Memorial Day. To remember and to feel today. To link past with present and future.

Pharmaceutical unmonitored profiteering. Minimization by our country and government of the profound trauma both physical and psychological on our service people.

Watched Recount last night. Where have all the ethics gone? Long time passing….. A partisan Supreme Court. Trickle down amorality.

Loyalty to partisan community… at the cost of the common good. Dedication to $$$ at the cost of the common good. Shallow values. Gang-mentality bonding.

Awareness … sustained awareness … is key. Empathy and courage is required. The counter-culture is growing. Thanks for enhancing the awareness.

Dozens of immigrants to California are among the war casualties

Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez was an orphan who made his way to the U.S. from the streets of Guatemala City as a teen. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tung Nguyen, born in Vietnam, was 11 and living in a refugee camp in Thailand when his mother placed him on a rickety boat with the goal of reaching America.

Of the nearly 500 Californians who have lost their lives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 59 were immigrants, The Times has found in an analysis of their obituaries.

Dozens more were first-generation Americans whose parents made their way to the U.S. from China, Mexico, Central America, Russia and elsewhere to seek a better life.

At age 7, Army Cpl. Victor H. Toledo-Pulido was smuggled from Mexico through rugged mountains into California. He and another soldier were killed in May 2007 when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle southeast of Baghdad.

“They judge us, and they say we just come to take their jobs and positions, but we also make sacrifices. Victor worked since he was little, in the fields and in restaurants,” his mother, Maria Gaspar, said after the 22-year-old was killed. “He was Mexican, but he thought like an American. And he gave his life for this country.”

…

I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier- The Peerless Quartet, 78 rpm recorded in Dec. 1914

Lyrics-

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mother’s hearts must break
For the ones who died in vain.
Head bowed down in sorrow
In her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur thro’ her tears:

“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,
There’d be no war today,
If mother’s all would say,
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.”

What victory can cheer a mother’s heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back
All she cared to call her own.
Let each mother answer
In the years to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!

Citizen Raven:

I am rememberin’ the five GI’s left from a recon squad…they spent 3 dayz and 2 nights in a wine cellar on one of the side streets of Melun, France. Staunching’ the wounds of their point man, usin up all the dressing kits and sulfa and then uncorkin’ bottles of some very sweet French wine to anesthetize their comrade as Waffen SS boots scampered back and forth past the garden level windows. The third afternoon, their outfit managed to pontoon the bridge that was blown shortly after the recon squad crossed that little bend in the Seine.

The squad was relieved and the wounded soldier evacuated to England for 3 months of botched surgeries to return home with Bronze and Silver Stars, a Purple Heart and a life long case of osteomyelitis but he missed bein’ with his buddies when they partook of the relief of Bastone at the Battle of the Bulge…and he never forgave himself survivin’ at Melun when 3 of the remainin’ four comrades didn’t survive the Bulge. That GI was my father.

There is no victory from war, only wisdom and memory and the wisdom dies to be replaced by hubris when the memories fade.

KEEP THE FAITH BROTHERS AND SISTERS, WE’RE BEIN’ CALLED OUT!!

It didn’t even cross my mind. LOL

Good times this family is having today. At least they’re honest about it.