Silent Night. Holy Night - Josef Mohr

In the meantime while America divides over the ultimate responsibility and outcome of this theatre of Operation, people like Mrs. Humes speak to the ordinary things we do with our spouses: the serenading in the shower, the playing of guitars, the good times and the warmth of having the one u love close by to hold, to cherish, to love.

Somewhere in the cross-hairs between honoring a commitment to serve your Country, your Commander in Chief and being with those we love – falls today’s men and women living up to deeply vested commitments despite the rest of the world who divide around you like a marathon runner coming into the final stretch while the crowd throngs the runner.

This engagement has been a war like no others: each operation becoming tactically more involved, demanding more, extracting more, requiring more from individuals who are the backbone of every operation. Every operation brings us closer to the brink of having more at stake as a nation.

For the Troops, their risk is infinitely more tied to the reality we only talk about in the speak-easy, the coffee-shop or in heated debate. On the micro-scale – having to patiently await what seems a small eternity for a loved one to return again into your waiting arms - if at all; waiting to hold your child asking to grow up in a world of peace and protection. From every side and within every possible imaginable family situation – it touches us all.

In approaching this Christmas Season, approach it with humility that America has within its population those who still rise each day to bare our standard for us – though we may disagree. Awake on Christmas morning knowing while you and I slept, one of our kind in the Gulf Region will never awake, never return home to that which filled their collective being with joy, with happiness, with love.

"Someone waved a flag today. Others on your behalf are being laid beneath one".

Vic

Born on the National Day of Prayer...

Three days earlier:

America had its wake up call – a call being answered by whom? Really, no f.bomb kidding!

It is my duty to report to you - unless you’re the one taking your absolute last look and thoughts on all you knew, all that you have loved and longed for… Is that one you?

Shall we raise a flag for such an idea - to waive good bye to those who are gone and go? Good bye neighbor. Good by relative, or lover, or friend. Some waived a flag today; others on your behalf are being laid beneath one. That is the wake up call we heard.

Our child: Hope?

Hope – as the child was aptly named was born on this, the national day of prayer. Where did this hope come from – this ephemeral, this fondness – this longing for hope even in the absence of itself?

Call life what you may – the child Hope, so names life a main event. Some say something to the effect of: “Save pie-town liquored-up speeches for circus folk.” Another school of thought blasted back: "If anything be blessed – hope may have had something to do with it.”

Whose right? Who’s wrong? A constitution let’s both sides forget about some impasse to continue on. Hope’s first thought: a national day of prayer? Or a realm of growth and knowledge taken into our minds to cohere, too adapt, to do what even our own imaginations are fueled by: those before us whose works served humankind?

The child Hope…, born on the National Day of Prayer. Who would have thought? The difference between just 3 days in what was otherwise an ordinary onset of autumnal lunar shift tides and leaf-laden car rides on the way through an extraordinary September morning?

It is rumored 'hope spans sorrow in the humanrace'. Today, Hope turns 6.

Haven't you seen that kind of hope in someone’s eyes? Isn’t that where you were re-granted a feeling of such hope - a glance of hope - holding it closer, longer still?

As all parents do, Hope’s parents loved her as the most precious of gifts. They nurtured Hope, seeing Hope grow from an almost alien-esque state of something we may not know enough about to confirm or deny. All the while – calling life something we do bow down before in some unique way of our own while thinking it be someone else’s way; even thinking it to be our own– then casting a name upon it like some sort of belief system you get on podcast or cable: The works and deeds and service of those today and before are so much bigger. Hope is bigger, fuller, and stronger still.

Today – Hope celebrates a birthday; a birthday in time essentially between the start of the first geophysical year 50 years ago last June 2007 and…, groups of people still fighting and making war over words in books clung to like stray dogs lapping the bile of cart animals gone crazy in a desert bazaar.
Is hope older than the bizarre? Does it matter? Who cares? Good. Good ideas abound.

Hope spans sorrow – the sorrow of broken faith placed in mere mortals as the emissaries of some creation maker spraying sanitizer and freshener over everything in some Houdini-like re-do of our civilization touted to crashed the gates too reportedly squeezed out too much booty on simulator TV. Does hope stand above this all – above the complexity and intricacy of where all the blocks fit?

Hope looks onto life from star-lit eyes – the eyes of first sight, first knowledge and child like. Each lash laden blink re-affirms the span of beauty to hilarity of our kind. Even the mean, the bad, the grossly distempered ill-spoken – holding onto hope. Imagine that? Was it hopes crooked hand revealing hope still, like forest mirth, or side-eye glances of Pan’s lost boys looking for Ca’tain Hook? Who says hope doesn’t have a crooked hand at times?

Fresh! Exuberant! All smiles…, wide eyed. Hope sets off – to school. Universally, we do that among our kind – the kind who seeks out hope. The look of endless expanse in every window Hope looked in on her way – Hope’s way - the what we do too somehow manage a policy among ourselves setting forth how we interact – our intercourse – the process of process. All these things within each of us - each hope within.

Oh yes, something about a story. Not so much a story, as it did happen this day. HOPE turning 6 today: Well it happened. I remember it - and you were there. It happened for every good reason, a story of those who do the deeds.

Hope beats for everyone – some would characterize that as messed up; others - how it brings new ideas, even fresh vistas and blank slates where impossibility and confusion stood before. Hope is indiscriminant. Hope may even favor the prepared? Today, Hope turned six somewhere this day.

• 
  
  In dozens of other places, in streets a google-click away - Hope died in remote places as a matter of inconvenient truth - those who also hoped for life - a hope within us all.

Hope was presented to the front of her classroom to be asked: what is your hope, Hope?

Smiling, she looked over her peers, classmates, those assembled around in the classroom - in the hallways. Her mind raced to the windows and out through the blinds and beyond.

Outside, a breeze pushed swings on a playground; sun rays glanced off steel bars worn by the hands of those like stars, like Hope. like you and me. it is too – a hope beyond all other disagreements. Outside, Liberty-lady a lookin’ over the Hudson onto the school where Hope has stood. Where Hope stands and plays.

With a torch as light built onto a nearby rock reaching up from the vast swallow of the Hudson, beneath the halo cast as nimbus on her head rests the story behind the construction of that ‘La liberté éclairant le monde’ as a milestone. Hope holds a tablet whose inscription bears these words "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" (July 4, 1776).

The real story of sweat and waiting and changes and delay – the building of this edifice – this thing jutting out of the Harbor of Upper New York Bay. Today, as then, a milestone. Hope turning Six, and a day older than the next. It was work and it was toil to build this representation thrusting up from the Harbor, off the shrore in tempest wind and pitching seas- one of many Hudson cool jewels of a story behind an edifice which bares our name.

Hope stands to tell you a story of that statute, outside. Hope’s harbor, where she stands this day – in each of us, is a way harder at work.

“a hope for tomorrow.” — Hope

Copyright Vic - The Network

Pieces of Idaho and Texas, last seen in Baghdad…

see: [2] http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11275

Lost is someone to perform calculus, or water treatment, or mechanical, or parenting, or elder care, an EMT, a Fireman, a Police officer. Lost is this one who is to one - all that is cherished.

We did not expire on that field of heat – bleeding to death - gasping a last breath far from home - a suffocating smugness of mindless wholesale slaughter of what we loose every day – all of us - scooping up parts of soldiers we have enough evac and emergency tech to save – what is coming back to us, blasted up, caught in explosions.

Our casualty’s would be triple or more without the MEDEVAC system – the line of support – the network – the other 4/5ths, the backbone of what is a truer support than any stickers, flag waiving and the such.

While the 5/5ths are now caught in a senseless, relentless slaughter of the future Fireman, Police officers – the teachers and professors – mothers and fathers – all that is us in community in the good times and the bad – what happens?

Iraq is a story of Loss – the loss of sanity. The loss of borders only established since the 50s – most no older than the boozed-out sick man of Europe - an Ottoman Empire re-animated and on the move in remote places as remote as even passing satellites wont capture the dark in full daylight. Death is what happens – getting scope creep.

The sickness in Iraq should creep you out. On bearing this burden – who today are those whose shoes we are not in – we don’t feel the twinge of disbelief – a disconnect in the what, the whys and the who you donnit for. We waived a flag today. Someone else was laid beneath one. What kind of a victor are we – if what we loose are bits and pieces of our future – the infrastructure of how things get done in our society while we are entertained with the ‘Presidentials’ mouthing plans like paper mache dummies.

So much moutha-mencia - and the rest getting’ to party-it-down in the most circus-esque self staining squalor. Service from the people is the sacred trust – not the leaders request to be trusted. Rocket Platinum Steelers Bleier would say - ‘It’s to be Trustworthy’. Our Troops have carried the water, lit the torch, carried on and on beyond the scope of what lay before them.

And last, though it be true, - These Troops who did and died and became dismembered or returned home whole to love and to have a life again far form where they left many of those who stood beside them - the troops did so for the President, too!. They did so for us because in some way - service is what broadens us, strengthens us, makes us taller, widens our scope.

“…lost today - stars from Marshall Texas. Boise Idaho.” - Vic Vlog

Vic’s Prayer for those who pass this day and the next: Be still my heart this night - oh Phobos and Demos with wings upon your feet come to claim these souls this day - those who no longer wait for sleep. We now wait for the hand of hope, even crooked hope to shine beyond the loss of these now gone. Amen.

In inking the line which flows from Congressional Halls neatly in black type -It flows out of staffers and books and bills to foreign lands. The ink before it has dried, already became the rivulets of blood and back. This is the line of service as it is still written – the ’so let it be written - so let it be done part of Humanities Army - still on the march after all these years with what left to overcome or to conquer.

Can we plan to be victorious without valor : death has gotten scope creep in Baghdad – a putrid gassy green of the Nile who slew all the babies – our babies only in their twenties, without so much as having lavished on this life with all that is their promise to be, to be alive.

Where are the parades welcoming back the soldiers? Where is their thanks and praise that we mistake support as a street sign given in honor to the fallen, a sticker, some talk over coffee while blasting the government.

Where is our support of those who toe this shifting line of sand on our behalf and on command? Rights are given by those who die and are dead - by those who return to their cities and have those cities doling out jobs to special interests whose idea of democracy is jumping up and down in a public square with a megaphone - far from the blood letting fields where Morris & Willey took their last look, their last breath, their last thought on the loved ones.

Arise with hope for our troops to return safely. Retire each night with the troops in your thoughts or prayers. Do things for those who serve - do them-in private - do them in public - yet do those acts which are still as if in a shadow cast from those who serve.

Vic

Copyright 2007: utah e.sdvob Vic Vlog: Senior Analyst / Staff Writer

Unprecedented Role for the National Guard

([1] MSNBC) [2] View article]

“The Pentagon is asking National Guard troops and their families to make sacrifices like never before in Iraq and other hot spots … Gen. George Casey … acknowledged that the Guard’s wider role puts unprecedented pressure on the lives, careers and relationships for troops once considered mostly weekend warriors.… Casey told The Associated Press on Sunday that the military will push ahead with a plan announced in January for National Guard deployments of no more than a year, with troops spending five years at home before redeployment. Currently, Guard members are returning to the battlefield after only 3½ years at home.”