Thursday, June 6, 2013

The Unbroken Line

Looking at the headlines today, or any day this week, or month so far or even longer, you really can't be blamed if you're morose and downhearted. It's really a case of  "cheer up, things could get worse, so I did and then they did, too." .

Lest we forget with clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right, here we are:

Gridlock and exultation in that gridlock in the halls of our national seat of government.

Outrage by one party over the other's use of the IRS to investigate and perhaps intimidate conservative groups though when those same conservatives used the IRS to investigate and intimidate the NAACP, 'twas no big deal.

A rapidly approaching debt ceiling with little inclination and less will to remedy the causes of it.

A professional armed forces where sexual violence is more likely to be visited on its individual members than they are to ever fire a shot in anger.

A cohort of a generation of college graduates who will spend the next two decades of their lives attempting to pay off student loans for educations they hoped would enable them to get better jobs that never existed.

The paralysis of analysis among our national media that has concluded comity means allowing malevolent miscreants of any and all political stripes to mouth their slander and fabrication at the top of their lungs without correction or reproof for fear of being perceived as infringing on any American's right to freedom of speech, no matter how stupid and wrong-headed it is.

The treatment of a panda phenomenon, such as the pregnancy of Kim Kardashian, as if it were an epoch-shaking event like a walk on the moon, when an actual event that did just that receives not one frame of video on E!

I wonder what a man whom I never met but in whose footfalls, over two decades ago I followed on a still-pockmarked stretch of open beach on the coast of France, and whose original trip had been nearly four decades earlier, Dr. Bill Austin of Forest, Mississippi, would make of how hopelessly helpless we see ourselves today when, like him and his brothers in arms, we could be bouncing around in a modified tin can braving murderous fire to help enslaved nations reclaim their birthright.


And on this, the 69th anniversary of The Longest Day, the D-Day invasion, I have to worry if we can 'still draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore.'
-bill kenny   

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