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Showing posts from October, 2016

Tangerine Man

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I've been so good. Do admit, I've successfully avoided the 2016 election on this blog. I made a pact with myself, even though my sense of outrage, over these many months, made my little fingers itch to be on the keyboard. But now, three weeks before the election, Donald Trump, the Tangerine Man (sorry, Bob Dylan) has finally driven me over the edge. It wasn't the recording of Trump boasting about his prowess in sexual assault, though that was an outrage. It wasn't his harping about Hillary Clinton's bad judgement, which seems to me the pot calling the kettle black. No, it's his insistence that the election is "rigged," and will be stolen from him. Arguably, the 2000 election was stolen from Al Gore, with the Florida recount and the Supreme Court's verdict in favor of Bush. But the whole system? The whole system? I guess Trump has forgotten any civics that he ever knew. He's forgotten that elections are run locally, and those who r

Another veteran departs ...

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There's a special place in my heart for World War II vets. My dad was in the Army, serving in the infantry with the 36th Division, when he was captured and imprisoned in Stalag VII-A, in Moosburg, Germany. That's a long and good story, which I will tell here, someday, at greater length. Dad died in 1997, at the relatively young age of 77. Now, nearly 20 years later, the rest of our World War II vets are passing at an alarming rate. From the website of the  National WWII Museum , in New Orleans, I gleaned the following: " According to statistics released by the Veteran’s Administration, our World War II vets are dying at a rate of approximately 492 a day. This means there are approximately only 855,070 veterans remaining of the 16 million who served our nation in World War II ." Now, I'm no math genius, but I think this means that, at this rate, all our living World War II vets will be dying within the next 5 years. It will truly be the end of an era.