Posted on 05/22/2009 10:00:13 PM PDT by kellynla
America's annual door into summer, Memorial Day, is found at picnics and cemeteries.
Spring's brief flowers dance in the same soft breezes that move the Memorial Day flags so many families have planted at the graves of those they love.
Families grow stronger, nourished by sensations sweeter and more sour than hotdog relish.
This sacred secular holiday, like the drinking glass ritually broken under foot at Jewish weddings, reminds us that joy and sorrow are seasons that come and go and come again in every human life.
In Europe, the red poppies are in bloom once again, as they were for ancient Greeks and Romans and Neanderthals.
After World War I, the "war to end all wars," it became popular to wear artificial red poppies as symbols of the blood of millions poured out — sometimes more than 100,000 deaths a day to swine flu and combat.
During more than 230 years, America has sacrificed in war approximately 1.1 million warriors, nearly two-thirds of them in a North American war between brothers that was far from civil.
The current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost nearly 4,900 American combatant deaths — roughly the number killed during an average two weeks of combat during World War II, when the U.S. population was only 43 percent as large as it is today.
Memorial Day's name has at its root "memory." It was carved into the calendar for the same reason names and dates are carved onto gravestones: to help us remember despite aging brain cells and life's distractions.
What this annual holiday calls us to remember is love, sacrifice, and the nobility of those who gave their lives in America's wars.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
ping
I'd like to turn a platoon of Marines loose on these two piles of excrement.
Poem written during WWII.
Last night I dreamed that I saw a dead man die.
That man was I.
Well, I doubt you'd get many of my fellow Marines to volunteer even though it wouldn't take but one Marine anyway... but Gore & Franken are just not worth our time.
Solution: The Gelding Old Party just needs to get a testicle & spine implant before next year so that they can begin to retake the Majority in the House and/or Senate...and hopefully “if” and “when” they do; they do a better job of Leading than they did last time.
TERM LIMITS is the only answer.
Semper Fi,
Kelly
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin recommends that right now we should get out the video recorder, the tape recorder, and the spiral notebook and create a family history of what those who faced war have to teach us.
A family is in many ways like a small nation. A nation is in many ways like a large family.
What we remember — and forget — largely defines who and what we are, both as individuals and as a people.
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