A little dose of reality.

I've been stretching my blog legs of late. I started by visiting my friend Al's site and wandering through some of his favorite blogs. From there, it was a mere hop, skip, and a jump to a wide variety of very well-written blogs coming from every side of the political spectrum. I've updated my own blog list based on some of what I came across.

Of those viewed, I most highly recommend Iraq the Model. If I read correctly, he's an Iraqi dentist living and working around Baghdad. His English is very nearly impeccable and his point of view offers much better insight than what we see in a lot of news reports that are designed to advance a predetermined message (I think I've already covered that in enough detail...).

Reading his account of daily life reminded me of something that I have a tendency to forget when I start climbing up on my soapbox. When I was in Iraq, friends and family back in the States used to ask me what I thought, what I saw, and how it compared to what I read. Bottom line: what I saw often had nothing to do with the media reports I read. When I first left Iraq, I still remembered that point and when people asked me about what I thought of this story or that incident, I told them that I just didn't know because I wasn't there anymore. Any answer I gave would be based more on pre-conceived notions and personal biases than the cold, hard knowledge of 'ground truth.' Iraq the Model brings that point home to me once again.