Reply #21: Amen to that. [View All]

[govegan]

We love our neighbors, we love this land, we love the earth, and we love the wonder of creation.

For these reasons, we cannot fathom the insanity of war without end and its inevitable cruelty, murder and destruction. We find it intolerable to stomach the mind-numbing cowardice that inhabits the lizard brain, which knows to strike and kill without reason.

Scott Nearing called war "organized murder and mass destruction by civilized nations" in his brilliant tome that he penned between the massive world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. As he elaborated: "War ... is neither a legalistic distinction nor a problem in ethics. It is a formidable enemy that snatches them from their families and jobs; that forces them to fight or to work; that gags them; that ruthlessly destroys the products of their labor; that wounds and maims them; that takes their lives."

Tricked, suckered, bamboozled, indeed. Snatched from their families and jobs.

My ancestors gave of themselves and risked much during the establishment of this country, and in the other great conflicts of the nineteenth century. To have their sacrifices trivialized and ridiculed by the neo-fascist cabal of today is particularly distasteful.

As per Wikipedia:

According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the historic race track in Charleston. The site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who had died while captive. The freed slaves reinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to individual graves, fenced in the graveyard & built an entry arch declaring it a Union graveyard; a very daring thing to do in the South shortly after North's victory. On May 30 1868 the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they'd picked from the countryside & decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the 1st Decoration Day. A parade with thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers was followed by patriotic singing and a picnic.