I can't sleep

I can't sleep.  I woke up around 1:00 having a hot flash or something akin to it.  Since the house is quiet, my mind is filling the gap with noise and I can't turn it off.  I've been thinking about Libya, Tunis, politics and how people discover their moral outrage during the election process.

On Tuesday evening I ate my dinner in the break room, watching soccer -- men's USA versus Guatemala in World Cup Qualifying.  The singing of our National Anthem was wild as the crowd seemed to be singing louder than the person with the microphone and they weren't all in sync.  But then everybody got to the line "Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there" and I started to cry.  There is power and symbolism to our flag.  A few days ago, a woman who blogs under the title Four Globetrotters wrote this about the attack on our Embassy in Tunis, followed by another piece on the clean up.  The picture of the flag on the Embassy building after the attack that is the heading photo on her blog.  What it took for it to get there, will stay with me for a long time. 

I've been trying not to get sucked into the false debate over Libya.  The question has been posed, "But did they have to die?"  What kind of question is that?  The conditions that our Ambassador and others faced at the time of their deaths must have been horrific.  I can't imagine the terror. What do you want me to say?  If you are looking at me to start bashing my Department's big boss or the President over this, I am not going to.  Am I angry that we have lost four of our own over there, yes!

In this time of budget slashing and a general disdain for those who work for the government, a better question is how are we going to make sure that the Americans serving our nation abroad have the resources -- monetary, intelligence, security -- they need so that this doesn't happen again.  How can we turn this indignation into tangible resource allocation to help prevent another attack?  Please don't act as though there has never been any confusion before in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.   We will get to the bottom of what happened in Libya.  We are living in the age of information; nothing stays buried for long.

Unequal political grandstanding does not sit well with me.  Don't come at me with brimming moral outrage over these deaths yet not over the thousands of men and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Should I counter with a question of my own -- Did the thousands of soldiers have to die?  What about the Veterans who have come home missing limbs or with brain damage...did that have to happen?  Do they deserve the lasting physical and psychological trauma?  Do the phrases "mission accomplished" and "weapons of mass destruction" ring any bells?  I feel that historical perspective is lacking in this current uproar.

It is so hard to stay on an even keel.  A few weeks ago when I went to Satsang, the reading Kent chose were what I needed.  As I work myself up into a tizzy during this election season, I can't lose sight of the fact that my criticisms of others in the end, only hurts my spiritual growth.  None of us know when our end time is near.  We don't know when our allotment of breaths for this life will run out.  The promise of a next breath is not a given.  While I am still alive in this body, I need to pay more attention to -- my own rhetoric, my attitude towards those who disagree with me, treating others with respect and dignity since they are also children of God, and how my actions are the examples that Selim will mirror.