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June 27 - July 6, 2019
The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority.
It was my first major experience in this kind of bipartisan cooperation. The most important thing I learned was that it has little to do with stretching or changing your beliefs.
The basic idea behind Regional Cities was that economic development is no longer just a game of luring factories—what some call “smokestack chasing”—from other locations, using tax incentives essentially to buy jobs. Instead, at a time when many people first choose where they want to live and then start looking for a job, it makes sense to recruit people, not just employers.
I would spend the rest of my deployment wondering exactly what it means for one of today’s wars to be truly over, and how anyone would be able to tell.
But something about exposure to danger impresses upon you that a life is not only fragile but single, with one beginning and one end. It heightens the desire for your life to make sense as a whole, not just from certain angles.
In the struggle for equality, we do well to remember that all people want to be known as decent, respectful, and kind. If our first response toward anyone who struggles to get onto the right side of history is to denounce him as a bigot, we will force him into a defensive crouch—or into the arms of the extreme right.