officeless paper

today was extremely dull. we're not actually able to do any work at the moment, so i spent most of the day (aside from 2 hours for lunch with my team) sitting on the stairs, smoking and chatting with a really cute girl.

it was HOT today (as usual), i almost died when i got in the car to get back to base... i'm 100% confident that if i'd played volleyball as well, the stench would have wiped out more people than the lebanese are capable of.

how's that for twisted? i must be israeli, now.

anyway: GoldenAngel just managed to remove herself from my site template. i'm not too interested in politics, but at least i understand the need to defend ourselves. i was embarrassed the entire read: i wouldn't care if i didn't know that she's not uneducated, that she's not unaware of the problems of the region.

she just doesn't understand something that even the americans finally get (i refer to their statement this week regarding guantanamo bay): you can't play by different rules from your opponent.

in addition to that - as much as we, as a nation, want to talk, want to negotiate (most of the people who don't, have simply given up); our neighbours want us out. completely. utterly. and in any way possible. yes, there are lots of arabs who don't actually care - they're like us, they just want to get on with their lives. but governments govern, even if they do it badly.
by not only allowing hezbollah to continue to cause us grief, but also by including them in that government, shows nothing more than contempt, and a willingness to cooperate with the hezbollah in all things. a government is a country's representation, and as such, our response is the only possible recourse. it's not that we've never talked with these people; the pullout from lebanon came with specific and well-defined stipulations that were simply ignored.

goldenangel: as close as your family is to the volley of rockets and bombs and fighting; i'm fairly certain that if the two soldiers who were kidnapped had been related to you, you wouldn't be feeling so apathetic. the status quo has been mentioned... should we continue to accept continuous border raids, and have our northern population living in fear? i have cousins who live close enough to see the border itself - trust me, they don't share your attitude. even where i am, we've all prepped the shelters and are awaiting sirens, and that's unusual for the center of the country.

and no, i'm not saying that there aren't innocents involved on their side either. but does that mean we're supposed to ignore our own? did i miss the part where israeli civilians are fair-game? and does the fact that the abducted were soldiers make any difference? i dunno. i can testify, as a soldier, that the last thing 99% of the soldiers want is to be in uniform, "eating shit" as the expression goes, and putting their lives in danger for things they don't really care all that much about. goldenangel's parents left the country, so she doesn't have to serve, so she doesn't have to know how much it SUCKS being a soldier.

me? i came here because i'm unemployably white in south africa. and i had no place else to go. so screw it, i'm doing my army service. i could always have chosen prison instead - or worse, to be unemployable in this country too. but the one thing i do know is that we need this country. and we need it to be safe.

and i find it hard to not stand by a country that in the face of all the propaganda spewed against it, still tries to keep the innocents in places like gaza supplied with water - when we're suffering shortages, provides financial aid... and has harshly enforced rules about being kind and sensitive to known terrorists' families when they have to go and fish them out because nobody else will help us.