Please don’t let anyone discourage you from writing. You will never please everyone and I know you know that. Many people get jealous of someone when you make alot of friends and even go to the White House to meet the president. I say “bravo” and good for you, CJ, you deserve the praise!! Please keep posting!!

11th

Say that you aren’t special. Maybe that is the key to all this. Say you really are Joe Average, CJ, finding your way through (as much as possible) a regular life; ups and downs, good and bad, faith and hope and luck and the occasional wad of chewing gum holding it all together at times. The point is that being ‘average’, you’ve made, and continue to make, choices that aren’t simple, choices that you’ve acknowledged cost you time with family, pain of various kinds, hours and hours of effort – in order to do what? To answer a higher calling in support of your fellow man. You said it yourself: “I feel that by telling these (Soldiers’) stories I’m taking care of them.” **Therapeutic aspect or not. And I take leave to doubt that having to cope with some of the fallout (read, fecal matter) you’ve dealt with as a result of your writings (look to the reason behind your writing of this post for but one example) would be regarded as ‘good for one’s blood pressure’.

The problem is, active kinship of this sort SHOULD be SOP – and thankfully, many, many, MANY good people do see more than their own daily grinds and grieviances, looking far past their egos to respond to the needs of others – BUT, these days it’s anything but the norm. Sad, but true. The cult of ‘me!’ is busy peddling the virtues of a life on Easy Street. Caring, commitment, conscience? – AWOL. By their blindered reckoning, these are fraught with difficulty, and difficulty of any kind is to be avoided; distained like some species of noxious roach. When facing the challenges that have crossed your path, average ol’ you continues to choose the ‘hard right’ over the ‘easy wrong’, CJ. The reason people are drawn to, and applaud your efforts, imho, is in part due to not enough people responding naturally, NORMALLY in a like fashion anymore.

You may not feel you stand out, and why should you? Of a certainty, the company your choices have allowed you to keep is chockful of like-minded folks carrying similar torches. You and your compatriots in the milblogging world in particular are in a unique position to paint verbal road signs and read the map (or at least explain the difference between the map and a Butterick pattern ) for the rest of us, going thru life as we all do sometimes getting caught up in our own worries, never realizing that we might be losing sight of the Big Picture. By your example of what the NORM should be, by presenting us in your posts with others who exemplify that quality, you inspire us to respond in kind, and to check our focus. You remind us that we ARE indeed our brothers’ keepers.

So keep on being nothing special, CJ, my friend; you’re doing one heck of a fine job.

I am sorry you have to deal with people that question your motivation for why you write. Anyone that really knows you knows your heart and why you do what you do. Keep on keepin’ on CJ!

By the way, I had to laugh at the name of your first blog! LOL I was not reading blogs at that time, so I never read it, but the name is very humorous!