MEMORIAL DAY

The fact that I am walking the planet on this Memorial Day of 2006 is a testament to the fact that American soldiers have helped create the world we live in today.

Without America’s fighting men, whose courage and sacrifice in World War II helped tip the balance and ensure an Allied victory, this world would be a dark place...for our enemies had Big Plans, plans that did not include people like me.

It is beyond imagining, the world that would exist today without America’s armed forces.

For most of my Esteemed Readers, our fighting men have helped preserve the precious freedoms that have made the United States of America a unique place on Earth, a republic with basic freedoms enshrined, one that is ruled by the consent of the governed. It ain’t perfect...but it’s way, way ahead of all the alternatives.

But for me - for my people - America’s fighting men meant the difference between life and death. A Nazi victory would have sounded the death knell for the Jewish people. And for me.

We are today engaged in a similar struggle with forces that oppose our freedom to think, to worship, to live our lives as we would like to live them. Forces that once again have singled out the Jewish nation for special opprobium while chanting “Death to America!”

It is the American fighting man - and woman - that will combat those forces and that will ultimately have victory over them.

Let us remember the ones who fought this struggle for us in the past...and who will do so in the future.

Update: From The Blue Sloth comes a link to a remarkable collection of vintage WWII photographs.

The photographs were posted by one Deveyn (writer of My African Grey - a parrotblog, of all things!), whose grandfather was a Seabee during the war. The photos, which until now had not been seen by anyone outside of Deveyn’s family, were developed by his grandfather in the clandestine photo lab he ran while stationed on Tinian. They include aircraft nose art, photos taken on Tinian, shots taken in a Korean concentration camp, and photos from film taken from dead Japanese soldiers. There is even a photograph of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud, made from the original negative. Amazing stuff, and well worth checking out...lest we forget the magnitude of the sacrifices that were made on our behalf.