Thanks
@mouser.
I consider that we forum members are probably equally lucky in having the
First Author/Admonistrator 
that we do, on this forum, and that, for all us oddballs, it's probably another case of "Vive la différence!"
I recall how, when I was first at college, years back, I went to the canteen to grab some lunch, but when I had my tray loaded and paid for, there were no empty seats at any of the tables -
except, conspicuously, for 3 seats at a 4-seat table where an old codger - the scruffy-looking janitor - was sat, eating his lunch. Yuck. He cleaned the toilets, wore grubby-looking clothes and a cloth cap, and walked with a shuffling gait. People avoided him. Nobody wanted to sit next to
him. So, I went and asked him if he minded my sharing the table, he said it was fine, so I sat opposite him. I forget how we started talking, but something he said sounded like he'd been in the military. I asked him if he'd been in the military, and he said yes, and told me his story. He'd enlisted in the Army towards the end of WW2 as a Private, under-aged, but lied about his age, so they accepted him. He had survived a couple of battles with the Germans and was sent home after being wounded in the leg/hip (thus explaining the shuffling gait).
I was overcome with a sense of humility and saw him in a completely different light. He was one of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women who had left their families to bravely risk their lives to save their country (Britain) from being invaded by the Fascist German National Socialists (Nazis) and to protect and preserve Britain's national sovereignty, freedom, liberty and democracy for later generations. The guy wasn't just a lowly decrepit-looking college janitor,
he was a jewel and the salt of the earth and I was lucky enough to be sat opposite him, talking to him. I had him and many others like him to be grateful to for the fact that I could get and enjoy my education and a life of liberty, free from the jackbooted heel of oppression under a Fascist German Federal Socialist State that was presided over by a maniacal dictator and run by his lobotomised unelected bureaucrats.
After that, whenever I met a stranger, I would try to assume nothing and would wait with expectation to see what sort of jewel I might be able to discover. The experience started to teach me the lifelong lesson that we are all self-imprisoned, shackled by chains made from the nonsense that is in our heads. We are so bound up in our own little discrete universes, unable to perceive a "reality" or see
Others except through a set of filters which are our paradigms, propaganda, conditioning, bigotry, false assumptions and absurd beliefs - thus making the Other seem almost alien and "I" and "the rightness of I" seem to be all that really matters. If the Other does not conform to this perception, then the Other may even be perceived to be somehow variously bad/evil, deserving of death, etc.
That janitor is often in my mind and he is typically one of the people I think of on Remembrance Day (Poppy Day) - and when I see the national sovereignty, freedom, liberty and democracy of a country at risk of being trammelled by a plebiscite seemingly ignorant of, or despising their hard-won heritage left by their forefathers. I wonder what he would have made of it, or whether he would have given his life for
that. I suspect he would.
Topic: This time of year I'm reminded how thankful I am for you folks (Read 14,476 times)
