k this is really a different post from my normal ranting about my own life.. and a little look outside the box.

i've stayed up way too late reading so some of this writing will probably be overly emotional... but PLEASE READ AND THINK ABOUT THIS... i hardly ever ask you guys to put any effort into reading my posts... but this really affected me.

i'm sick of everyone saying that america has no business being in iraq, and that president bush reacted too quickly to the situation and that the u.s. is just out to get the middle east's oil...  (hehe i think of a couple people that read my posts that hate bush, and i apologize ahead of time to you, this isn't directed at you personally)  personally, i am THANKFUL for a pro-active president.  THANKFUL for the soldiers that are deployed every day to foreign countries to help ensure and protect peace... my own brother being one of them.  i am GLAD that my brother is convicted in his heart to be involved with the military.

what brought this about is my reading a book i bought today called Shadow Life: A Portrait of Anne Frank and Her Family.  i have always been interested in history, especially of wars and things... and stories of the Holocaust never cease to drastically move my heart.  so i wanted to share a particularly moving excerpt of the book (to me anyway) with you and share my feelings on it.

The following is an account of an experience in a Nazi death camp, where those who were under 15, were over 50, women who were pregnant, or who wouldn't leave their children were immediately sent to the gas chambers:

"I came to Auschwitz August 22, 1944.  I came with my mother, my brother, my father, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin.  A neighbor of ours was with us.....He had a four-year-old child with him; he had lost his wife in the ghetto.  We got off the trains in Auschwitz and they separated the men right away.  The women and children were on one side and the men on the other.  When we got off the train and they separated the men, this little girl, the neighbor's child was left alone.  My mother (she was a saint) walked over to him and she said, 'Don't worry, I will take care of the child.'  She took this child by the hand and she kept her, wouldn't let go of her.  The child was alone and my mother wouldn't let the child stand alone.        

Everything happened very rapidly....My aunt was with her little boy in the front and my mother with this little girl by the hand and my brother, and I was the last one.  My aunt and her little boy he motioned to the left, and when he asked my mother if this was her child and she nodded yes, he sent her to the left.  My brother, being only twelve at the time, he sent to the left, and me he motioned to the right.

I realized my mother was on the other side and I wanted to run to my mother, I wanted to be with her.  A Jewish woman who worked there caught me in the middle and said...'Don't you dare move from here!' Because she knew that if I was on the other side I would go to the gas chamber.   And she wouldn't let me move....

This was the last time I saw my mother.  She went with that neighbor's child.  So when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero:  a woman who would not let a four-year-old child go by herself."    --Esther Geizhals-Zucher

i bawled when i read that story and was so glad for a government that is not willing to let life go to this extreme.  hitler tried to take over the world and the u.s turned a blind eye until germany's ally japan struck us close to home at pearl harbor.  then it still took us over 6 months after D-Day to liberate people being tortured and dying in the concentration camps.  the u.s. turned a blind eye to violence in the middle east after the Persian Gulf War until Al Queda hit us close to home with the attack on the Towers.          

THANK GOD for a government focused on liberating people and to the people who say we did it without provocation, i say THANK GOD we didn't have MORE provocation...            

now we see how history will view the U.S.'s actions and inactions in the 21st century... will it be disgust at inaction until almost too late as was in WWII?       or will our children say, wow, only hundreds of soldiers died fighting for freedom, as opposed to hundreds of thousands and millions including innocent women and children? 

ok.  hopefully i've put at least a few thoughts into your heads tonight...