Memorial Day Post

I read this post over at Kim's and then started reading the comments.
I don't know if it was the content of the original post or the comments or both put together but I was touched. I started thinking about my own father who had server in WW2 and I started to cry.

It happens not infrequently in blogs that something I read touches me and I was reminded how rare it is for something that I read in the major media to affect me this way. Maybe they just don't have the skill, maybe they think they would be thought less well of, maybe their editors don't want something too emotional to reach print but for what ever reason it just doesn't happen.
That is a shame because a well written story can touch you and stay with you more than a sound bite ever can.
The legacy of Common Sense is still with us today. Back then they had pamplets today we have blogs. They had Thomas Paine we have Bill Whittle. Were it not for people like Bill I would despair the fate of the written word, he is not alone in the blogosphere but tyr to find someone who writes with that kind of power in the NY Times and you will come up short.

My father served in WW2 mostly on a ground crew for the air corps but after the Battle of the Bulge as he put it "They took everyone who could carry a gun and sent them to the front". He finished the war in Germany served under Gen. Patton. He probably was witness to some of the death camps they liberated but he never liked to talk about it. I wish I had pressed him and asked him more about it when he was alive.

I wish he was here today to see the new monument but he might have been very matter of fact about it. His was a generation that went a did what had to be done. Performed acts they never imagined they would. Witnessed things they never wanted to witness. Looked at evil that no man should ever have to look at. When it was done they came back to their girlfriends and wives and raised families. They built in the aftermath of a devestating conflict a nation greater than any has ever been. They were a great generation and I hope we can live up to the greatness they left us.