Letters to the Editor - 4/29/2013
Editor: "We the people" and historians seem destined to discuss presidents and their wars.
President Johnson was blamed for staying too long in Vietnam at too great a cost to the national treasury and American and Vietnamese lives. President Kennedy was blamed for initially "putting boots on the ground" there. He called them "military advisers." But no matter, some died advising.
President Truman was castigated for engaging in Korea. It was called a United Nations "police action" - a title that never caught on. President Eisenhower got a cease fire. But lines that divided North and South Korea are still in dispute decades later. The one constant is the graves of the dead who fought over them.
On a recent sunny Washington day I visited Arlington National Cemetery. I sat in its utter peace of beautifully landscaped grounds and blossoming trees with chirping birds. It distanced the din of Washington on the move.
En route home I heard, on the radio, President Obama citing former President George W. Bush's "courage" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Speaking on a bullhorn atop World Trade Center rubble, Bush vowed to avenge the deaths of innocents.
I thought of courageous men and women whose graves I saw at Arlington. They fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was said Iraq was about finding weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Others died in Afghanistan - the 9/11 terrorist breeding ground. Carnage continues in both countries.
Now, after the Boston Marathon, is there more or less fear about how near or far away we are from potential terrorists plotting and planning to inflict harm in maniacal revenge?
Editor: What do that once-exiled ayatollah, that bearded shrink from Texas and the Chechen sibling twerps have in common? Two basic things present.
First, they are products of closed, almost neolithic, limited, absolutist societies that seem to exude nothing more than hatred.
Second, they took their vitriolic societal precepts into free, open, liberal environments where they could comfortably nourish their horrid plans and once mature, ply them in honor of those closed, almost neolithic, limited, absolute societies.
Editor: What would the Moosic High School officials who suspended a student on April 24, 1938 think if they had been put in a time machine and were transported to 2013?
I noticed the item in the "On this Date" section in The Times-Tribune about the student who was suspended for "grinning" during a school assembly. That's "grinning," not "gunning."
As a show of solidarity for their unfairly prosecuted classmate, the boy's fellow students walked out.
I think the teachers from 75 years ago would take one look at the heartbreaking headlines of the past couple of decades and retreat safely back to 1938. They would want no part of Columbine, Newtown, or any of the cyber-bullying that follows students from the classrooms to their homes, and, in some cases, results in the tortured kids not showing up again for class. Ever.
So, let's go back 75 years to that day at Moosic High School, where there is no gunfire, no suicides, no national tragedy in the making.
A day where we see only a kid who won't stop grinning.
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