"For this hour, and for this trial..."*

As of this week, I have worked exactly one year in legislative government - one session with the Colorado state legislature, and the past six months on the Hill. After my brief months here, I've observed a Washington, D.C. composed of regular people from all over country, many of them in their 20s and 30s, who are exerting as much power as they can in their own little fiefdoms, their own little corners of the Beltway.

After hearing people's stories (either in the news or from colleagues), it seems most these run-of-the-mill young people work hard at their jobs, even if the work is sometimes aggravating, occaisionally seems trivial, or requires unreasonable hours for an unreasonable salary -- Though often, very often, at some point many of these folks find themselves at moments of tremendous consequence, when the decisions they make have national or international significance.

I notice this all the time now when I read the newspaper. The people in the pages are real - they are not fictional. And sometimes they fail. They didn't know they would be put in these critical and complex situations, but there they are all the same. It's a sobering realization.

EC has been auditing a Navy warship that Robert Kaplan thinks could play a role in determining U.S. military and economic power in the 21st century. I remember once EC told me who her team was interviewing for the week, and I had a moment of remarkable clarity -- she was interviewing him, and his staff? Any job quickly becomes routine, but at that moment I was struck with how important EC's team was, not just for us as a family, or just for her, but for the country.

Charlie Wilson's War, which EC and I saw recently, captures this phenomenon with humor and intensity. Charlie Wilson, a party-loving Congressman from East Texas ends up funding and prosecuting a covert war in Afghanistan in the early 1980s. His East Texas, all-female staff works with Charlie and a rogue CIA agent to supply the Afghan Mujahadeen with shoulder-fired missiles capable of bringing down Soviet attack helicopters. Wilson got elected because he was able to help elderly East Texans with their Medicare and Social Security. But he ended up with his fingers deep in a secret war in a faraway country.

It helps to remember that regular people put in extraordinary situations is nothing new.

On Spengler's elite forum (made up of academics, retired military, intelligence buffs and religious scholars), a young serviceman in Iraq -"Ehud" is his avatar- comments regularly, and is a youthful anomoly in the forum. Sagacious Spengler's words for Ehud follow:

Ehud, Stay safe. A lot of people are reading -- I am surprised how many and in what places. If there is any merit to what we do (and Providence will decide that, not us), it will take ten or fifteen years to have any impact. It won't be the present generation of power-brokers who pay attention, but young people starting their careers with a sense of dissatisfaction at what they have learned. As they rise through the ranks, these ideas -- if they are borne out -- very gradually will rise with them. I don't see how the Republicans can win this year's election given their poor showing in economic as well as strategic matters. That will give traditionally-oriented politicians four years to wander in the desert, with an open mind, and for a new generation to get involved.

Americans became complacent and underestimated the difficulties and the demands on them from the world of the 21st century. As always, they will have to learn the hard way. The one consolation is that they always have learned.

So here's wishing you a complete 2008.

There's nothing like a desert experience to focus the mind. As a wise man said a couple of nights ago in Alexandria, "God didn't just need to get the Jews out of Egypt, he needed to get Egypt out of the Jews." Amen. And here's to wandering.

* "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." -Winston Churchill on his appointment as Prime Minister in May of 1940; The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948)

BC