this economy together. That’s what my Swiss friend told me last time I visited Zurich. I haven’t been out enough talking to people this past year and, while the passage of time permits people to cool off and gather context, it is past due to make the rounds. So on this anniversary of 9/11, I am planning a new journey to visit my amigos in Europe and the Middle East to listen to what they have to say about the state of the world, share ideas, and ultimately report back to you what it means to me. This past year I haven’t gotten a whole lot of mail from the Middle East and I feel a bit in a vacuum trying to figure out what Real People have to say about it. The last time I felt this way was the summer of 2000 and I failed to properly anticipate the buildup that led to the Al-Aksa Intifada that September. So it is best to make the rounds and keep current. 

Whether or not I see 50, 40, 30, 10 or even 1 person, and whether or not it is 50, 40 or 10 people who read Global Thoughts, if we are out there contributing on a personal level to increase the level of understanding among our colleagues that are blessed with the ability to communicate and travel across national borders, it is a small dose of balance toward peace injected into the world that makes life a bit more worthwhile and meaningful beyond one’s self and the work he does for his daily bread. It is motivation and justification to keep moving forward. I hope those reading this feel similarly.

I sometimes feel that we don’t get what we pray for because we don’t really know what we truly want. I wish everyone this year that when they figure out what they really want, they will get it.

A pier in Pointe au Pic, Quebec on a foggy Sunday morning. Right now I am listening to a song that says "All the world is a narrow bridge; the essential thing is to cross it without fear."