I had it in mind to write about my Uncle today.  Omar.  He was a local hero; he grew up in the East County area of San Diego and  had a reputation as a tough guy and a ladies' man.  He raced stock cars on a dirt track and drag raced on the back county roads.  He was over six feet tall, dark curly hair, deep set eyes, and hands the size of a five-pound ham.

But while I was thinking about Omar and the things I remember about him that are significant, I kept hearing the news in the background.  The events in the middle east and the push and shove between the two presidential campaigns have left me angry, frustrated, and deeply depressed. 

Omar was a butcher by trade.  He always had the best bar-b-ques.  The first time we were invited to one I was excited to have a piece of steak, a rare treat for us in those days.   As soon as we got seated and a huge platter of meat was placed on the table, I grabbed a steak and the bottle of A-1 sauce.  I shook that bottle (I proudly knew just what to do) but failed to check the bottle top, which had been unscrewed and placed on the bottle.  So as I vigorously shook up the bottle, everybody got an A-1 shower.  I was so concentrated on my task that it took a few seconds for me to realize what was happening and everyone else was kind've frozen in place.  Omar got the worst of it.

When you sit back and watch a mob take over, you can't expect to have a reasonable result.  A mob is a mob...what were we thinking?

When I was in high school Omar opened his own shop in the back of a mom-n-pop grocery store in Lemon Grove.  He hired me as an apprentice and paid me the whopping sum of $25.00 per week (1963...that was pretty good pay for a sixteen-year-old). 

Is it true that there were no Marines guarding the Embassy in Benghazi?  A Libyan security force?  We hired the fox to guard the henhouse?  And that same security force moved the Ambassador to a "safer" house and then turned around and told the mob where he was?  So do we believe the news reports that say his car was attacked or believe the pictures on the net that show him being carried around by the mob?  Was he dead at that point?  One of the pictures looks like he might have still been alive.

Omar taught me how to quarter chickens, trim the meat, tenderize round steak into cube steak and then clean the wheels of the tenderizer and use the scraps to grind into hamburger.   I learned how to cut the loin away from the ribs (pork and beef) producing more expensive  cuts (boneless loin), and ribs, too.  The first cutting lesson he told me I needed to have a six-inch boner and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what one had to do with the other...he laughed at my hesitant embarassment and explained that it was the long, thin-bladed knife in the rack (I wanted to title this "Learning to Use the Six Inch Boner"...but I didn't want Rica to faint).

Were the statements released by the US Consulate in Cairo prior to the uprising an apology in advance?  Is Obama responsible for the stupid things his Consulate folks say?  Some want to blame him for the statements.  How much of this outrage is because of a Youtube video and how much because it was 9/11?  How much of this results from the recent US policies and attitudes in the Middle East?  Is Obama really more sympathetic towards the Muslims than towards Christians?  Lists have been posted of offenses that Obama has committed against Christians while he has made huge overtures to the Islamic world.  Is that because he is a Muslim or Muslim-sympathizer, or is it because he feels that it is the right thing to do since we have spent the last ten years pounding the crap out of Islamic nations?

One day I noticed that the Omar's scale that was (IAW state law) clearly displayed on the counter showed a different reading on the customer side than on our side.  I put a piece of meat on the scale and looked at both sides and made sure, and yep, they didn't  match.  So I mentioned it to Omar;  unfortunately I mentioned it while there was a customer there and Omar wasn't happy with me.

It's just no good...now there are Marines on their way to Libya to "secure the situation"...WHY THE HELL WEREN'T THEY THERE FROM GIT???

I learned to work the counter in Omar's shop.  I was a great counter man (boy);  the customers loved me.  They were so impressed with what a knowledgable young man I was.  What I was was a primo BS artist.  I had little or no idea of what I was doing, but I always had a stream of BS to lay on them,  and most of them (housewives and little old ladies in tennis shoes) ate it up.  I learned that when someone wanted a pound of hamburger, you put less than a pound on the scale and work up, not too much and work down...the customer feels better when you add to instead of take away from.  

Now I am hearing that the Marines (only 50) aren't even going to the scene of the crime.  I guess it is best not to offend the murdering radical bastards sensabilities by sending in an armed, uniformed, disciplined military force.

I guess the last straw, so to speak...was the cooler.  We had a walk-in meat locker and we put straw on the floor to soak up any blood that dripped off the hanging meat.  Every night I had to sweep out the locker and put down new straw.  If any blood had soaked through the straw and got to the floor I had to scrub that with soap and bleach and water.  I got lazy and didn't clean up the blood one evening.  Then the next day I just covered it up with new straw.  By the end of the day the whole cooler smelled really bad.  It didn't take Omar long to find out why,  and an even  shorter time to tell me to go home.  I felt great.  I was getting off two hours early!!  Woohoo.  Then he said, "You don't need to come back". 

I don't know how this whole thing is gonna play out;  what will Obama do?  Bow and apologize some more?  What would Romney do?   I will share an emotional response from an old, tired, heartbroken soldier:  I am sick to tears of watching what has been happening to this country.  I really thought Bush was on the right road when we went into Afghanistan;   I was even with him when we went into Iraq.  But something happened...it seemed to me like we lost our way somehow and we wound up in a mess as bad if not worse than Vietnam (Remember his daddy telling us "No more Vietnams"?...I didn't believe him, either).  The heartbreaker is that it is always the American soldier who has to bear the brunt of foreign policy, good or bad.  If we had a president with the stones to tell the Joint Chiefs, "Go stop this mess" and then get out of the way, ( and if squeamish, close his eyes), and let the strongest, most efficient, deadliest, and most compassionate military the world has ever seen go and do.  Wouldn't take long. 

Well, my mom put the word out to the family and anyone else who would listen that I was let go for being too honest...the scale story being the basis for that.  I knew the truth, and so did she, but she was never too fond of Omar anyway so her version of events became the official version.

There is no real correlation between Omar and Libyan events;  the things I learned from Omar have stuck with me for life:  I can still quarter a chicken in a flash,  and I know what is in hamburger.  My experience in the Middle East is limited but impressive...I felt when I was there that I was in an evil place.  I never met a single Saudi, Iraqi, or Kuwaiti that changed my mind about that and in the twenty-plus years since I left the desert I have had no indication that my sense of the place was wrong.  There is a lot of sand over there...it would make a beautiful glass bowl.