May 29, 2011
This blog will encompass one of the favorite features which Thomas Sowell has called "Random thoughts on the Passing Scene." Here is my version of random thoughts:
IT'S RACE DAY
Happy Race Day, Patriots! I was born and raised in Indianapolis so Race Day has
a special place in my heart. My Pop took me to my first 500 in 1966. It was one of those deals that we were poor but we didn't know we were poor, so 500 Mile Race tickets were pretty precious back then. The race was memorable for me as Pop worked most of the time and it was great to have one on one time with him. There was a big crash on the first lap and 11 cars went out. My favorite driver Graham Hill won the race so it was great day.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. One of the teary moments of today's 500 Mile Race for me was when the bugler sounded Taps. It took me back about 4 years ago when we interred my Mom and Pop's ashes and our younger sons "the twins" played Taps so beautifully and poignantly.
Pop was a prisoner of war in Germany in World War II. The toll this experience enacted on my Dad and his fellow "Kriegies" (nickname for the German Kriegsgefangener = POW) was incredible. He knew first hand the tender "mercies" of a socialist regime. He was tortured in a Gestapo jail in Vienna and survived the ordeal of a 600 mile forced march across northern Germany in the most extreme winter conditions in Europe for the previous 100 years. It is his legacy of loving liberty and the freedom which resulted that influences all I do today to try to help reverse the course our country seems to be on as well as pass onto my sons an even better America than the one my Pop left my sister and I.
On our radio program last Monday, I quoted Kris Kristoferson as Devon Milford from the 1987 television mini-series, Amerika:
"I'm not going to accept the breakup of America. I'll resist with my spirit. I'll resist with my life. I can resist because I've found the love for my children, the possibility that their lives are more important than my own. I'll live through my children, through whatever good and true things I might have taught them or the legacy of fear I might have left them. At this time, each of us will find our best selves or our worst selves and through that, immortality."
CLICK IT OR TICKET - WHAT A DUMB IDEA!
I detest commercials on TV. Most of the time they involve stuff I don't need. More often nowadays they involve spending monies which the federal and state government has caused to be taken from my family and I (and your family as well) for what ... commercials which advance their own programs (oh yeah, for our own good!).
One of the blackboard scraping moments is the ongoing Click It or Ticket campaign. In my reading at the end of the day, I hold onto all sorts of articles.
The following op-ed was published in December 1, 2002 by Jon Caldara in the Boulder Daily Camera:
"No. I am not saying we should kill stupid people. I am simply saying we shouldn't stop stupid people from killing themselves.
With the best of intentions, police, sheriff's deputies, and the State Patrol have joined the Department of Transportation to promote the new "Click it or Ticket" campaign. They are spending your tax dollars to advertise that they will be checking to see if you're buckled up on the roads. If you're not, you'll get a ticket.
Let's think about this. The idea here is that the threat of a $17 ticket is more motivating than the threat of meeting your windshield at 60 miles per hour. On what kind of person does this logic work? More importantly, do we really want this person voting?
People who don't use their seat belts are morons. Now, we have a responsibility to give everyone, even morons, all the facts. What you do with those facts is up to you. Fact is, 565 people died in car crashes in Colorado last year. Of those, 354 weren't wearing their seat belts. That's over 62 percent of all fatal crashes.
You can cut your risk of dying in an accident by over half just by buckling up. Oh, and you'll save $17.
What are we going to do next? A $7 fine for your putting your tongue into a blender? A $38 penalty for using an electric razor in the bathtub? A massive tax increase for voting Democratic? (Sorry, that was just gratuitous.)
Just like people know smoking is bad for them, they know wearing a seat belt is good for them. There's no claiming ignorance. It's not like cars were just invented, and nobody knows how seat belts work. It's easy. It's inexpensive. It's fast. And it works.
So seat belt laws must apply to kids. Children aren't old enough to understand the facts. And we have a responsibility to protect children from people (including parents) who put them in danger.
Of course you'll find a handful of folks who actually believe it is safer not to wear a seat belt. They're the types who tell you that their Uncle Ted smoked 28 packs of Marlboros a day and lived 'til he was 93; therefore, smoking is safe. They also tell you that in a nasty car crash they'll be thrown safely out of the wreckage. If they wear a seat belt, they'd be trapped and surely die.
Yes, these people are kidding themselves. But don't they have the right to make their own (bad) decisions about their personal safety? If they are wrong, and they are, they sacrifice their own lives, not others'. We don't force people into medical treatments they don't want. If your appendix bursts, and you treat yourself with herbal tea, that's your business. We don't fine you. Granted, it's hard to fine the dead (although creative liberals did come up with the death tax).
Keeping stupid people alive against their will is not in our long-term interests. These idiots we save from their own irrationality reproduce and create even more brainless people. Before you know it, you have California.
Trust me, Darwin hates seat belt laws.
In fact, maybe police should pull folks over, and ask them to find the United States on a map. If they can't, they don't have to wear a seat belt.
The reason most often given for protecting the endangered stupid is that when they injure themselves, we might pay the medical bills. It would seem that some of the stupid are too stupid to buy insurance, even though they are required to by law in order to drive. (But they'll follow the seat belt law?) This is a tempting reason, but where do you stop? Do we outlaw tobacco to save those who are too stupid to stop smoking? Do we fine people for eating fatty food? Apparently the answer is yes; these proposals are being debated on the state and national level now.
We are not going to take someone off life support if they didn't wear a seat belt and didn't have insurance, just like we wouldn't do to the uninsured person who used herbs on the burst appendix. There is a cost, but it's preferable to the alternative: losing individual decisions over your own body.
Maybe the stupid need their own Bill of Rights. It's the best way to guarantee people get smarter."
INCUMBENT PROTECTION MAILINGS (AT OUR EXPENSE)
Well, it's the end of the Indiana General Assembly and I've gotten yet another multi-color, mult-page glossy mailer from State Representative Dave Cheatham. This is the same Dave Cheatham who equated his cowardly walk out from the General Assembly to a serviceman being deployed to Afghanistan (sorry it was a kid in his wife's classroom who said it, yeah right! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwixYYFmSHI&feature=related).
It's bad enough to get this self-serving crud, but I even wrote him to get off his list of mailings!
On April 17:
Mr. Cheatham:
Please stop mailing me your multi-color expensive mailers anymore which are funded at taxpayer expense. I find that your disingenuous information (vis a vis "Thousands of Hoosiers rally ..." when the majority of these people were bused in a union expense from outside Indiana) borders on propaganda. I found this practice revolting when Congressman Hill did it and would find it equally distasteful if a Republican did it. I shall ask my fellow taxpayers to do the same.
Respectful to the office of State Representative,
Rick Reuss
On April 18, I got the following:
Mr. Reuss,
I will gladly stop mailing any information to you and your friends to not waste taxpayer money, especially since you will no longer be in my District. Many citizens want to be informed about issues, which you have made clear with your e-mail that you do not.
On May 28, you guessed it, I got another mailer from Cheatham! Earlier in the week, I got a multi-color, mult-page glossy mailer from Congressman Todd Young with the legend in the left hand corner "Official Business - This mailing was prepared, published, and mailed at taxpayer expense." These mailings are expensive and unnecessary and the only purpose they serve is to act as campaign mailers for incumbent politicians. It's wrong when Democrats do it and it's wrong when Republicans do it. WHAT SAY YE, PATRIOTS?!!!!
Action Plan: Contact these folks to stop sending these mailers and contact the newspaper editor to let them know of your dissatisfaction with these folks using monies we don't have for things we don't need!
BTW
On Saturday, my radio partner Rick Berry and I taped a tutorial on "How to Do a Radio Ad" under the direction and production skills of my "twins" Joe and Alex. We should have the finished production on youtube very soon!
MacARTHUR
On this last Memorial Weekend, Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics are showing a lot of war movies. The movie, MacArthur, was on Sunday morning. His Duty, Honor, Country speech is timeless:
Douglas MacArthur:
"As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, ‘Where are you headed for, General?' And when I replied, ‘West Point,' he remarked, ‘Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?'
No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this. Coming from a profession I have served so long, and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code - the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always. ...
Duty-Honor-Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points; to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean. The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character; they mold you for your future roles as custodians of the nation's defense; they make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success, not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fail; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.
And what short of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable, are they brave, are they capable of victory? Their story is known to all of you; it is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then as I regard him now - as one of the world's noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man. He was written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast. But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism; he belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom; he belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his status in the hearts of his people. From one end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage.
As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs, on many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and, for many, to the judgment seat of God. I do not know the dignity of their birth but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for them - Duty-Honor-Country; always their blood and sweat and tears as we sought the way and the light and the truth.
And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts; those broiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storm, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropical disease, the horror of stricken areas of war; their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always victory - always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men reverently following your password of Duty-Honor-Country.
The code which those words perpetrate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training - sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when He created man in His own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world - a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellites, spheres and missiles marked the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind - the chapter of the space age. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a greater, a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard-of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; of purifying sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.
And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable - it is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but a corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who are trained to fight; yours is the profession of arms - the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that it you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty-Honor-Country. Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide man's minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the nation's war guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict; as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice. Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long; by federal paternalism grown too mighty; by power groups grown too arrogant; by politics grown too corrupt; by crime grown too rampant; by morals grown too low; by taxes grown too high; by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold beacon in the night - Duty-Honor-Country.
You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words - Duty-Honor-Country.
This does not mean that you are war mongers. On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers, ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.'
The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished tone and tint; they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and reechoes in my ears - Duty-Honor-Country.
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps - and the Corps - and the Corps. I bid you farewell." (Upon being awarded the Sylvanus Thayer Medal, at the plain of West Point, 1962)
