There are times I wonder how many more of any holiday that our republic will survive to see, but this one is the hardest to come to grips with. Memorial Day is the day to honor those who fell fighting to preserve the republic and if it falls, that's dishonoring every one of them. Every one of them gave themselves, their lives, their futures, for something bigger than themselves.
It's not just the generation that saved the west in the all out war of WWII;
it's all of them, from those we know of fighting in the first battles of the
Revolution on April 19, 1775, (commemorated as
Patriots' Day
but some states shift the date to get a Monday Holiday) to those who were lost
in
Bumbling Biden's disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, including those lost since then. We include losses from training
accidents as well as actual enemy action.
For most people, Memorial Day is the semi-official Start of Summer. It's marked by barbecues, trips out on the boat, or other outdoors activities. Let me join the chorus of folks saying that while you're enjoying your day, take a moment to remember or think of and thank those who gave their all in service to us. The ones who don't get to mark the holiday with us.
I say that in the belief that those who made that sacrifice wouldn't hold it against us to have a little fun on their day.
Credit to Al Goodwyn at Creators Syndicate.
I find it more difficult every year to convince myself that the deaths lately were justified. What have the wars really accomplished? Vietnam, Desert Storm 1 and 2, Afghanistan. Politically we are back to essentially what was the status quo before the respective war. Don't get me wrong. I honor the people who have given their all just have problems lately thinking their sacrifice was worth it.
ReplyDeleteThe middle class is poorer, the aristocracy and their industrial cronies are richer. The middle class go-getters with leadership abilities are KIA, so they cannot retire from the military and compete with the elites in business or politics. The middle-class taxpayers are poorer, which makes them less self-sufficient and more dependent on favors dispensed by rulers. The political situation has moved closer to nobles and serfs. Liberty is an aberration, it is not the natural outcome of human politics.
DeleteWhat would the "status quo" have been if they never went in the first place?
DeleteYou're looking at what is, ignoring the millions who watched the fall of the Soviet Union, and who haven't had to see another 9/11 long enough to be born and grow all the way to adulthood since that day.
Now ponder where you'd be if we'd hunkered down, rolled over, and played dead the last 60 years, and just let communism and tyranny roll on unopposed.
Tell us about that world, and then answer your own questions.
And for anyone who doesn't have enough liberty, it begs the eternal questions:
What have you done about that?
And what are you prepared - in every sense - to do?
If the answer is that enough has not been done, to whom now does that task fall?
1) That we haven't had anything that resembles air defense in this country since about 1990, or that the military - particularly the Air Farce - was literally gutted from 1992-1999, is all evidently news to you. That lets us know your level of familiarity with that particular subject matter.
Delete2) Lindbergh's idiotic and myopic isolationism as national policy pretty much went facefirst into the woodchipper of history by around 3PM EST, 7 Dec 1941.
Which coincided with the last time anyone in the U.S. besides his wife gave two sh*ts for the man, or his opinions, and he went into a virtual self-imposed exile from public life until the day he died, shunned and largely forgotten. That unfortunate public eructation, coupled with open admiration for Nazis is hard to walk back after 1946 or so.
You could look it up.
3) Who do you figure the U.S. would have traded anything with, after surrendering Europe to a combination of National and International Socialists, and the Pacific all the way to Kauai to Japan?
We would be the Mexico of the entire world, and inevitably, been taking on everyone interminably, from then until now, as despotism, like rust, never sleeps. And we'd probably have lost, overwhelmingly, long since.
Whether you and your kids would now speak German, Japanese, Russian, or Chinese is mainly an artifact of what-if-history and actual geography. The inevitable result of the U.S. never developing the atomic bomb at all, let alone first, might even conceivably mean you would never even have been a gleam in your dead-before-you-were-even-born daddy's eye.
I'm glad you're comforted by those thoughts.
The ultimate differences between your fond wishes, and those of the Burn Loot Murder and Antifatard crowd cannot be measured with existing instrumentation.
I'd suggest an earnest rethink, this time after looking at the whole board, rather than fever dreams and hopeium.
Recently the US military shot down a Chinese spy balloon using a fighter aircraft, I'm sure they had three more fighters in 2001.
DeleteRoosevelt decided to permit Japan to attack Pearl unchallenged, because it suited his anti-America-first narrative. Thrilling footage was captured by the six movie newsreel companies on the island for no reason at all.
The US couldn't have surrendered Europe, because Europe doesn't belong to the US.
Way to not address anything I said, move your goalposts, and erect more strawmen from a bankrupt perspective.
DeleteОтличная работа, товарищ!
An untold amount of American blood was shed to advance liberty. Now the billions we saved actively seek our demise.
ReplyDelete@ Ed Campbell
ReplyDeleteIt's one thing (to be willing) to shed blood in defense of your country and the Christian values in which you've been raised; it's quite another to watch those for whom you've willingly written a blank check urinate on those values
I will never, nor can I ever, forget my Brothers In Arms. I will not break faith.
ReplyDeleteRequiescat in Pace, David Allen Higgs. See you soon.