My daughter asked me what I was going to blog about today.  “I won’t be talking about politics,” I told her.  “People who read my blog are trying to get away from politics.”

Then occurred to me that perhaps I should follow Professor Higgins’s mother’s advice when she was advising her son about how he should converse with his newly recreated former flower girl, Miss Eliza Doolittle.  “Perhaps,” she said, “you should stick to the weather and your health.”

Health is out.  My readers have heard way too much about my health, your basic case of Too Much Information.  And in these days, even the weather has become politicized.  So the weather takes us straight back to politics.

In addition to that, while we’ve been having a pleasant and relatively cool summer here in Seattle, the rest of the nation has been suffering under a killer heat dome.  So my initial reaction was that I wouldn’t talk about the weather at all.  

And then I opened an e-mail from my brother.

My mother always used to say, “A wise man changes his mind.  A fool never does.”

And so I changed my mind, and decided to talk about both the weather and politics after all.  

The image in the e-mail took my breath away.  I was unable to secure permission to post the image, but here’s the link: 97.3 The Eagle.  

The image is of a photo of a soldier in full combat uniform walking under the hot desert sun.  The message reads:  

I was going to complain about the heat today, but then I remembered:  

It’s not 120 degrees. I’m not 5,700 miles from home.  

I’m not in full uniform and carrying a 70 pound pack.

I’m unlikely to drive over a bomb today.

Yes, I believe that when it comes to talking about weather AND politics, that certainly puts things in perspective. We can have our messy political fire fights.  We can complain to high heavens about “all those other guys.”  We can vote.

We’re the home of the free because of the brave.