Did We Forget?

A View Into Death's Face

Seventy-two years ago today, an unimaginable eternity ago given today's culture, Allied Forces led by the Americans, stormed the heavily fortified beaches at Normandy, France.  Over thirty-six hundred Americans lost their lives that day in a matter of just a few hours, and 29,000 during the entire battle.  To put that in perspective relative to today's terms, that's 6 times as many Americans lost in the entire Iraqi War.  Six times the KIA, in a few hours.  Most of those survivors are gone now, but we promised we would remember their sacrifice that led to the year-long liberation of Europe, and ultimately the defeat of the Nazi ideology.  But have we remembered?  In the mainstream media, as well as in the alternative media, I found only one reference to D-Day:  Charles Schultz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, remembered.  The strip today showed Snoopy swimming ashore amid the barricades.

Never Forget Why I Died Here

I guess that war was so long ago, and was fought over things that aren't meaningful today, that celebration of those 29,000 - and all the others on both sides who were killed  - just isn't worthy of remembrance any more.  Things like national sovereignty, personal freedom, and the forceful resistance of tyranny, are just  quaint ideas that are out of fashion today.  Today we celebrate only the Self, the center of being: the I, Me, Mine.  Self sacrifice for a greater good is long out of style; today's philosophy is to sacrifice all for Self.  We don't fight for a national identity; today we "fight" for multiculturalism, an ideological abomination that satisfies no one, and damages the psyche as well.  We "fight" for safe spaces, where the truth of the real world cannot reach nor harm us. We "fight" for an extreme minority of sexually confused individuals to dictate a new set of sexual and societal mores to the majority, in defiance of millennia of established cultural behavior.  And worse, to consider oneself a "patriot" or an "American" is to be ridiculed and demeaned by our enlightened betters.  But in any of the aforementioned "fights", did anyone actually make the ultimate sacrifice?  Was it a matter of such importance that one would lay down one's life for it?  No.  It's just background noise.  It's a distraction; a deviation from our normal, safe and secure lives.  It's just for a little excitement in an otherwise predetermined, boring life.

But when a new threat rears its ugly head here in the heartland, when a dirty nuke goes off in your city, or when a suicide bomber decimates a sporting event or a concert, you may get a dim realization of what seven million American men realized here in the heartland in 1941.  That there are things worth really fighting for:  your family, your way of life, your personal freedom, your country, and in this new 21st century, your God.