These days the news is about the conflicts in the Mid_East, particularly between Israel and it's Arabic neighbors. When I hear about them it reminds me of the time I played tennis under contract with a bunch of friends from the Lexington Tennis and Swimming Club. We played every Thursday after work. There were certain unwritten rules which we all agreed to. The most egregious one was the one where if your cell phone rang -you would ignore it unless you knew someone was going to call and the matter was of the most significant importance.
Wouldn't you know it. Mid way through one of our matches the phone rang. It was on one of our players. He happened to be a well known dentist in our area. We all felt it was one of his patients probably complaining about a pain in his tooth that had to be dealt with immediately. He said he had to take the call. We were all annoyed and stared at our friend to get back to the important stuff of finishing our set. His one minute interruption seemed like eternity and we all harrumphed him back to playing. He apologized and told us his brother was sitting at the end of the runway waiting to take off on a mission to bomb a Hezbollah site and that he called to say he loved him.
We all ate humble pie that evening.
