WORDS TO REMEMBER
On this Memorial Day, 2006, I thought it'd be appropriate to re-visit some words from President Ronald Reagan's address at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on this same day, 1986, two decades ago:
"I was thinking this morning that across the country children and their parents will be going to the town parade and the young ones will sit on the sidewalks and wave their flags as the band goes by. Later, maybe, they'll have a cookout or a day at the beach. And that's good, because today is a day to be with the family and to remember...
I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the wall. And they're still helping each other on. They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam -- boys who fought a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys who were dodging bullets while we debated the efficacy of the battle.
It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other.
And they were special in another way: They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of duty. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age; they stood for something."
These words from twenty years ago have special meaning today with yet another generation of young men and women risking life and limb thousands of miles away in another unpopular war.
This past week leading into this national holiday was also eventful on another front, as Congress and President Bush dealt with the controversial immigration debate while shaping new legislation.
Again, some words from President Ronald Reagan come to mind, this time courtesy of a terrific op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago. As the piece reminded us,
"In one of his radio addresses, in November 1977, he wondered about what he called
"the illegal alien fuss. Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won't do? One thing is certain in this hungry world:
No regulation or law should be allowed if it results in crops rotting in the fields for lack of harvesters."
The op-ed folks at the WSJ add:
"The current immigration political panic is not unlike many in America's past, including a couple while Reagan was in public life.
He always avoided the temptation to join them, no doubt realizing that they were short-sighted politically, and, more important, inconsistent with his vision of America as the last best hope of mankind."
The whole piece is worth reading and re-reading more than once.
Our 40th President again has some words worth keeping in mind as history seems to be testing us all again.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend, everyone.
Well, Memorial Day is for the living anyway for it does nothing for the dead. Death is final and there is nothing that us living ones can do for the dead. What is meaningful is we, the living human beings in this twenty first century with the advance of mass and quick communication, get together to finally eradicate the plague of war so we don't ever need another frigging Memorial Day.
As for the so called illegal immigration, aren't we all illegal immigrants or descendants of one? I don't recall native American indians ever welcoming the first European settlers. Come on, the reason that Mexicans are coming over the border is that we have a good economy here, They come here to make a living. They are hard working people and I, for one, welcome them.
Posted by: Dennis Chan | Monday, May 29, 2006 at 12:55 PM