Thank You and Happy New Year

Stingy Americans (and probably others as well) have now donated $11 million to tsunami relief through Amazon alone. But this really floored me–an apparently spontaneous flood of Christmas gifts to “any wounded soldier” at Bethesda has hospital officials saying, “Please, no more!” More here.

In the nearly one year I have maintained this site, I’ve spent more than my share of electrons dwelling on the brutality, apathy, and stupidity of human beings toward each other. But if you care enough to stop by, the odds are this passage from Theodore Roosevelt’s , The Strenuous Life, applies to you:

Only those who have seen something of such work at close quarters realize how much of it goes on quietly and without the slightest outside show, and how much it represents to many lives that else would be passed in gray squalor.

Thank you for doing me the honor of reading my screeds. Last year, I was blessed with a (much better) new job, (very first) new house, and a (second) new child. It would have been easy to be content in my good fortune. This site has been my effort at making some contribution of my own, a mustered-out soldier’s vain effort to complete an unfinished duty. Watching the number of first-time and regular readers to this site steadily increase buoys me. I extend a special thanks to all of you who helped pass the North Korean Human Rights Act. My greatest thanks are for those in the military who are risking and sacrificing everything to protect my family’s shot at a life of happiness. I hope the New Year rewards all of you in your personal lives, as well as those elsewhere whose suffering concerns us.

I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor. . . . If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.

Thank you for the understated goodness and kindness of your thoughts, words, and deeds.