Earlier tonight, I walked out behind my building and saw an injured bird. I'm not sure why it was injured, but there it lay, fluttering but unable to fly. It may have had a broken leg, perhaps it had bird flu, but in any case, it was not able to behave like a healthy bird does. I was moved, but I did not know what to do. Two hours later, it was dead. And I am so saddened by this. Death is a fact of life. How ironic that statement is. Death should not be a fact of life, it should be a fact of death.

I wanted to help that poor creature, but what could I do? I did not have the strength to just kill it and put it out of its misery, so I walked away. And two hours later, nature solved the problem for me. It did not solve the anguish I felt, seeing a poor creature suffering, but it solved the creature's suffering. Not soon enough, but eventually. Of course it is not enough, and even now I am fighting back tears--tears for a poor innocent that I could not help, and did not have the strength to even help stop its suffering. Life is like that. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is what is best for those concerned.

People have died in Iraq. Innocent people, who only wanted to defend ideals that they believed in, and who more than likely suffered as much or more than that innocent creature who died in my back yard. And every one of those deaths touch me, and I feel anguish that it is so. Death is never pleasant. And it is more unpleasant for those that are closer to them than I am to a suffering bird who is a stranger to me. All life is precious, but none more precious than the life that touches your life.

No death should be taken lightly. I believe that no man who has a conscience takes death lightly. And I believe that our President has a conscience. I believe that he grieves for those who have died in Iraq, and that each injury and death touches him in a personal way. When I hear people say that he doesn't care, and that he will send people to die for his personal profit, I am offended. I believe that those who make those statements take life and death less seriously than he does, for they make assumptions about a man, any man, whom they do not know as well as themselves. They cannot know the personal sorrow that an individual feels when a death is on his conscience, yet they will make light of the situation, and make assumptions, and bestow upon a person whom they truly do not know all manner of nefarious motives. Yet they will never walk in his shoes, nor know the burden that he carries, every time an honest and decent American gives his life for the rest of us. No man can make an assumption about that burden.

I will not rest easy tonight. But I know that those who fight for all of us and assume the burden of pain, suffering, and death, do so because they believe what they are doing is right. And if they find themselves alone, in pain and suffering, soon to exit this earthly life, that someone is grieving, and their death is not in vain. And that their sacrifice is appreciated.