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Two Choices

What would you do?….you make the choice. Don’t look for a punch line, there isn’t one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves children with learning disabilities, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question:

‘When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does, is done with perfection.Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do.

Where is the natural order of things in my son?’ The audience was stilled by the query.

The father continued. ‘I believe that when a child like Shay, who was mentally and physically disabled comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child.’

Then he told the following story:

Shay and I had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, ‘Do you think they’ll let me play?’ I knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but as a father I also understood that if my son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

I approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, ‘We’re losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning.’

Shay struggled over to the team’s bench and, with a broad smile, put on a team shirt. I watched with a small tear in my eye and warmth in my heart. The boys saw my joy at my son being accepted.

In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three.

In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as I waved to him from the stands.

In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay’s team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball. However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay’s life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact.

The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over.

The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game. Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman’s head, out of reach of all team mates.

Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, ‘Shay, run to first! Run to first!’ Never in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, ‘Run to second, run to second!’ Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball, the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher’s intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman’s head.

Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home. All were screaming, ‘Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay’. Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, ‘Run to third! Shay, run to third!’

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, ‘Shay, run home! Run home!’ Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

‘That day’, said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, ‘the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world’.

Shay didn’t make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making me so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

AND NOW A LITTLE FOOT NOTE TO THIS STORY:

We all have thousands of opportunities every single day to help realize the ‘natural order of things.’ So many seemingly trivial interactions between two people present us with a choice: Do we pass along a little spark of love and humanity or do we pass up those opportunities and leave the world a little bit colder in the process?

A wise man once said every society is judged by how it treats it’s least fortunate amongst them.

May your day be a Shay Day.

(from an email sent by Hal Jeffrey, American Family LLC)

(March 24) — J.T. Gabriel received a message just before Thanksgiving from the wife of a Marine: Seven U.S.-supplied drug dogs were facing a certain death in Pakistan and needed to find adoptive homes.

But what began as a simple message about dogs soon became embroiled in a larger issue of U.S.-Pakistan relations.

The seven dogs were the only ones believed to be left from a group of more than two dozen specially trained canines provided to Pakistan under a counternarcotics program funded by the Pentagon. Unused and abused, the dogs were going to be euthanized within a month.

The wife of the Marine contacted the Defense Department, hoping to save the dogs. U.S. officials were sympathetic but not in a position to help. So she turned to Gabriel, who runs a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization called K9 Soldiers.

K9 Soldiers, which Gabriel founded to support military dogs, wasn’t meant to be a dog-rescue organization. But then she saw pictures of surviving dogs living in horrific conditions in Karachi, Pakistan, where they were supposed to be used by customs officials looking for narcotics.

“Of course, when I looked into the e-mail and opened the picture of the abuse these dogs had suffered, it was impossible to say no,” Gabriel said.

Three dogs were taken in by U.S. Embassy personnel in Pakistan. The only option for the other four was to bring them back to the United States because Pakistan doesn’t have a culture of dog adoption, Gabriel said.

A private individual agreed to take possession of the dogs, but K9 Soldiers still needed several thousand dollars per dog to cover the shipping costs to the United States. Gabriel was concerned about raising those funds in time. But the money started pouring in when she posted pictures of the dogs on the Web.

“We were able to raise $20,000 in two weeks,” she said, “which just floored me.”

Still, Gabriel encountered bureaucratic problems getting the dogs out of Pakistan, she said. She asked a congressman and the State Department for an inquiry into the issue, hoping to draw attention to the story of abuse.

Then she got word from someone she describes as “high up in counternarcotics in Pakistan” who asked that she take down the pictures of the abused dogs she had posted on her Web site. Apparently, the photos were embarrassing the Pakistani government.

“I was spitting bullets,” she recalled. “If they don’t want to be embarrassed, don’t treat a living thing like that.”

But she agreed to take down the pictures to move the process forward. The dogs were soon handed over and ready to be sent back to the United States. The last one, a black Labrador named “Sammy,” arrived last month.

This is not just a shaggy dog tale. The canines are part of a larger problem that has characterized U.S. security and military aid for Pakistan, which has reached more than $10 billion since 9/11. The assistance has been aimed at helping Pakistan combat militants and police its border with Afghanistan, but it has long been fraught with allegations of misuse.

One problem is that Pakistan will often accept equipment, such as helicopters, but not the training that goes with it, according to Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. “In terms of the broader security assistance, what the U.S. has tried to do is ensure that appropriate training is provided,” Curtis said. “I think in the past that has not always been the case.”

Richard Douglas, who served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for counternarcotics under George W. Bush, said he couldn’t comment on the specific case of the Pakistan canines. However, he recalled declining to fund a similar drug dog program for a foreign country because of concerns that the animals would not be properly cared for.

But Douglas also said it is important to understand the unique difficulties that Pakistan faces.

“I know from personal experience that Pakistani public security forces carry a counterterror and counterdrug burden whose magnitude is not fully perceived in the West,” he said. “They do so without adequate resources and in harsh and unforgiving terrain, both topographically and politically.”

The Defense Department was not able to provide comment about the drug dogs by publication time. A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy did not respond to a request for comment. Pakistan’s army chief is in Washington this week to meet with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other senior military officials as part of a week long strategic dialogue meant to strengthen bilateral relations.

For Gabriel, the issue is not relations with Pakistan, but making sure there is proper training in those countries that receive canines and proper oversight of the private contractors that supply them. “We don’t want to unnecessarily embarrass the Pakistanis,” Gabriel insisted.

Nor is providing trained dogs to allied countries always a bad thing, she noted. “I know that our military had an international canine force in Iraq, and I have heard and received pictures of Iraqis training with our American military,” she said. “They come to love the dogs and understand they aren’t wild dogs; these are dogs that have a unique talent to save citizens and military personnel from explosives and narcotics.”

In the case of the surviving Pakistan dogs, the story at least has a happy ending. The four dogs are recovering. Gabriel has found permanent homes for all of them, including one that was placed with a U.S. Navy canine handler.

“They are the happiest dogs I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Somehow they know they’re back in America.”

Author:  Sharon Weinberger – AOL News.com