Tag: media

How Far We’ve Come

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I stumbled across something today that I found fascinating, an April, 1981 Time magazine article, Magnum-Force Lobby. How many clichés can you spot in just this one paragraph:

Among the nation’s hyperactive special interest groups, from doctors to dairy farmers, none is as effective as the gun lobby in combining slick organization with membership zeal to create the perception of power on a single issue. For nearly 13 years, the N.R.A. and compatriot gun groups have successfully fought every attempt to strengthen the feeble Gun Control Act, passed after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Now, in the wake of the shooting of President Reagan, the lobby is ready to ward off another wave of proposed gun laws. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey last week introduced a bill that would ban the import, manufacture and sale of cheap, easily concealable handguns, known as “Saturday night specials,” and require a three-week wait between the purchase and pickup of any handgun. Not only does the gun lobby have its cross hairs set to shoot that bill down; gun lobbyists even hope to pass a gun bill of their own that would riddle existing federal firearm regulations with as many holes as a road sign used for target practice.

This is the kind of coverage that Professor Brian Anse Patrick studied for his book The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage that I wrote about in The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation. This is a little time-capsule of what it was like thirty (30!) years ago.

Oh, and the author of this antique? Evan “Obama is sort of God” Thomas, who now is the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton.

And the beat goes on . . .

Bad Gun Handling

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I’ve been watching the BBC TV SciFi program Torchwood. Breda got me hooked with her video clip of one character, Gwen, getting trained with firearms (in Blighty!)

But in one episode I just watched, Gwen’s training seems, well, deficient:

As far as I could tell in that episode, Gwen hadn’t fired a shot, yet the slide on her pistol is locked back, and she seems completely unaware of it.

Oopsie!

(This is the kind of thing that irks my wife when I notice it.)

UPDATE: And in a related post, Mrs. Borepatch comments on why it takes an American to actually pull a trigger. EXCELLENT piece.

Tales of Armed Self-Defense

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This one’s in my back yard:

Man arrested, 2 others facing charges in deadly shootout

A 20-year-old man was arrested Wednesday and two others are facing charges in connection with a robbery that led to a deadly shootout Tuesday night at a north-side auto store, police said.

Carlos Peyron is facing charges of first-degree murder, attempted aggravated robbery, attempted armed robbery and kidnapping after he and three other men attempted to rob M&M Customs, which sells and installs car alarms, said Sgt. Fabian Pacheco, a Tucson Police Department spokesman.

One of the suspects, Noah Lopez, 18, was shot to death by an employee during the robbery.

Two other men, Toney Stith, 26, and Anthony Peyron, 19, were wounded in the shootout and will face charges once they are released from the hospital, Pacheco said.

All of the men are gang members, he said.

According to police, four men went into the business, at 3040 N. Stone Ave., and confronted an employee, forcing him into the back office.

The business owner, who was in the office, pulled out a shotgun and fired, wounding Anthony Peyron.

The suspects attempted to flee but encountered a locked door.

Lopez turned to the business owner and shot him in the forearm.

The employee retrieved a handgun from his tool kit and fatally shot Lopez, who turned his gun on the employee.

Lopez was pronounced dead at the scene.

So not only did the boss have a shotgun in his office, one of his employees had a PISTOL in his TOOLBOX. And get this:

Stith was wounded in the lower extremities, while Carlos Peyron was hit in the back of the head with the stock of the shotgun.

The victims held the suspects at gunpoint until police officers arrived two minutes after the shooting was reported.

The newspaper actually properly identified the victims and the perpetrators.

The good guys end up with one wounded (one hopes only superficially), and the bad guys end up with one dead, and the rest wounded and captured.

I used to live very close to where this occurred. It was not unusual to hear multiple gunshots at night, very seldom followed by sirens. I slept with a .357 Magnum on the headboard there.

Armed self-defense works.

You Never See “Psychic Wins Lottery” Either

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US woman sentenced to death for killing fortune teller and her daughter

A WOMAN convicted of murdering a fortune teller and her daughter was today sentenced to death by a judge in Orange County, California.

Mother-of-four Tanya Nelson, 45, did not react when Orange County Superior Court Judge Frank F Fasel imposed the sentence, the Orange County Register said.

She still denies committing the crimes, but in March a jury recommended the death penalty for Nelson, who resided in North Carolina, for the April 23, 2005, stabbing of Ha Smith, 52, and her 23-year-old daughter Anita Vo.

Nelson had been a long time client and friend of Mr(sic) Smith, who she allegedly murdered because a fortune did not come true.

A man who plead guilty to the murder of Mr(sic) Smith, Philippe Zamora, 55, told the court that Nelson felt cheated because Mr(sic) Smith told her that her business would do well if she re-located to North Carolina, but instead it went bust.

The LA Times reported that Nelson was arrested five weeks after the murders after she had assumed the identities of the victims and spent more than $US3000 in a shopping spree at South Coast Plaza.

And it’s nice to see that the foreign press also has layers of editorial oversight like the US media does. Either Ha Smith was a woman with a daughter, or “Mr.” Smith was in the midst of a sex-change the story failed to inform us of.

I don’t like to make light of another’s tragedy, but this story just hit me that way.

“Treat me with benign neglect.” – Ashton O’Dwyer

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Vanderleun has a short piece on his sidebar today about Texas Governor Rick Perry, from which comes this excerpt:

I want people elected to Congress, to the United States Senate, and to the presidency in 2012 with the express message that we are going to go to Washington and try to make Washington as inconsequential in your life as we can. I want the states to become the laboratories of innovation and experimentation. And I want to get this country back.

Why is this so difficult for people to understand?

Because we’ve been trained.

Back when I wrote The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, I quoted part of a comment sent to Glenn Reynolds by reader Mike Gordon:

Perhaps the most pervasive way in which journalists are different from normal people is that journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem. Journalists’ world is dominated by government because it’s so easy to cover: Public agencies’ meetings take place on a regular schedule and, with rare exceptions, have to admit journalists. As a result, participants in the meetings play to the press, inside and outside the meeting room, and the result is the elaborate dance of symbolic actions – gaffes, denials, sham indignation, press conferences, inquests and endless process – that dominates our news pages and means next to nothing in the long run.

Journalists tend to give private enterprise short shrift because it’s harder to cover: The meetings are private, aren’t announced in advance, and reporters aren’t invited. Unlike politicians, most businesspeople aren’t required to interact with the press, and many avoid doing so when possible – the downside is usually greater than the upside. As a result, journalists are generally reduced to covering what businesspeople do more than what they say. This is more work, so less of it gets done.

It’s no accident that for the most part, the news is dominated by people whose value is largely driven by how much publicity they receive: politicians, athletes and entertainers. The people who actually make the world work – people in private industry, rank-and-file government employees and conscientious parents – are largely invisible in the news, except when they’re unlucky enough to make one of the rare mistakes that reporters manage to find out about.

And we live in a media-saturated world. Of course it’s government’s job to “do something” about whatever the crisis du jour is. Benign neglect? Who on earth wants that?

A lot of us.

I was watching the news this evening, and the topic of the regulation of Wall Street came up. Wall Street, you know, is notoriously unregulated. That’s why all those bad things happened recently, and why the government had to “bail the fat cats out.” Now they want to modify the rules (that apparently don’t already exist, since, you know, there’s no regulation of Wall Street) and among the changes that Washington wants to impose is a $50 BILLION slush fund “controlled liquidation” fund, financed not by tax dollars but by the Wall Street firms themselves.

This, we are told, will help prevent future financial catastrophes.

I cannot help but return to Thomas Sowell and his theory of social visions. The constrained vision, he says, is dependent on incentives to get desired results. The unconstrained vision, he says, is more interested in intent than outcome.

What incentive is there if failure is cushioned? Does this not encourage greater risk-taking? What, then, would be the outcome expected by the constrained side of the aisle?

And when that outcome occurs? What would be the expected response from the unconstrained side? Would it not be “the fund needs to be bigger”? Otherwise known as “escalation of failure” or “do it again, only HARDER“?

I think O’Dwyer uttered the motto of the Tea Party Movement all the way back in 2005: “Treat me with benign neglect.” Or as Rick Perry put it more recently, we want Washington to be as inconsequential in our lives as possible.

Like that’s gonna happen.

The Knowledge Problem

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Yesterday I quoted a bit from Glenn Reynold’s weekend piece Progressives can’t get past the Knowledge Problem wherein he also wrote:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled “command economies” were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his “The Use of Knowledge In Society,” Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together.

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on.

Turns out, it’s not just what they don’t know that’s the problem.

Like Ronald Reagan said, “It’s what they know that ain’t so.”

Today I read an interesting piece by Lane Wallace in The Atlantic, The Bias of Veteran Journalists. In that piece Lane noted that she was disturbed when she recognized her fellow journalists were asking questions that indicated that they’d already chosen a story line and only asked questions that would further that story line. I recommend you read the whole piece.

But what jumped out at me was this:

In his new book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer cites a research study done by U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock. Tetlock questioned 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” asking them to make predictions about future events. Over the course of the study, Tetlock collected quantitative data on over 82,000 predictions, as well as information from follow-up interviews with the subjects about the thought processes they’d used to come to those predictions.

His findings were surprising. Most of Tetlock’s questions about the future events were put in the form of specific, multiple choice questions, with three possible answers. But for all their expertise, the pundits’ predictions turned out to be correct less than 33% of the time. Which meant, as Lehrer puts it, that a “dart-throwing chimp” would have had a higher rate of success. Tetlock also found that the least accurate predictions were made by the most famous experts in the group.

Why was that? According to Lehrer,

The central error diagnosed by Tetlock was the sin of certainty, which led the ‘experts’ to impose a top-down solution on their decision-making processes … When pundits were convinced that they were right, they ignored any brain areas that implied they might be wrong.

Tetlock himself, Lehrer says, concluded that “The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly.”

It’s not just pundits. It’s the people that Thomas Sowell characterizes as “The Anointed” who gravitate into government to save us poor rubes from ourselves.

Apply Tetlock’s observations, for example, to the Anthropogenic Global Warming Intelligentsia. Or the gun control organizations that constantly predict “Wild-West shootouts” and blood in the streets after each incremental repeal of gun control.

“Dart-throwing chimps” indeed.

When Does a Wookie-Suit Become Evening Wear

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I’m beginning to understand the fascination that sociology holds for some people. I came across an AP piece today that was originally published on Sunday, Prosecutor: Agent infiltrated Christian militia. Since it’s an AP piece, I won’t tempt their wrath by actually quoting from it, I’ll instead quote one of the commenters (at the time of this writing there are 12,443 comments):

the comments are a @#$%load more interesting than that waste of time “story/non-story”
three unspecified arrests of unspecified persons for unspecified crime/s in unspecified places, insinuating that unspecified persons may belong to an unspecified militia.(a 2nd amendment right) oh my! – Pooh, 967+/194-

The last number, 967+/194- is the “approve/disapprove” rating given by the readers of the comment. I’m in agreement with “Pooh.” Others were as well:

Could this article be any more vague? Jeesh. Not news worthy without information. John B. 3/28 1:04pm 2036+/419-

what did they do,couldn”t make much sense from the article – Richard 1:10 pm 1733+/324-

That was apparently OK though, because it didn’t prevent many from commenting on what they thought it was about.

The truly fascinating thing about the comments, though, was not so much what was said, but the tone and to some extent the approval/disapproval ratings.

From a quick sampling, I call the ratio about four parts anti-government/pro-liberty, two parts pro-government anti-right, and about one part each of neutral and “WTF, over?” (those being comments that leave you scratching your head wondering WTF the commenter intended to say).

Here are a few representative samples from immediately after the story posted:

Tea party terroists strike again. – Paul 3/28/10 1:29pm PDT 364+/724-

—

It aint over until they bust and waterboard Glen Beck – Knight 3/28/10 1:34pm PDT 514+/708-

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You can stop all this nonsense by shutting down RUSH LIMB, glen Beck, Hannity, you know what just shut dow FOX NEWS…Radio and TV people are useless. Bunch of people sitting on their arses expressing their oppinion that I don’t give darn about.. – David 3/28/10 1:47pm 363+/648-

—

just another tea bagger republican who dosen’t want to pay his taxes like the rest of us. he wants to operate his illegal meth labs and illegal distilleries to making his moonshine and raping his nine year old cousin doing the lords work by being fruitful and multiplying and claims the government is infringing on his freedoms and rights and stocks his pantry with guns and bullets and bibles instead of food. he buys them with his welfare check.hallelujah praise god bubba now past me that bottle of moonshine and that mexican ak-47 . i think i see them damn government revenuers coming i can’t tell though i can’t see to good shouldn’t have taken that last hit of meth. – Daffy22 3/28 2:02pm 148+/329-

—

They are nuts, the REPUBLICANS, are promoting rage, Palin say the REPUBLICANS are tie to the TEA PARTY, and the TEA PARTY is evil and to me they are dangerous, every time they start up, there is more more killing, more harsh words, they are lack of moral value, just because some did not want HEALTH PLAN, doesn’t mean the rest of AMERICANS did not want it, just cannot satisfied very one.

THE AMERICA WAY IS DEMOCRATIC WAY, just be glad, happy and enjoy it
THE JUG HEAD PROMOTING SUES
AGAIN WASTING OUR TAX PAYERS MONEY, IS THAT WHAT THE AMERICAN WANT? BECAUSE THAT IS AGAIN OUR MONEY IS BEING SPEND FOR SOMETHING GOOD FOR THE PEOPLE – Wanda G 2:12pm 89+/229-

I didn’t format any of these. They’re taken verbatim from the comments. Note their scores.

From the other side:

Why do you, whichever of you, say derogatory things about Tea Party people? I have not gone to a Tea Party meeting, but the last time I looked, this still was The United States of America, operating under the Constitution. These people have every right to rally and say basically whatever. That’s America. I will say this, the history of America has always been one set of ideas competing against another. Another side of America is that sometimes it has come to a face to face confrontation. I hope it doesn’t, but I would expect many of the Tea Party types to be there if it comes to it. The idea of America is a free flow of political ideas. Try and stop that, and something else may flow. That’s our history. – William 3/28/10 1:49pm 657+/125-

—

Oh (expletive deleted) wonderful. The last thing we needed right now was for the Obama administration to turn the paranoid delusions of the extreme right-wing crazies into reality. One would sincerely hope the FBI had actual evidence of actual crimes committed or planned. If not, this is just pouring gasoline on a fire.
I hear the government sent troops to confiscate an illegal arsenal in Concord, Mass., and they ended up in a running firefight with the local militia. Oh, wait- that was April 18th 1775- the “shot heard ’round the world” that began the American Revolution. – Ostlandr 3/28/10 2:05pm 334+/92-

–

Let me get this straight. Muslim terrorists threaten and kill thousands of Americans and Homeland Security tells us not to call them terrorists. A Christian militia group THREATENS muslim groups and the FBI and Homeland Security perform raids around the country rounding up these “terrorists” to protect who? Whose side are they on? – Scorchin_blues 2:08pm 322+/102-

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When arrests are made, indictments, especially federal, should NEVER be sealed. Our government is totally out of control. But then, Waco proved that. – WillamK 2:10pm 255+/58-

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Meanwhile, radical Muslims are living in Virginia right in the shadow of our Nation’s Capitol. And Barack Hussein ‘I’m not really a Muslim, I’m just named after one of the most revered Muslims, and both my father and step-father were both Muslims and I spent my developmental years living in Muslim countries’ Obama turns a blind eye. – M 2:11pm 266+/118-

—

The mighty Homeland Security Forces, under the auspices of our Beloved Leader Barak Hussein Obama, have swooped down on the evil heartland of America and apprehended 3 very suspicious Bible readers who also owned guns and were concerned about so many Jihadists allowed to festoon the urban areas of our nation. Wow…..I wish I could have seen them slide down from the ropes of their black helicopters and bust through the windows of those bungalows with their automatic weapons. I makes me proud of this what this country has become. Janet Napolitano warned us about these evil doers…now I feel so safe. – Shannon – 2:13pm 232+/97-

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Everyone in the USA should own a gun to protect themselves from the power hungry – Opps did I say that 1:20pm 1356+/393-

Personally, I have to say I share Daphne’s position on this story:

My level of trust in the government has reached such a low point that I am seriously doubtful that the militia people recently arrested actually did anything criminal. I’m inclined to believe that they’re nothing but political scapegoats to further the White House meme that white, Christian, right-wing protesters are dangerous extremists.

I know, that sounds nutty, but I still remember the murders committed by our government at Waco and Ruby Ridge the last time a Democrat administration went on this sort of witch hunt.

Could be wrong, but I remember (I think) John Ross in Unintended Consequences saying something on the order of “You can always tell which militia member is an undercover Fed. He’s the one agitating for violent action,” or words to that effect.

Anyway, I don’t think that the comment thread to that article is representative of the general public, but I do think it may be representative of the politically active subset of that group.

Which means that the “Tough History Coming,” as Peggy Noonan put it so long ago, appears to be coming closer.

Read that piece, and think on Billy Wilder’s words.

Phil B. Finds Another Gem

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Reader and UK expat Phil B. (now living in Middle Earth – aka: New Zealand) sent me a link to an interesting piece in the Daily Mail‘s online edition, from one Mary Ellen Synon, an Irish-American living in Brussels. Ms. Synon’s Mail-sponsored blog Euroseptic (catchy name, that) apparently serves the same function over there as Ann Coulter’s writings do here (there was a bit of a flap over Ms. Synon’s take on the Paralympics a while back, for example.)

Yesterday’s piece, Barack Hussein Obama and Indonesia: there’s no place like home, will, I’m assured, have certain parties over here coming unglued. A taste:

One of the reasons a lot of Americans find Obama oddly foreign is that he had an oddly foreign childhood: his formative years were spent in Indonesia. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born there. The rest of Obama’s childhood was spent in Honolulu, a Pacific Ocean capital soaked in East Asian culture.

What’s this got to do with Britain, or indeed with Europe? Plenty. Obama is the first US president who was raised without cultural or emotional or intellectual ties to either Britain or Europe. The British and the Europeans have been so enchanted with ‘America’s first black president’ that they haven’t been able to see what he really is: America’s first Third World president.

If you doubt it, remember the kick in the teeth he gave Britain over the Falklands just a few weeks ago. Obama had his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, fly to Buenos Aires to give American support to President Kirchner’s call for international negotiations over the Falklands. Amazing. What was more amazing is that all we’ve heard out of Number 10 and the Foreign Office since then is that it doesn’t mean anything.

Oh, yes it does, and Washington insiders know it does.

Like that? Here’s a little more:

What we have shaping up, but what the British Government doesn’t yet grasp, is that Obama has a conscious policy of down-grading America’s relationship with, first, Britain and then with the rest of Europe.

He believes that the US — yes, his own country — and Britain, and the leading European countries, too, for that matter, are imperial powers who ruthlessly exploited the Third World for their own profit.

And Obama is America’s first Third World president.

Forget Obama’s Chicago black cadence. It is a fake. He copied from the kind of black preachers that were unknown to him until he was a grown man and inventing his political image.

What the Obama administration has near-wiped from the president’s personal history is that his only childhood links with America were as a schoolboy in a fashionable private school in Asia-dominated Hawaii, where he was raised by his white, bank executive grandmother.

Chicago is not Obama’s homeland. It never was his formative influence. The president’s world view is more aligned with that of Indonesia.

You can be sure the gift Obama gives the President of Indonesia will be something more than the dvd box-set of old Hollywood movies he gave to Gordon Brown. The US president’s manner on the trip to Indonesia will be more the manner he showed to the King of Saudi Arabia last year. The king received a deep bow, something never done by any US president before. Obama also kow-towed to the Emperor of Japan and to the Chinese premier.

Give it a read.

And then reflect on the fact that no American flags fly over the American disaster-relief facilities in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Why?

The Obama administration says flying the flag could give Haiti the wrong idea.

“We are not here as an occupation force, but as an international partner committed to supporting the government of Haiti on the road to recovery,” the U.S. government’s Haiti Joint Information Center said in response to a query about the flag.

Hey, that’s change you can BELIEVE IN!

UPDATE: Gerard finds further evidence that Obama’s audacityofhopenchange is wearing thin with our allies.

It Happens Every Friday

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This was first published in 2007, according to KnoxNews, and Michael Yon published it last November, but it’s the first I’ve seen it, and copyright be damned, I’m going to archive it here, too:

Fridays at the Pentagon

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

Over the last 12 months, 1,042 soldiers, Marines, sailors and Air Force
personnel have given their lives in the terrible duty that is war. Thousands
more have come home on stretchers, horribly wounded and facing months or
years in military hospitals.

This week, I’m turning my space over to a good friend and former roommate,
Army Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, who recently completed a year long tour of
duty in Iraq and is now back at the Pentagon.

Here’s Lt. Col. Bateman’s account of a little-known ceremony that fills
the halls of the Army corridor of the Pentagon with cheers, applause and
many tears every Friday morning. It first appeared on May 17 on the Weblog
of media critic and pundit Eric Alterman at the “Media Matters for America”
website.

“It is 110 yards from the “E” ring to the “A” ring of the Pentagon. This
section of the Pentagon is newly renovated; the floors shine, the hallway is
broad, and the lighting is bright. At this instant the entire length of the
corridor is packed with officers, a few sergeants and some civilians, all
crammed tightly three and four deep against the walls. There are thousands
here.

“This hallway, more than any other, is the `Army’ hallway. The G3 offices
line one side, G2 the other, G8 is around the corner. All Army. Moderate
conversations flow in a low buzz. Friends who may not have seen each other
for a few weeks, or a few years, spot each other, cross the way and renew.

“Everyone shifts to ensure an open path remains down the center. The air
conditioning system was not designed for this press of bodies in this area.

“The temperature is rising already. Nobody cares. 10:36 hours: The
clapping starts at the E-Ring. That is the outermost of the five rings of
the Pentagon and it is closest to the entrance to the building. This
clapping is low, sustained, hearty. It is applause with a deep emotion
behind it as it moves forward in a wave down the length of the hallway.

“A steady rolling wave of sound it is, moving at the pace of the soldier
in the wheelchair who marks the forward edge with his presence. He is the
first. He is missing the greater part of one leg, and some of his wounds are
still suppurating. By his age I expect that he is a private, or perhaps a
private first class.

“Captains, Majors, Lieutenant Colonels and full Colonels meet his gaze and
nod as they applaud, soldier to soldier. Three years ago when I described
one of these events, those lining the hallways were somewhat different. The
applause a little wilder, perhaps in private guilt for not having shared in
the burden … yet.

“Now almost everyone lining the hallway is, like the man in the
wheelchair, also a combat veteran. This steadies the applause, but I think
deepens the sentiment. We have all been there now. The soldier’s chair is
pushed by, I believe, a full colonel.

“Behind him, and stretching the length from Rings E to A, come more of his
peers: each private, corporal, or sergeant is assisted as need be, by a
field-grade officer.

“11:00 hours: Twenty-four minutes of steady applause. My hands hurt, and I
laugh to myself at how stupid that sounds in my own head: my hands
hurt…Please ! Shut up and clap. For twenty-four minutes, soldier after
soldier has come down this hallway- 20, 25, 30… Fifty-three legs come with
them, and perhaps only 52 hands or arms, but down this hall came 30 solid
hearts.

“They pass down this corridor of officers and applause, and then meet for a
private lunch, at which they are the guests of honor, hosted by the
generals. Some are wheeled along. Some insist upon getting out of their
chairs, to march as best they can with their chin held up, down this
hallway, through this most unique audience. Some are catching handshakes and
smiling like a politician at a Fourth of July parade. More than a couple of
them seem amazed and are smiling shyly.

“There are families with them as well: the 18-year-old war-bride pushing
her 19-year-old husband’s wheelchair and not quite understanding why her
husband is so affected by this, the boy she grew up with, now a man, who had
never shed a tear is crying; the older immigrant Latino parents who have,
perhaps more than their wounded mid-20’s daughter, an appreciation for the
emotion given on their child’s behalf. No man or woman in that hallway,
walking or clapping, is ashamed by the silent tears on more than a few
cheeks. An Airborne Ranger wipes his eyes only to better see. A couple of
the officers in this crowd have themselves been a part of this parade in the
past.

“These are our men & women, broken in body they may be, but they are our
brothers & sisters, and we welcome them home. This parade has gone on, every
single Friday, all year long, for more than four years.

“Did you know that?

“The media haven’t yet told the story.”

Just . . . damn.