Note: This is an updated version of a Memorial Day blog I wrote about five years ago, both celebrating and mourning personages of the past who can only be reached by memories today. It’s funny how people in your life are there, flashing bright, briefly and with intensity, and then they are gone. This is especially true of military service in general and wartime duty in particular. You mourn the loss of guys you were close to— literally a [...] READ MORE
Cheer up! We’ve always got death to look forward to. Sometimes we get so caught up in the mean spiritedness of politics and man’s inhumanity to man, which is one male chauvinistic expression feminists don’t seem to mind, that we lose our grasp on humanity and the shared assets and liabilities that make us more similar than different. We cringe through morning updates on the slaughter of innocents in the Ukraine as we brave the tirade of [...] READ MORE
Sometimes the simplest demands can turn a man into a monster. Because the mask has become so polarizing, the extreme reactions aren’t really about being asked to wear one for an hour. It’s about communicating what side you’re on. — ProPublica, October 7, 2021, “We’re Losing Our Humanity and the Pandemic Is to Blame” In a well-researched October 7 article for ProPublica, Sarah Smith takes a fascinating look at how COVID-19 has turned Americans against each other, [...] READ MORE
Contemplating the War on Terror and remembering our last brief display of national unity twenty years ago. I suppose I wrote my 9/11 commentary a year ago when I shared remembrances of my son’s escape from the soon-to-collapse South Tower on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was a happy ending for both Jeremy and us, but after 20 years he is still trying to come to terms with why fate put him there and, secondly, [...] READ MORE
Uncle Sam’s call became more of a challenge during the Vietnam War. Frederick Richard “Rick” Ohler’s name is just one of about 58,000, mostly men and barely old enough to be treated as adults had they avoided military service. They are all dead. Rick, at 24, was one of the older soldiers in the 519th MI Battalion and, like many of us, he was an intelligence analyst. Our compound was in a rather rural place known as [...] READ MORE
Some slackers faced death sentences during the 1918 pandemic. I guess we are all familiar with the idea that history repeats itself, and, accordingly, if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, we’ll keep on making the same blunders. The Philosopher George Santayana gets the credit for best expressing this theorem with this assessment: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He was looking at this from a historical perspective, a world view, [...] READ MORE
The message of the evils of racism still falling on deaf ears. I had a blog written about how all of us are more alike than different, but it just doesn’t seem credible anymore. It’s reassuring to think we’re always going to have a happy ending here, as well as in the hereafter, and that we all have more goodness within us than iniquity. Maybe, but, then again, we may merely be a nation of strangers who [...] READ MORE
Keeping up with the virus on Fox News. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that the acceptance of a lesser service than public service is betrayal of this trust… I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true. — Part of The Journalist’s Creed by Walter Williams (1914) [...] READ MORE
Something for those scared to death of dying? It seems that people are becoming increasingly aware of the value of history and the lessons we should be learning from it. Museums and historical societies are all around, supposedly to sustain our understanding of the past, as well as its impact on our present while providing guidance for the future. Driving across the wide expanse of Virginia over the weekend I saw a big billboard proclaiming Cooter’s Place, [...] READ MORE
