Flip-flop

A flip-flop

In Sderot, we go through a little bit of crazy when under fire. Things get slightly out of whack, there is a snafu here and a snafu there. This is trivial compared to the rigors of actually getting hit, but it adds up to long-term stress and struggle just living in our own home. 

Kids have to have fun. That is part of growing up. And kids under fire seem to need more and more fun. So my kid Moses is watching Hogan's Heroes. A lot. He is glued to Hogan's Heroes. I also let him have a dog that he loves, Smoothie, who is like a living teddy bear and that is also a help under fire. Smoothie is a girl, so she has some puppies that are still in the house. The puppies love to chew on shoes and flip flops. You know this. Well, here's an example of how the fire adds up to a kind of craziness:

When I work, it is hot...we have no air conditioning, and this is the Middle East...I toss off my flip-flops under my desk, without thinking about it, and then the puppies find them and take them somewhere to chew on. Then the Code Red siren sounds, and I jump up from my desk and rush to the bomb shelter. But without the flip-flops, because there is no time to find them in the 15 seconds that we have before the first missiles fall -- sometimes it is really more like 5 or 10 seconds, honest. So I have to rush. So just earlier, we rushed, as usual, but when I ran through the next room that leads to the bomb shelter, what! glass under my bare feet. Moses, that dear boy, had dropped and broken a glass on the floor but was too glued to his escapist TV show to clean it up. Ouch. 

This is our own tiny example, but there have been many cases of serious injuries among people runnng to bomb shelters. They get heart attacks and die. They break their legs. They get run over by cars. Bomb shelters are not really the answer. No bombs and no missiles--that is the answer. If Hamas men have to die before they stop shooting off their deadly projectiles and lying about everything under the sun, then I say the only reasonable thing to do is to kill them. There is a corner of my heart that weeps for any killing, but in this case, for the first time in my life, I can say with complete conviction that killing them is 100% justified.