Another video today for people to think about. This is a presentation by a man who created United Hatzalah in Israel: an organization of volunteers who put ambulances on motorcycles to decrease response time and provide support for critical patients while the full-size ambulance fights it's way through traffic. Over the years, his organization has grown to thousands of volunteers in several countries and has become a vehicle for knitting together Jews, Arabs, and Christians.

 
As I was preparing to write this article on an event twenty years ago today, I noticed the headline that a shooting has just occurred in a Connecticut elementary school with 28 dead, 20 of them children.

I was laid up in bed with my still swollen ankle propped up on a pillow, a zip-lock bag of now melted snow pressed against it. A much-abused copy of Billy Joel's Kohept played on the stereo across the room. The room was sweltering, the window next to me open wide and the snow long-since melted from the overhang, but I wasn't going to limp down the stairs to adjust the thermostat back down again. A knobbed stick lay propped against my milk-crate nightstand surmounted by an ugly lamp, which was now off, the room lit dimly by the lamp-posts of the small cluster of upper class modular apartments, Mods, nestled in the snowy woods. A stack of untouched textbooks lay between me and the window, a Weis and Hickman novel closed and marked on the sill itself.