I’ve heard far too many people claim that “we can never go back” and “things will never be the same” after the attacks last September.

Don’t buy it.

Why should we always be on edge for people who might do us harm? Why should we give up our cherished liberties, our freedom, our trust in each other?

I, for one, do not want to be suspiscious of everyone I meet.

I, for one, do not want to submit to a police state.

I, for one, do not want an even more powerful government.

I, for one, do not think the government can “save us.” Indeed, it is our government which got us here in the first place.

I, for one, find nothing patriotic about waging war.

If you drive a gas guzzling SUV, you’re supporting terrorism. That gas comes courtesy of a corrupt and oppressive Middle Eastern country. And no, sticking an American flag on it doesn’t make it any better.

We can feel safe. We can be safe. We can live as if we have nothing to fear.

Because fear is the underlying cause of all the mistrust in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere. When fear disappears, trust can begin. And trust builds friendship.

I reject fear. I reject war. And I reject the ludicrous notion that this country is on a treadmill it can never get off.

I have taken up the “hobby” of birdwatching. Not just birdwatching, but bird attracting. I spent ten bucks at Home Despot for a bird feeder. Another five bucks bought the seed.

One more Lincoln bought a PVC pipe to put around my feeder. The idea is that the PVC pipe is too fat for the squirrels to climb up.

I had a slimmer one up the past week and was all proud of myself for keeping the squirrels out of my feeder. Well, my gloating didn’t last long. I was typing in this spot yesterday morning when I looked up to see a squirrel camped out on the feeder. I chased that one away, only to find another one up there ten minutes later. That’s when I bought the extra-fat pipe.

When I first got the feeder, I reasoned that squirrels need to eat just as much as birds do. And they do….but not at the expense of the birds. After I came home yesterday afternoon to find the feeder completely empty, I knew the squirrels were to blame. And the new pipe seems to be working. I watched a squirrel storm off in defeat this morning.

I was still chucking at their misfortune when I found a new visitor to our back porch. It was a baby squirrel, still skinny. He wandered back and forth across the deck railing, watching me through the window. He poked his head into the plants we have on the rail, nibbling at the flowers. Every now and then he’d pick up a piece of pinecone from the rail and chew at it. Then it was back to the flowers.

I could feel the guilt begin to grow. This little guy was clearly starving and I had all this food. How could I deny him the right to eat?

It was then that I remembered the big bag of sunflower seeds in the garage. I picked up a plastic bowl, scooped the sunflower seeds into it, and headed to the back porch. The squirrel didn’t wait to see if I was friendly – he took off. I suppose that his fear comes from my scaring squirrels away for the past two days. I put the bowl on the deck after scattering a few seeds here and there. Now the squirrels have some food, and the bird feeder is still for the birds.

So, am I a sucker? Yeah, probably. I had no problem running off the fat squirrels that hogged the feeder, but this little guy was just too pathetic-looking.

You can’t claim to love nature if you don’t love all of it.
Squirrels included.

I’m on a mailing list for lucid dreamers. Every time someone new learns how to lucid dream, I remember the excitement I felt the first time I learned to lucid dream.

It is still one of the coolest things I’ve ever learned how to do.

I got home from helping with the Tour De Cure event here in North Carolina. When I got home, I stood and stared at the house, taking in all the details, as if not trusting what I saw.

I could’ve sworn that everything looked different. Everything was different. It had to be. And yet, I couldn’t quite identify any change in particular.

Later yesterday evening, I figured out that it wasn’t my home that had changed – it was me! I had departed Saturday morning to do something new – volunteer for a public service event. Because I had been willing to venture outside of my comfortable existence, the eyes I brought home saw everything in a different light.

Travel can do that for you, but you don’t need to travel. Just trust yourself enough to try something new and you will never be the same.

I just received an email from a developer in Denmark with whom I’m developing an application. It took minutes to type a reply to him, and seconds for it to travel halfway around the world.

I also converse regularly with a friend in Australia. In real-time. It seems like he is still living across town, yet he’s on the other side of the planet.

The Internet is still astonishing. At no time in history has the world been so interconnected, our planet so small. Everyday people have the miraculous power of instant communications from anywhere on the globe, to anywhere on the globe.

This is the world my daughter’s being born into. Her world will be one where national boundaries will be for convenience only, where any space can be traversed instantaneously. It will be exciting to see what kind of world gets built on this revolutionary foundation.

I finally got around to watching the special on the USS Liberty that ran on The History Channel last month.

I’d heard the story about the USS Liberty before. It was an American ship that got attacked by Israel during the Six-Day War. I had assumed that Israel would have come to its senses by now and admitted they bombed us.

I assumed wrong. The sight of Israel’s embassy spokesman insisting to this day that Israel had mistaken the Liberty for a combatant ship sent me into a seething rage.

Israel knew damn well what it was doing. It was attacking an unarmed ship in international waters. For all the blather about Israel and America being allies, Israel plays the U.S. like a fiddle. Israel gets what it wants from us and then thumbs its nose at us.

Israel will get no sympathy from me until sees fit to right this treacherous wrong.

So, the gloves are off in the Mideast. I’m only hoping that both sides wake up and figure out that violence isn’t the most effective way to influence people. Mayhem has gone on there so long that people are jaded by it.

Arafat isn’t in control of the Palestinians. Sharon isn’t in control of the Israelis. Well, Sharon could order the troops to stand down, but he probably feels pressured not to back down.

Politicians never want to be seen being bested. It’s important that a trusted outside party step in and mediate. Each side’s trust of the other has evaporated, as has each side’s trust in themselves to find a solution.

I was feeling in a contemplative mood today. Maybe it was the drenching the area got last night. Maybe it was the fun weekend spent with Kelly’s family. Maybe it was the gorgeous morning that greeted me. For whatever reason, it was a morning where I kept dreaming while I went about working.

I was starting to get into a programming task when a look out the window gave me a zen moment. I had a thought – a small knowing – that life is infinitely more connected than we humans allow ourselves to realize. The thought was one of some pity – that we deny ourselves out of a far more fufilling life. Another way of explaining it was that we have no appreciation of the worlds which are set in motion from our tiniest thought, act, or decision.

It was a thought I savored all day.

I suppose I should write this down in case there’s any question later on. Saturday morning on the 16th, the weekend before we got our Bambina pictures, I woke from my dozing and announced to Kelly we were having a “GURL!” (as my neice Victoria used to say). She asked me how I knew, and I told her about my dream.

It was one of those dreams that stands out – a you-better-remember-this-you-dork dream. It was the last thing in my head before I awoke. In my dream, I was staring proudly at a wedding invitation to be delivered. It was an invitation to the wedding of an old high-school acquaintance named Gina. I didn’t decode the meaning at that point, but I concluded that the wedding invite meant we were having a girl.

After the pictures came back, I figured out the significance of the name: The name was Gina, as in “va-gina.”