h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

otay.

Yeah. I hate restaurants. I never served. I always cooked and washed.

With reference to your relationship...to heck with what anyone else thinks.

With reference to the bombing thing, I refer you to the reactions and thoughts of the people of London during the blitz...morale doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be there.

Amazingly enough- it's there. People refuse to give up on life, and it's wonderful. Jeruslaem doesn't look the same now, much more quiet in the evenings, but life is more powerful than anything.

Well, it can't be as bad as 70CE...

What's 70CE and why compare?
It's bad. It's VERY bad. 15 people just died an hour ago. I can't see how anyone can say that because someone else had it bad, they it's bad for them now isn't that bad.
It's bad. Just is.
Same with the people of London dutring the Blitz. It doesn't make it better that other people have been through horrible times- it's horrible now, too.

Softly, softly.
I sat at work and watched the World Trade Center thing. Seared into my memory forever. But I was also thinking, at the time,"This doesn't happen every day, here. What is it like where it does?"

Otherwise known as AD 70. When the Romans razed the whole city of Jerusalem....

I used to be a Security Guard. An unarmed one. A cold one.
One freezing wet night, when I was thinking of chucking the whole thing, I remembered Lt. Col. Chesty Puller and the Marines at Chosin Reservoir. They were not only frozen, it was colder there then where I was whining, but they were almost surrounded. They had to fight their way out and fight during a controlled retreat. Then I thought, I'm not doing so bad compared to them.

I'm sorry- a trouble shared isn't split, for me, it's doubled.
You didn't get warmer for those people's troubles, did you?
I just don't get this concept.

Maybe it is a product of my upbringing.

To seek consolation in history when I'm in a situation I can't do much about.

Like when I was dealing with a wailing infant, trying to get her to take a bottle. I was weaning her. Her mother was at work and had been breast-feeding up till that night.
I had no one to turn to or talk to, it was just me and the baby.
The only thought that got me through it was,"I'm not the first. Tonight on this planet, I'm probably not the only. There's got to be a way."
Took about a week before she truly settled down. It wasn't clear sailing from there, but it was one hump I was over.

Maybe it's the comparison I'm upset with. Maybe it's 'coz it keeps coming, and not a one-time thing. I don't know.

The human has a "fight or flight" instinct that often has to be restrained. Philosophy and often humor are part of this restraint.
I believe some of your horror is heightened by the fact that if everything had gone according to plan, you would have been gone by now.
And it is kind of hard to "fight" something that your government and police and military can't really pinpoint. You can empathize with the frustration, but you can't rationalize the method. The bombs, the suicides seem to be irrational, random, mean. And they are.
It is a form of blackmail.
And just before Passover. Mean.

Just BEFORE Passover ???
It's been going on through the whole holiday.
I guess you're right- I shouldn't have been here now, but it's also going into a state of war. It'll be the 4th war I've lived to see, and I don't like it. And I don't want to get anyone I know involved in it. And I'm living in the centre of all this hell-break-loose, and I am not even half immuned as I thought I was.
And I hate what this is doing to this country and its people.

I've been watching from afar and reading online at the Arab sites and the Israeli sites and the news sites from all over the world.

I don't think the 1967 borders are an option.

I think Arafat is yanking everybody's chain.

I think Powell and Zinni and Bush are getting tired of him.

Yeretz Israel has been under siege of one form or another since Weizmann set foot in the area. Without an unforeseeable (to me) compromise or a surrender (equally unthinkable), that's the way it is going to be as long as there is an Israel.
But, historically speaking, the people of Israel were under siege in the goyim countries, too.
One of the IDF generals just retired. He was the highest-ranking Orthodox soldier.
He got in trouble a few years back for saying:
(I'm doing this from memory. I think I read it in the Jerusalem Post)
"There are two kinds of people in Israel:
Jews and Gentiles who speak Hebrew."

The anti-semites don't care if you came from the shtetl or the boardroom. Yemen or Britain. It is a racial conflict that involves hate.
I can't understand any of it. It is stupid. There are families who gather to watch the last video tape that their sons made before they waltzed into a public place with a bomb strapped to them. And the Arabs say that oppression produces this. Stupidity produces this.

I wish I could help you somehow. Fight for you. Protect you. Put a stop to all this.

Problem is, everybody else is doing this for us, while we do nothing.
Everybody else knows how to solve our problems.
Even I can tell you how to solve our problems.
But we keep lingering. Why? I really don't know.
And I don't care that people went through the hollocost, even though a big part of my family died there- we don't need excuses. We need action. But I guess that as jews, we're only good for thinking.

Oh, somebody's doing something.
An Islamic congress in Malaysia. Who have now defined Sharon as a terrorist.
Sharon himself, who rejects the idea that he and his government should just stand still and let other's decide for them.
The newspapers are begging for "clear goals".

That "retired" orthodox general I was reading about, whom I would assume has now been called up in some capacity, also quoted
Sir William Francis Butler :
"The nation that insists on drawing a broad line between its fighting ment and its thinking men will find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards."

You are a Sabra, aren't you?
Most girls your age in the US don't even have any idea where Israel is, let alone what is going on there.
I met some when I was in the Army. Their parents had not taught them anything, their schools hadn't either, and the Army certainly wasn't going to bother. It still hadn't gotten over the fact that they were in there in the first place.
I am trying to raise my daughter, who will be twelve next month, to have some idea of what is going on around her.

A Sabra? I'm a native, yes.
I know lots of Americans don't even posses passports, which really IS concerning.
The army changes you, no doubt, makes you grow up fast.
But it's hard to avoid shallowness, which I believe the American culture provides...
And Sharon? I find him somewhat a coward, and somewhat a terrorist. I'm very unhappy with him.

The ones who concern me are the Americans WITH passports, which means they're spreading theirselves across the world.
My father and I were discussing this the other night.
Since the country covers more territory than most of Europe, you can travel from the arctic circle to almost the equator without a passport and remain in the continental US.

I'm sorry to hear your feelings about Sharon. He's showing up on the radar as a peeved fellow who is showing more guts than brains and not letting the lawyers do the talking for him...or the diplomats.
Bush and Powell are getting really upset over the portrayal of Arafat as a victim...or a martyr.
Ahh, I've met a lot of children in uniform around here.
I'm not too clear on the shallowness bit. I might require a definition. I will admit that stupidity seems to be more than hereditary. Some people have to go to college to become stupid, it seems.
What American culture?
They have chili cook-offs and rattlesnake round-ups around here, on the same day.
My daughter , the trombone player, performed with the 6th grade band last night at the Middle School. The band teacher almost fell out during the performance. I took a close look at her after the show, checked her pulse and told her she was not doing any driving. She was red-faced and heaving, looking bad.
Of course, she'd been feeling bad before the show, it was hot in the gym, but when she directed, she gave it the full Toscanini!

I keep losing this thread!

I'm sorry. Anything I can do to help?

Um...
hang a big red flag on it?