Praying for Time

It was early 1991 and the US was about to enter into a military conflict with Iraq for having invaded Kuwait. The mood of the country was somber; no one knew what it would mean, and the bellicose rhetoric of the “madman” from Tikrit (only about 290 miles northwest of Ur, the city that Abraham, the father of Judaism, was from) had quite a few Americans nervous.

The luxury of present-day hindsight allows us to paint the conflict as a largely one-sided one, but before the fight started, Iraq had a million-strong army that was the 4th largest army in the world, so however demonstrative the fight ended up being, before it started, nobody was sure how many people would die, how long it would last, and what the future held.

It was in this context that I first heard a song on the radio by the late George Michael, a song called “Praying for Time”, and it resonated with not just me, a 24 year-old computer programmer working for a bank in Manhattan, but it became an anthem of sorts with some of the soldiers who were about to deploy, unsure of whether or not they’d ever come home again. You see, although there had been some prior conflicts, emotionally anyway, America at the time was very much still reeling from Vietnam.

The lyrics of the song were so powerful and spoke to my shamefully self-indulgent existence in such a way that I try to revisit it every once in a while to remind myself about the ugly in myself that the song put a spotlight on.