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What Can Arlington Cemetary Teach Us?
The simple gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery look like they go on forever. Row upon row of small white crosses mark generations of military casualties. Tens of thousands of the nation's defenders lie buried on 600 heartbreakingly beautiful acres along the Potomac River. For the first time in a decade, a section overlooking the Pentagon is now being prepared to accommodate 26,000 more graves and 5,000 additional cremation niches.But the cemetery is being expanded not so much due to mounting deaths in Iraq (1,773 U.S. troops have been killed there so far) Gag. At least they left off the "at least" before the number as to accommodate elderly World War II veterans who are dying at the rate of 1,200 per day. Soon, the last remaining eyewitnesses of Pearl Harbor, the Normandy Invasion and the battle of Iwo Jima will be gone. A total of 405,399 Americans serving in the military died in that worldwide spasm of violence, which pitted adherents of virulent Axis ideologies against reluctant Allied nations. Hmmm...Is there a virulent ideologies theme here? It took the German blitzkrieg on London, reducing the House of Commons to rubble less than a year after Hitler conquered Poland, to convince the British they should have gone on the offensive. It took Japanese kamikazes - that era's version of suicide bombers - to finally jolt the American public awake. And with the MSM today, we'd prolly all be calling for a quick settlement before anymore of our boys were killed by the insane, suicidal maniacs of Islam...no, no ...Japan. And it took photographs of emaciated Nazi concentration camp survivors liberated by American troops to remind the world that it waited too long to respond to the looming threat. Have we learned anything - or are we destined to repeat the same mistakes? Only time will tell! Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-25 |
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