I went to my sister's graduation early this month. Because her class was a small one, they did the graduation a little differently than most I've been to. The school made no attempt to hide its religious affiliations, and the keynote speaker was a minister.

He told a story about how he was on a flight once, going to perform a relative's wedding. But after they landed, they had trouble even pulling up to the gate. See, that's when the whole eastern seaboard did not have electricity. Finally, they figured out how to get them off the plane, but they couldn't even open the doors to leave the airport. There were no lights, no way to retrieve their luggage, and all the other small things that are normally taken for granted were unavailable. He finally was able to leave, and another relative picked him up, but they discovered that they were low on gas. Guess what. Without electricity, there was no way to operate the pumps. They made it home by some miracle, but they were counting on the power being restored by the next morning. It wasn't. At that point, they gathered enough gas from neighbors who had it on hand to mow their lawns, and they were able to get to the wedding rehersal.

The point was, "Will you be prepared if you had to go off the grid?" It wasn't meant to be solely literal. The college was a health care school, and the point was that they had learned some bit of creativity that could serve them in times of trouble. Having seen my sister, I have some argument with that idea, but let's go with it.

And that's when it occurred to me. This is why we are in Iraq, and it is absolutely, without a doubt, necessary that we be there. It is absolutely necessary that people died for this.

At this point, anyone who has read any of my blogs is scratching their head in amazement. You're probably thinking, "Am I hearing right? What is that little liberal girl doing supporting the war?!?" And that's where you would be wrong. Don't mistake this for support. It's not support, it's acknowledgement.

This war was necessary because of the exact reason the preacher gave. He said he saw people throwing their cell phones against the ground because they would not work. Presumably, these are phones that would work again within a couple of days. The neighbors who they borrowed gas from all had places they needed to be. But they couldn't put it together that they needed to pool their resources.

In the movie War of the Worlds, even though I was disgusted at the story and the acting, one scene chilled me to my core. The family is in a van because they replaced a part after the electricity went down. In other words, they had the only working vehicle, and they had a better chance of escape. The first time they met a crowd of people, they were forced from the van at gunpoint. People were murdered and the van was crashed. It chilled me because if there were such a crisis, that is exactly what would have happened.

See, this whole time, I was confident in my ability to keep my family safe. I could afford to be elitist about it because I knew how to grow my own food and live without certain things we take for granted. But I forgot the human factor. If I have it, that doesn't mean I get to keep it. We've all heard that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. That's not true. He's held down and blinded. Read your Ray Bradbury.

So what now? Someone give me hope. Quickly.