WE'RE LIVING IN A BIG LITTLE MONTH

February may be short on days, but not on dates. Dates of some consequence.

For instance, February 2 was the date the groundhog trumped the weather-caster...February 3 was Chinese New Year...February 6 was when the ancient Greek Oracle at Delphi answered the great questions... February 14 is Valentine's Day...February 21 is President's Day. Well, you get the idea.

However, it's not the calendar that shapes our lives; it's our lives that shape the calendar. Right now a billion Christians and a billion Muslims are using these February days to arrive at a historic decision: Do we continue waging the East/West Crusades of old, or do we find common cause in rallying a new crusade between us?

The question is being asked throughout the streets of the Middle East, and the answer is likely to affect how you and I survive throughout the streets of America. With regard to our oil prices...our jobs...our budgets...and our kids' safety from future Middle East wars.

First, though, this name Middle East should be discarded. It was coined in the West, but it ignores something every protester in those streets knows very well. The world's civilizations began in these lands. They were not midway between more important regions. They WERE the region! The region where everything really began, whether you want to name it the Garden of Eden or Mesopotamia or whatever your literary pleasure.

Long before Europe and America, these were the lands of giants. Pharaohs, Persia and prophets. When Alexander the Great conquered the sprawling Persian empire (modern Iran) the civilizational battle was joined for all time. East vs West. Greeks, Persians, Muslims, Crusaders, the lands are soaked rich in the blood of both sides in these endless hatreds. Hatreds re-fueled when in 1948 the West helped create the state of Israel in the midst of this volatile region, and its most volatile haters condemned the action.

Today, East and West out here often hate one another without remembering quite why. Or simply because extremists on both sides stir the hatred brew anew. Now that the region's 1 billion Muslims are trying to throw off the shackles of dictatorships often funded by the West, the searing question that looms for the West is: Will their passions for freedom see us as the Great Satan their extremists charge?

To those -- both East and West -- who insist on easy black&white answers, you are a boil upon this eternal plague. There are no easy answers, there are no military answers, they are not even handy conspiracy answers. When you ride the tiger of history, you not only have to know how to hold on; you first have to understand the tiger's deepest fears and hopes.