A Day To Honor (Updated – Marines)

Will we soon be celebrating an annual holiday for Barack Obama, too?

CJOnline.com / The Topeka Capital-Journal

Story originally published at http://cjonline.com/stories/110908/loc_353922770.shtml

Planning under way for Obama holiday

The Capital-Journal
Published Sunday, November 09, 2008

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

“Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at the downtown McDonald’s, and a celebration is scheduled for 8 p.m. to midnight Jan. 20 at the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center, 420 S.E. 6th.

Today, November 10th, is the 233rd birthday of the United States Marine Corps.

Semper Fi!

https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/holiday/usmc2008/playmovie.asp

My dad was a career Navy vet who participated in the Battle of Britain; my mom was a UK Navy vet (WRNS) who was an air-raid warden in Wales & London during the same. I, too, am sorry we have now “selected” someone with no qualifications to be our C-I-C. I’m sure that what they fought for is still important to millions of Americans and that we can overcome this “coup” in time if we apply ourselves as diligently as our parents did in their great challenge. At least, I certainly hope that is still possible. Happy Veterans Day tomorrow to all our Vets!

First and foremost, a thank you to my Dad who served in the Korean war. He lied about his age to so he could join up at 17. Said he had to shoot a 12 yr old kid-he was aiming a gun at my Dad and he had no choice. Very difficult for him.

These are the holidays I honor and remember:

Veterans Day for our brave soldiers

4th of July-to celebrate and honor our country (since Obama does not like our National Anthem and hates our country, they may do away w this one and flying the flag will become illegal)

Thanksgiving-this holiday celebrates people learning to take care of themselves. This was the first recorded event of socialism that didn’t work and got scrapped.

Christmas-for me, this celebrates Christ and all that is good in this world.

My birthday

Labor Day-to honor the 60% of our country that is hardworking

Memorial Day-again, to honor our military

My family has its share of unsung heroes, too, starting with “the war to end all wars”. Three young men from both sides of the family tree served; two survived and one lived to age 103 and one died young from being gassed in the trenches.

World War II touched almost everyone. My grandfather had radiation poisoning from occupying Japan. Two of his young brother-in-laws were wounded and disabled for life. Several cousins survived with minor wounds but one lost both legs when his ship was hit.

Viet Nam took no lives outright, but two family members are gravely ill from Agent Orange and one has died after years of fighting for health care.

These veterans all cared deeply about our democracy and taught me to care as well. One of my problems with the man called Obama is that he has given veterans so little respect; I never saw anyone in my family disrespect the flag or fail to honor the Star Spangled Banner. I knew then that he was not the one because if you can’t respect what a nation stands for you have no right to lead it. That flag those soldiers raised at Iwo Jima is still a testament to our strength and our honor and the tenacity of our veterans.

Wow, y’all’s stories are moving me to tears. John, how sad you were not able to bid your grandfather good bye…CJ, Cathy, all of y’all tell such moving, powerful stories. I thank you for them!

CJ my thoughts and prayers are with your father.

Thank you to all who serve our country, and Thank you to all who support those who serve our country.

May God Bless and keep all of you safe. May God Bless and keep the USA safe from harm.

My Veterans Day message is simple. I hate war. I loathe it beyond reason, I suppose.

Short of what happened in WWII, I see NO reason to go to war.

I cannot stand the militaristic paradigm, the insanity of it all.

BUT, having said that, the losses in this war are far less than in the past.

I find it strange that nobody acknowledges that. Every life is a loss, of course.

But this has been a very “light casualty” war.

I do not think the US needs to be the police of the free world.

We cannot afford it now.

Repeat.

We cannot afford it.

Perhaps the next emerging capitalist nation can.

But not us.

We are in economic disarray. We have no money. We, therefore, must give up that role.

That was the past.

For me? This is one good outcome of the economic meltdown. I can’t stand war, so I have NO problem in admitting it’s time to knock off the war-mongering.

My son and his high-school buddies—all of them members of the very smart but nerdy group of war gamers, science fiction fans, readers, computer geeks—joined the military either right out of high school or after a couple of semesters of college. They joined not to pay for college, or because they were too uneducated or too stupid, as Sen. Kerry said, to do something better. They did it because they felt that their country needed them. I’m proud of all of them.

One of them is in combat in Afghanistan right now; he’s supposed to be rotated back here in December. Others have been in harm’s way but are presently back in country. My son is here, working and going to college. Although he was a tough, athletic kid—martial arts and marching band—he blew out his knees in Marine training and was invalided out. He’s gone through extensive surgery and rehab, hoping to get back in; he was severely depressed about the situation for some time, felt he’d failed his buddies and his country.

Considering how the present administration has screwed up the prosecution of the war, and consideration of what the new administration will no doubt do to abuse the military, I’m glad that his doctor gives him no hope of getting back in. I wish all of his buddies were out, too. I wish all of our young men and women were out. And don’t get me started on the disenfranchisement of the military vote …

I’m not at all disrespecting the military or the war effort against our fascist enemies when I say this. We need a strong military. My family’s military tradition goes back to the Revolutionary War, and beyond, to the wars of Old Europe. Members of my family have fought in every American-involved war since the Revolution. There are too many of them to name here, just as there are too many of my friends who have served and are now serving in harm’s way. Some of them, friends and family, came back, if at all, in a box. Some of them came back maimed for life, either physically or mentally or both. Some of them came back with the seeds of death already set in their wounds, even though it took years for those seeds to kill them. Agent Orange, anyone?

My father was 17 when he (with his family’s written permission) joined the Air Force during the Korean War. He was trained as an aircraft mechanic and assigned to an air base in Japan. An Army captain met his ship at the dock and immediately recruited anyone who had experience operating heavy earthmoving equipment for a special unit. My Dad was one of those. Next he knew, he was operating a bulldozer and a grader at the front lines in Korea, rebuilding airfields that had been bombed.

Then the Chinese came across the border. During the fighting retreat, his legs were slashed and punctured by artillery fragments, some of which he carried until the day he died. The medics had run out of bandages, so they wrapped his leg wounds with electrical tape they’d borrowed from a tank crew. He suffered frostbite, nearly lost all of his toes. He told me, when he explained the ugliness of his toes and toenails, that people are wrong about hell being hot. Hell, he said, is frozen.

While his unit marched along a road, some panicked men in a jeep came through at high speed. They slammed into him, and he was thrown into an ice-choked ditch, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound; his right eye was slashed through the sclera. If his buddies, already exhausted and wounded themselves, hadn’t picked him up and carried him for miles, I wouldn’t be here.

An Army doctor sewed up his eye and told him that it shouldn’t be a problem. He got drugs for the pain in his head, but no x-ray. He was sent back to the Air Force, ended up doing mechanic work and guard duty at an airbase in Korea, where he received another head wound and more fragmentation wounds during an air raid. He was awarded, in total, three purple hearts.

He also had other terrible experiences in Korea—I won’t detail them here, but I remember when he’d wake up in the night, screaming in Korean.

He suffered from migraines and other pain for the rest of his life. In the late seventies, he suffered a massive stroke from which he wasn’t expected to recover. That’s when the doctors discovered that the scar tissue from his head wound had caused the rupture in the blood vessels in his brain. They also found that the extensive scar tissue from the meatball surgery had all but blinded him in his right eye. He did recover, persevered, learned to walk and talk again, and went on to run his own company for years.

In 1993, after a routine operation, he suffered another stroke, threw a blood clot that went to his heart and killed him.

And the politicians still haven’t managed to resolve that particular damned war.

My family has a proud military tradition. They’ve kept on serving, despite the faithlessness of the politicians, the old men who keep sending them off to die but who don’t have the guts to finish the wars they start, who don’t have the fortitude to work out political solutions to prevent unnecessary wars. One of these days, that deep well of American patience and faith is going to run dry. On the day it does, I know who to blame.

I trust I can also honor my family here in the Uk who fought to bring peace to the world in WW11.

My uncle who passed over in the battle at El Alamein.

”Before Alemein we never had a victory. After Alemein we never had a defeat”. Churchill”

Also I would like to pay respect to my mother who lived through this terrible war. She was located in Glasgow where most of the British weaponry was made..
She lived through the blitz where Glasgow was bombed on a daily basis so as to take out the production of our weapons.
Many days were spent dodging the doodlebug the Germans launched to take out these areas Glasgow, Leicester London etc so as to make us more venerable to the German onslaught!
Hopping on one foot, with one shoe over all the live electric wires on the way to the aid raid shelter. During this time she lost both her parents!
For me to listen to her stories of surviving the war makes me truly appreciate everything we have in life.

Without the coming together of the British & American forces I guess Britain would not of been on the map today.

One consolation is Germany made one huge mistake by first going towards Russia which gave us time in the UK to get our act together along with the help from our allies from USA~~

So I also would like to pay my respects to all who came together to make life easier for us all.

THANK YOU to everyone who’s family served to make Keep us FREE~~

I would like to take this time to give a word of honor to my Vietnam veteran father, Army, who never complained about his service, he took that as his duty for being born into this great Nation.

I would also like to thank my friend Kevin Clark, grandson of late Congressman Jamie Clark of NC, (D) for his service to our Nation. Kevin is a great man, and great patriot, & also probably the smartest man i’ve ever met.

Such powerful, beautiful, poignant stories – thank you all, from our shores and across the pond. For all of you stories of bravery, of great courage in the face of great fear, of duty, and of honor, for them all, I thank you for sharing them here.

And to all of the veterans reading this, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. One need not support a war to support those who serve our country. In your honor, I have written a check to Paralyzed Veterans to go in the mail tomorrow, and will make an online payment to the Service-members Legal Defense Network or the USO (remember, the USO is NOT a gov’t funded organization!).

Oh, and I’ll be calling my buddy, surrogate father, Mac, tomorrow, to thank him for his service in WWII.

The Obama Swirl Cake

A cake you will never forget

The flavor is one sufficient to describe everyone’s President what a joy. what a joy;

He said to tastes of him and gave of himself to people all over the world a mix of a cake;

The ingredients was poured into a bowl, you know the Constitutional bowl;

The Great Melting Pot of America, a pot filled with people from all over the world;

Different nationalities, cultures, religions, genders and beliefs, I need to mix this as one;

No one can be left out of this mixing bowl in a White House built for all;

The greatest campaign team in the history of America was stirred at a high degree;

Not at Princeton, Yale or Chicago School of Law but in Harvard he made it you see;

The bowl is still mixing and its not slowing down as it circles and swipes about;

Meeting people in very high places and leaving them with no reasonable doubt;

The Queen of Talk Shows Oprah Winfrey stepped out and stirred the mix even better;

Michelle was there with encouragement in hand and sound prayer to support her man;

What flavor will the cake turn out to be the mighty powers were now all in;

Mixed by the best chef’s delicacies with two little tasters at hand;

Malia had the spoon and Sasha had the bowl in support of dad a great man;

They gave the chef the final okay saying the mix is yummy so please do not change;

This will be the best cake ever in the White House there is nothing you need to add;

Heaven has opened and poured out a blessing that God baked as long as he could;

A cake prepared for the world to eat and I am certain every slice will be good;

What a preparation period, going back to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. you see;

I have a dream of a great cake that will taste so good it will carry all Americans through;

Just believe in the dream and keep the vision going I promise it all will come true;

Just keep rolling the doe and stir the mix, Lord what a great cake he is going to fix;

There is a start and finish to everything the bowl, the mix and the batter;

In the beginning God joined the two together, mother, Ann Dunham and father Barack;

What a pair brought before God in heaven a cake was being made of so many flavors;

Before the foundation of the earth it was already done, Barack Obama had already won;

Before Obama was formed in the womb the seed was blessed, the victory was complete;

God had already ordained him a profit before the nation;

Testers will try your cake and understand the delight of your many flavors;

Not Black or White, Jewish or Greek even Hebrew I must add but a flavor all can enjoy;

This cake could no longer wait, Obama put in human form and made for the entire world;

And since there are so many flavors to this cake we will call it “The Obama Swirl.”

Writen by; Raymond C. Christian (Hall of Fame Poet)

Date: November 14, 2008

Place: Camp Phoenix, Kabul Afghanistan

Reason: To let the world know that we all are filled

with many flavors, only our bloodline

is the same. In the beginning were Adam and Eve,

cultural differences were all created by man. Let us

cut this cake together and please enjoy your dessert.