As choruses of "Auld Lang Syne" rang in the new year recently, the responses I received from friends willing to help a soldier in distress provided music to my ears: "Count me in! Yesssss! Absolutely!" And "Tell me where to send the check."
Here's the story: I was sitting at a counter in a Los Angeles hotel when a young man sat down on the stool beside me. He shook his head as the waiter dropped a menu in front of him and asked "How you doin'?"
"Horrible," the young man said. He told the waiter how he had fallen asleep on the train from Camp Pendleton to the hotel and someone had stolen his satchel. The bag had contained all his personal belongings, including his computer.
"I'm on my way to Florida tomorrow to see my wife for Christmas before I go back to Afghanistan," he said. "The computer was the only way I had to keep in touch with her from the battlefield."
The waiter, short for words, wiped down the counter. "Bummer," he said.
"I was so mad," the young man said, as his barrel chest puffed up and down and his chiseled face flushed. "I was burning, I can't believe I was suckered." Then he paused as a look of resignation crossed his face. "But what can you do? That's the world today."
He was burning, but so was I that a solider who was fighting for a better world for all of us would have had this happen to him. More importantly, I didn't want to believe that he was right about the world, despite the venom and mean-spiritedness we see all around us. Mean-spiritedness that fills the air in the halls of Congress, contaminates our roadways and airwaves, and culminates in someone reaching across a sleeping soldier to steal his satchel.
"Do you have an email address," I asked the soldier. "I know some people who can help."
I didn't know specifically who would help, but I know people who reject mean-spiritedness on a daily basis. They fight against it in their everyday lives and strive to carry a torch for hopefulness. I knew if I put this soldier's plight on my Facebook page - noting that "his computer is how he keeps in touch with his wife" - I would get friends to respond.
And so I posted a plea when I got back to my room and invited people to join in on a project to buy this solider another computer, "a 17-inch HP," which is what he said he'd had taken from him. The responses poured in and within a day or two the deal was done: we had $1,000, enough to buy a replacement computer for a soldier to keep in touch with his wife from a combat zone half a world away.
One friend had just lost her father. She said she and her mother were participating so they could feel the Christmas spirit. Another friend whom I hadn't seen in 20 years chipped in out of the blue, as did our daughter and son-in-law because they're true blue.
Friends who sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street crowd joined in, as did a brother who works on Wall Street. One friend, a nationally renowned lawyer, offered to buy the computer on behalf our group and wait for the soldier to get off his plane in San Diego and present it to him as he returned to Camp Pendleton.
I got this email back from the solider after I wrote to tell him of the plan: "I really appreciate people like ... your friends and their support for the troops (that's) the reason we do it," he wrote.
This holiday season a soldier got a new computer, but he gave a group of us Americans stretched broadly across this land a true gift, the opportunity to make a statement about the kind of world we want to live in in 2012 and beyond.
ABOUT WINDOW ON MY WORLD
Window On My World is an occasional essay in Monday's Bellingham Herald that allows Whatcom County residents to share their passion for what they do, an idea or cause they support. Send your Window On My World, which must be no more than 700 words, to Julie.shirley@bellinghamherald.com.
