Posted on 02/23/2003 9:02:29 AM PST by bogeybob
WABI TV reported Friday that the Maine National Guard Family Assistance Center has received about 30 complaints from children of deployed soldiers concerning Principals, Teachers and Guidance Counselors reportedly demeaning the role of their deployed parent. Some children involved are 7 to 9 years of age.
Here is a letter written to a friend of mine from the Maine Army National Guard:
"Thank you for your interest on this most troubling matter. Our Family Assistance Centers have reported cases from Aroostook County to Southern Maine. We are reluctant to give out specific schools and the individuals involved in the interest of giving the education community a chance to address the problem itself. Also, parents wanted the opportunity to pursue the issue through their local school boards first.
In all, we have over thirty complaints that name schools and individual principals, teachers and guidance counselors. If one considers that these complaints come from just the parents who attended our briefings and only from children who told their parents, we are concerned that the problem may be more widespread than we know.
We are recording the complaints, and I will personally visit these educators to express our concern as a professional organization and ask for their cooperation.
Ultimately, our main concern and first responsibility is the safety of our children during these uncertain times. Maine has a core of dedicated and professional educators, but we will challenge any individual who places our children at risk due to their own political ideologies."
I agree this is the thrust of the Kommisar's memo. Just letting them know to polish it up a little bit. "Hey, they're just kids, even you dolts should be able to trick them."
Your posts are very touching, Uncle Jaque.
For what it's worth, WVOM-FM, 103.9 ran the story for the second day in a row in its news.
May it be of comfort to thee to know that it is my Lord's Name as well, and I use it not in vain, nor as any substitute for "foul" language as you seem to assume.
I actually gave it a fair amount of thought and - as ironic as it might seem to you at the moment - prayer before putting it that way.
Your humble correspondent once felt "called" to the Christian Ministry, as many of our Ancestors and a couple of surviving Relatives have before. For a number of reasons I will not bore you with, it never happened, and in retrospect I now see that it was just as well. I have been known to call 'em just like I see 'em right off the top, which has a way of offending people terribly; people like me usually do not live to be as old as I am.
The horses of my passion tend to run away, on occasion, with the surrey of my common sense, and although I try to maintain a Spirit of Peace and a very long fuze, every now and then some jackass will take a blowtorch to it and find the business end, and it can be a while before the smoke clears and splinters of the furniture and broken glass stop raining down on the crater.
These are decidedly NOT the qualities most Churches are looking for to prop up their pulpits and keep the collection plates bountifully loaded.
So let me try to explain it to ye this way, my Brother;
Would not the getting of said "clue" by the said Union (or whoever calls the shots for public schrools of new-age hedonistic heathenism these days) be consistant with the Will of our Lord? If it protected little Children ("...Prevent Them Not")from being turned from the Love and respect of their Mommie or Daddy by an agent of darkness and illusion (you know where they come from, don't you?)then might it be appropriate to cry out for said "clue" for them (and perhaps us all) to our God Almighty in Jesus' Precious Name?
Just where do we suppose most clues come from, anyway?
Where do you get yours? Same place I get mine?
One thing I have learned - the hard way - is that despite the best of intentions, getting "preachy" about my "Religion" to people, especially a potentially spiritually - mixed audience, has a way of really turning them off, and that rather quickly. So I try to keep my Old King James handy, but out of people's faces, and let the Light and the Paraclete do most of the talking most of the time.
Have you noticed perhaps the only poster on this and other related threads trying to refrain from using phrases such as "Whoop A__" and "Take the XXX's OUT!!!" in his commentary, while pleading for restraint from physical threatening and confrontation?
Can you identify 3 contributors here so far who you might honestly call a "Peacemaker" while advocating for "Justice"?
Two? Go ahead; check it out. I'll wait.
...
Yup; I'm still here.
Aw, Come on!; There Must be AT LEAST Two!
If you can't tell who it is I know as Master or follow as best I can as Lord without checking my name-tag, score-card, or bumper sticker...
Then I done blowed it.
And yes, sometimes when I am a little "Wroth" with spiritual - as well as emotional indignation, a curse oft rises from the depths of my old adamic nature to these lips, and I have to bite it pretty hard and fast in order to convert it into a prayer or word of Praise before it flys.
And even then it still might be a little rough around the edges; can't have that happening from a pulpit now, can we?
Not to worry; won't be happening.
But I was sort of hoping that the last word of that post might have tipped someone off.
So please forgive, if you will, a sorry excuse for a Brother in Christ; Although indignant enough over this so as to care little for how some participants in the matter might be offended, you are certainly not among that number.
And hopefully there will be prayers in legion far above our collective indignation over what has been perpetrated on these Families.
Amen?
I am outraged at the conduct of public school personnel concerning this issue. This is precisely why I choose to homeschool:)
I'm watching Bill O'Reilly at the moment, and so far narry a peep about it. If it's in the studio, he surely knows about it, but apparently is not getting his dander up over it.
Yet.
The story finally caught Howie CARR's attention this Evening, and he mentioned it breifly at 1725 hrs.. A couple of callers commented on it, expressing similar sentiments as to what we see here.
LOL! Priceless!
(I feel that way myself sometimes too.)
. . . for those of us who are latecomers to the thread, who are the corporal and the chaplain's assistant, and what on earth did they do?
(I thought they didn't make bad boys peel potatoes or be janker-wallahs anymore because it hurt their self-esteem.)
The link is HERE .
Somebody should create a new thread for the WND article to keep the story alive. I'm pressed for time, or I would.
It looks like the reporter in the WND story got some real confirmation. This is the best treatment of the issue I've seen to date.
I think we have this one run to ground and now that there are multiple threads, this one will morph into obscurity. But I know the FReepers will keep up the vigilance.
Here is my update ... of all the e-Mails I sent, the only response other than an automated "thank you for your interest" return came from my Governor, Jeb Bush. I am totally confident that if this stuff happens in Florida, there will be no delay in action from the Governor's office. Someone posted elsewhere that Jeb reads and replies to his own mail and it's true! Thank you, Jeb!!!
Maine Military News Update; Page W-47 (Small Print):
U.S. Army Advisors arrive in East Timor:
Dateline East Timor: at approximately 4:30 this Morning, local time, two Maine National Guard Soldiers arrived via lifeboat launched from a U.S. Navy Coal Tender anchored well offshore and listing slightly to Port, on a mission from Augusta, Maine, to establish a United States Military Presence in East Timor.
Corporal John Mosher, in his somewhat rumpled WW-II surplus fatigue uniform and armed with a long-handled shovel, is to advise East Timorian and Portugese Troops, specifically the Engineering Corps, in developing their state-of-the-art waste treatment facility West of the coastal metropolis of Jaco.
Major General Yuseph F. Tinkman IV, Adjutant General of the Maine National Guard, tells the Argus that Cpl. Mosher has demonstrated a peculiar talent for digging up dirt at his former assignment, and that his new post would provide ample opportunity for him to demonstrate these skills to one of America's most stalwart Allies, Portugal, in their Indonesian paradise of Timor.
Private / Chaplain's Assistant A. Gibson leaves his Ministry with the National Guard Family Centers in Maine, after this organization was disbanded, disbursed, and their buildings burned to the ground. General Timkman sincerely regrets this reduction in services to the Families of recently activated and Deployed Maine Guardspeople, but cites Maine's abysimal financial crisis of late as making cost reduction measures such as this neccessary.
Pvt./CA Gibson's new Ministry will be with the Rare, venomous Ring-Tailed Dung-Bats which inhabit squalid, vermin-infested caverns deep within the tropical rain forests on the Southern slopes of the 9,714-foot high Monte Ramealu. This pioneering mission will be in promotion of the Army's experimental outreach to meet the spiritual needs of endagered and exotic wildlife in potentially threatened environments.
Senior Maine Educators and Environmentalists, co-sponsors with the Military in this novel venture, expect to work closely with Pvt. Gibson as his adventures might yeild interesting environmental insights for the Students in classrooms back here in Maine.
How they intend to communicate with him while he is under the heavy jungle canopy hundreds of miles from civilization from whence no White man has ever ventured and been seen or heard from since, has yet to be determined.
"All of us at the Ministry of Education here in Maine wish Pvt. Gibson and Cpl. Mosher the best of luck in their new assignment" wrote Kommisar Alboneze in a Press Release from his Augusta Office Wednesday.
East Timor's US Military Advisory force of two is expected to qualify for a 5-day "R-and-R" vacation in sunny Borneo after their first year of service in Timor, provided that they can still be located at that time.
And now, about that mysterious dumpster fire in Standish last night...
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