All Out!

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. Albert Einstein said:

"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead"

Unfortunately when we learn to walk, to talk and play we also learn to fear, but unlike walking, talking and playing we can unlearn fear, makes you smile when you think about it, doesn't it? A Japanese proverb says that, fear is only as deep as the mind will allow. If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing in and of itself, but due to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. Did you just feel that? A slight surge of empowerment run through you? Yeah me to! Wanna go out and try something scary? No thanks, I don't.

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do" - Elenor Roosevelt.

"Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not".- Virgil Thomson

When I was a little boy, my greatest fear ever was... (Insert your greatest fear) No I wont fill in mine probably because that would take enough space for an entire blog post, but top on that list was that I had a really annoying lisp that I just dint know how to dispose of to the next unfortunate little boy... Atleaset some one called Richard or something like that, seeing as I had difficulty pronouncing my own name. Strange enough I grew up and one day just out of no where I dint notice it happen but I had no lisp at all now that we are on the topic, who is the cruel soul who invented the word lisp with an S smack in the middle so that sufferers of the said condition cannot even state their condition?!!! What does that story have to do with this blog post? Absolutely nothing!!!! But today I was talking with a good friend of mine and it reminded me of a story about two little boys in their mother's womb. The twins we're having a conversation and it went something like: one of the boys says to the other "I hear when we are born there is so much space you no longer have to be curled up in fetal position" Then the other says "I hear there is no amniotic fluid all round, there is a thing called air, which is a lot like amniotic fluid only you need to keep taking it into your body through your mouth and nose, that is called breathing!" and the other boy says "I am told, there is so much space people walk form one place to the next, walking is this thing people do while all stretched out and upright and they use their feet to move them about, I am also told that people don't live in wombs, they have things called houses which can be thousands of times bigger than a womb!" the other boy says "There other things called plants which are king of like people but cant walk or talk but they breath, then you have to eat through your mouth and no longer through you umbilical cord, in fact, they don't even have umbilical cords!!", "No umbilical cords?!" "I dont think I want to be born, how we supposed to live without umbilical cords?" The two little boys were terrified and din't want to be born since they dint know how to live without their umbilical cords. As nature would have it a couple of months later they two boys were born and the minute they were born screaming in fear of the unknown they started to breath, a couple of hours later their mother fed them and they were able to eat through their mouths not their umbilical cords, months later they started to crawl, then walk, then talk, run then everything else the rest of us do!

All of nature is made to grow. We don't put a seed into the ground and then hope that it grows, we put a seed in the ground, water it, put manure on it and then in and of its self without our assistance it starts to grow, weak and shaky at first then stronger as it grows then becomes a strong tree with fruit and the fruit has many seeds to start the cycle all over again. That's the way of nature, we all grow, it's programmed into us, if your life is getting water and manure, figuratively of course we grow and produce fruit.

In the Bible it says:

Gal 6:9 Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
NIV

Note, there is a catch to reaping a harvest, if we do not become weary and at the proper time. These are the two most important things in reaching your goals. Not giving up and at patience. An apple tree standing in an orchard in Limuru does not practice producing fruit, it does not struggle or worry, it just sits there, drinks its water and breathes its carbon dioxide and then in due time, it produces its fruit.


We are all wired to do life and to do it well, it's in our DNA. Greatness is inside all of us, it calls out, if there is something you do not have then you do not need it to be great at least not just yet.

--BTW a good friend of mine who is a German Shepherd Dog Breeder is trying to popularize his services and since I believe in supporting my friends, I believe in the quality of his pups and his breeding standards I may as well post a link to his website, that is Blue Line Kennels  http://www.blueline-kennels.com/

We Were Soldiers Once and Young

War is in our nature, it's as human as jealousy, entrepreneurship and prostitution, it's a basic part of fallen humanity, some of the oldest human skeletons found by archeologists have spear heads in their rib cages... yeah, that's how how deeply violence runs through humanity, I mean the first recorded sin after the garden of Eden was murder, violence is almost a basic need, the ability to mete it out and control it. Why else would countries spend billions upon billions of dollars every year to sustain their militaries even though most of these countries have never been in any serious form of war fare.

Every serious politician knows how necessary war is, every diplomat knows that they are just a precursor to armed invasions.

Bullets change governments far surer than votes...

Now I am no authority on war fare, and neither do I fancy myself a writer, apart from my extensive reading of the tactics of Hanibal Barca and the spectrum of war fare from attrition to maneuver; war is fascinating and I love war movies but that's as far as it goes.

All the violence on CNN of late has got me thinking, from Hosni Mubbarak kicked out by a bunch of fed up civilians to Col. Muamar Gaddafi and his: 'I will rule you or kill you' policy and of course the most recent Osama bin Laden, as he stepped out to watch the royal wedding and gave away his position... LOL < I heard that from Tina Masai> Most likely Osama will go down in conventional history as a villain; our own head of state sent congratulatory messages on his death, my friend phoned me at five in the morning to wake up and watch CNN that had the news that Osama was dead, { I would not have felt so wasted if I had seen his corpse} no corpse leaves a lot of questions and too much room for even more conspiracy theories. All in all in the historical records that count Osama is a villain; I am sure in many parts of the world his name is a rallying call to action and his very image inspires fights for freedom, and so it does not matter how history remembers him because

History is often written by those who hang heroes

What matters is how we remember him, now as I was alive to see the August 7th Bombings in Nairobi, for which Mr. Bin Laden was quick to take credit for and the Kikambala bombings in 2002, I am not a fan of Bin Laden and on his alleged death I say "Down with the terrorist!!!" in fact kill a few more just to prove a point, we shall not be scarred by terrorist, that even includes the little boys in next door Somalia who have been issuing threats of late.

Africa is infamous for armed conflict rag tag bands of child soldiers applying guerrilla tactics to destabilize governments who more often than not also got into power by the same guerrilla tactics; All of them perpetrating the worst kind of blood baths on unarmed civilians, this does not however stop them from giving themselves noble names like "The Lords Liberation movement", "Peoples army of here and there", "Patriots front for the republic of bananas", "Freedom fighters from heaven to save the impoverished and so forth"

Often the worst atrocities happen when both combatants declare themselves freedom fighters.

A Muslim preacher I watched on TV a couple of months ago, {I think that's the same guy our government had to spend millions deporting to Jamaica} said something I thought was profound:

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

Now back to Osama bin Laden Son of Mohamed Bin Laden... This was the guy on top of the US terrorists list, a man who's organization is responsible or at least claimed responsibility for some of the worst acts of terror, don't get me started on nine eleven and all the controversy around it... What I believe is anyone who targets civilians is a terrorist and down with the terrorist. George Walker Bush who was commander in chief of the armed force in the United sates when 911 went down thought a lot like me in one of my favorite speeches from him "We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll send them running..." Amid the countless conspiracy theories, most of which make really good sense he packed up the good men of the US marine corps to far away Afghanistan and Iraq... To fight for the Afghans and Iraqi's freedom. The Iraqi's and Afghans did not seem to take it too kindly and good old George Bush and his men in green uniforms invented the word insurgents to label all the Iraqi "FREEDOM FIGHTERS" as they called themselves... Now don't get me twisted here I am not for the insurgents, in fact throw me a helmet and M16 and I'll be out in the desert wasting insurgents...KABOW take that you bloody insurgent.

Amidst all this my mind goes to the infantry troops with boots on the ground and back packs full of M16 magazines in Helmand and Iraq. Do they ever think about why they are doing what they are doing? what are they doing in a place their country does not remember, in a war it does not understand. This story's a testament to the young Americans who died in the middle east, their British allies, and a tribute to the young men of Afghanistan and Iraq who died by their hand in that place.

Joe Galloway, an American newspaper journalist who recorded the events in the Valley of Death in Vietnam in 1961 on his return to America wrote:

Some had families waiting. For others, their only family would be the men they bled beside. There were no bands, no flags, no Honor Guards to welcome them home. They went to war because their country ordered them to. But in the end, they fought not for their country or their flag, the fought for each other...

Joe Galloway in his closing statement writes:

We who have seen war, will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams. So this is our story, for we were soldiers once, and young.

War is by any description hell, the brave men and women out there protecting civilians who will brave hell for safety of their country men and for their liberty and social freedom, those are the true heroes, as a friend of mine once told me

Every man dies, not every man lives

If for the young men who put boots on the ground and stick their necks in a noose every day this helps them find life through taking another life; {it's a paradox of life}.... It brings me to thinking about a different soldier, a soldier friend of mine once told me:

<span style="text-decoration: underline; ">We train to serve not to die, it is noble to die in combat, it's heroic to kill the enemy, I'd rather be a hero than a noble</span>

The other soldier I'm talking about drops his credentials in Joshua 5:14 "And he said, No; for as captain of the army of Jehovah am I now come. Then Joshua fell upon his face to the earth, and worshiped, and said to him, What saith my lord unto his servant?"

This was one soldier who did not come to kill, but came to die, He later says,

Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.

Paul later argues that, for a good man a few would dare to die but for a bad man no one would. And Jesus not only died for his friends, his family, his country men, he also died for those who killed him, for his enemies and for all of us. That's you and I included.



Why wouldn't anyone believe and trust in a soldier like this, one who does not ask you to die for his cause, one who does not ask you to kill for his cause but one who will die for your cause, one who already died for your cause, one who triumphed for your cause... And not because he did not know who he was dying for. A story is told about a man who worked for a railway company in the US, his job was to sit in a booth and change railway tracks by some gear and lever mechanism from a booth, he made sure in coming and out going trains were on the correct rail way and did not suddenly hit an unexpected end of the railway. One day he decided to take his son to work with him. His son was excited to see what his dad does at work and they were having a good time bonding, then the man looked at his watch and noticed it was almost time for a train to come in so he went to his booth to re-set the rail tracks. He got to the booth and set the tracks in place and waited for the train, while the train was really close to the station he noticed his son on the railway with his foot caught in between the tracks, the train was awfully close and he had the choice to either move the railway so his son can run free but that would derail the train and kill many people, it was a tough call and he had to make it fast. he decided to let the train run over his son, he watched as his son screamed with fear and called for his help... it was a quick moment and the little boy's screams could no longer be heard, only the trains engine rumbling to a stop... In the train the man saw prostitutes in the buffet seducing men, gamblers and cons, corrupt business men and thieves, he had sacrificed his son's life to save these people... I don't know what he thought but I'm sure he wondered if his son's life was worth more than the people in the train.

God the father sacrificed his son for a bunch of fallen sinful people but he knew all of this, his love for humanity was that great:

There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is
utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the
worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about
me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself...

And he shall continue to fight for you until he says in Isaiah 2:4

Isa 2:4
He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
and men shall study war no more.
NIV