Tomorrow Thursday my wife, our daughter and me are going on vacation to Scotland. As I’m typing this, with roughly 1 hr plus of paperwork still to do before venturing to bed, it occurs to me what a lucky bastard I am. Before the advent of the Internet, I used to think I had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world. When, though, I state that thanks to my broadband connection I’m seeing world events from a virtual front seat, I still may be seriously overplaying my hand. As sure as the earth is round, too many machinations and undercurrents in society still escape my view, and too many topics just catch the eye without my brain connecting the obvious dots and grasping the true relevance of what I see.
Yet for all that, the Internet has proven itself a wonderful tool. At worst it has turned my happy relative ignorance into an uneasy realization that we truly live in a world in turmoil, a global battleground of ideologies, and that’s not even counting the plethora of mundane-or-rather-not-so-mundane problems facing the majority of earthlings: proper nutrition, health care, lack of freedom etc… etc…
At best though it has opened the door for new friends across the globe, and notably in the United States, where over the past year I finally found large numbers of people who thought and spoke as I do – or liked to do, since over here in the Old Continent very few qualify as people to whom I’d refer as being “on my side of the fence”. I’ve stated this several times and it may even start to bore you, but you in America, where despite the omnipresence of liberal media, rightwing views are carried by at least half of the population, have no idea whatsoever what it means to live in an “intellectual” environment where political correctness is the New Religion. When I was invited by Kerry Dupont to post on Downeast, a whole world opened up for me, a world where the decade-old lies with which I had been bombarded since childhood (as a twelve-ear old I had to learn that Julius Nyerere, notorious for screwing Tanzania’s welfare, was “The Torch-Bearer of Africa”) were effectively exposed as the senile rantings of pony-tailed, woollen-sock wearing, frustrated and hypocritical do-gooders locked in May 1968.
I like to live my life the way I do it: working hard, loving my family, raising our kid and hopefully kids, planning and securing my and my family’s future, renovating the country house I bought in 1997, trying to make my business flourish, reading and studying, enjoying the beauty of my country and continent, both its natural as its architectural enigmas… I was raised in a family where hard work was considered one of the highest virtues and laziness was something to loathe… and when all the work was done, I truly learned to appreciate the reward of a vacation meant to come to rest, breathe other air (often in Switzerlands mountains) and simply enjoy being healthy and young.
As I am preparing for this long-awaited break from the often demanding work, anticipating to venture out in the grandiose scenery of Scotland’s mountains, glens and lochs, I’d like to wholeheartedly thank those people who are on the forefront of defending our civilization from a murderous ideology that wants to cast hundreds of millions back in the seventh century. In a very real sense of the word I feel that those nineteen year-old troopers in Iraq, the security personnel back in the States and in my own Europe, and all those from far or close involved in fighting this “War On Terror”, because that’s what it is, a War On Terror, are fighting to preserve our - my - way of life. And I’m tremendously grateful for that. Not knowing which readers care about religion and therefore a bit reluctant to invoke God, I find it nevertheless appropriate to share with you that I’ll surely take some time to go into a church and save a prayer or two for all those out there, men and women, following orders, taking responsibility and putting their lives at risk. Thanks for all that.
If all goes well, we’ll be back on September 14th. Thanks for the company, Kerry, Tom, Scott, Mark, Jamie, Stacy, JohnL, LarryF, Kevin, Drazil, John, Arthur and all those I might forget.
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