Although any marking of time or sequence, unless tied to a cosmological event (passage of our planet around the sun, or its turning on its axis) is essentially arbitrary, we humans often feel the need to note when round numbers drop into place on a scoreboard or when a clock-hand reaches perpendicular. I have never felt that my "big" birthdays -- 21, 50, 62 -- loomed any larger than the rest, but many people do.
At any rate, it felt somehow wrong to let my 400th post on this blog go by without somehow commemorating it. Yet, in truth, this four-hundred-and-first addition is every bit as significant (or insignificant) as the others that came before it.
I write for a largely-unseen audience. I deal with a subject that could easily lead to discouragement, even despair. We seem no closer to a real resolution of the myriad difficulties between Iran and the West than we were when I set up this virtual soapbox. On the other hand, we still do not have a hot, shooting war and no bunker-busters have been slung at my friends in Iran or missiles launched toward our allies in Israel. If many suffered have suffered under sanctions or lost sleep over imagined catastrophe, few have died.
Sometimes holding your own is the best progress you can manage. Thank God, then, for the status quo -- not exactly a fist-pump, high-five moment, but much better than donning sackcloth and ashes. In the tradition of little boys holding little fingers in dikes, I hope to keep plugging tiny fissures -- always aware of the churning of the vast deep on the other side of the seawall.
At any rate, it felt somehow wrong to let my 400th post on this blog go by without somehow commemorating it. Yet, in truth, this four-hundred-and-first addition is every bit as significant (or insignificant) as the others that came before it.
I write for a largely-unseen audience. I deal with a subject that could easily lead to discouragement, even despair. We seem no closer to a real resolution of the myriad difficulties between Iran and the West than we were when I set up this virtual soapbox. On the other hand, we still do not have a hot, shooting war and no bunker-busters have been slung at my friends in Iran or missiles launched toward our allies in Israel. If many suffered have suffered under sanctions or lost sleep over imagined catastrophe, few have died.
Sometimes holding your own is the best progress you can manage. Thank God, then, for the status quo -- not exactly a fist-pump, high-five moment, but much better than donning sackcloth and ashes. In the tradition of little boys holding little fingers in dikes, I hope to keep plugging tiny fissures -- always aware of the churning of the vast deep on the other side of the seawall.
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