To that end, I’m going to live as close to my local community as I can, embodying a call to life shared by John Robb’s notion of “Resilient Communities.”
This is an idea I've thought about for about four years now. I'm not sure what did it, but "community" became a much bigger part of my my future goals than it once was. It used to just be a nice place to live, with all the amenities I was looking for. Now it's mostly about people.

“I can’t prove it, but I I suspect that the real reason we surged in both Afghanistan and Iraq was not to establish a better peace. Rather, it was to allow an honorable exit for the United States from the conflict,” he wrote to me.
I have to admit I've got a strong bias against Tom Ricks for reasons I won't belabor here, but I think he's absolutely right in this instance and have thought along similar lines for about three years now.