The Troubles are back…..

There were major outbreaks of trouble in the 60s and 70s. There was so many acts of dissidence it was a weekly thing on the news. Walter Cronkite, one hell of a newsman. Everything he reported on was fact checked and verified before he said it. We lived in the Georgia countryside, so we weren’t in the thick of the race wars, but we watched the news every day and followed it closely. The only other thing that filled the news was a place called Vietnam.

My parents met in France during the 2^nd World War. He was tank crew and she was women’s army crops. My mom was a first generation Italian American. At the start of the U. S. involvement in WW2 she was drafted into the Office of Military Intelligence at the age of 17. She became a spy for the military. She was captured by the S.S. but managed to escape. She died at 73, and never ever spoke of what happened then. Between the two of them, they spanned WW2, Korea, and Vietnam. My dad did two tours of Vietnam, loosing only 2 men in all that time. Gotta give my old man credit, he knew how to stay alive and how to kill to stay that way. He was on his 2nd tour of duty when he hit his 30 year mark. I’m not sure if it still works this way or not, but at the time if you were between 20 and 30 years of service, instead of saying where you were going, you were given a list of duty assignments and told to pick one. He found out that when he was going home, they were planning on turning him around and sending him for another tour. He retired the next day.

I look at the country today and think what they’d say about……. everything. I have no doubt that my mom would, VERY vocally, ask “What the hell did we fight and hurt for?!?!?” Needless to say, this is not the country they fought for. It makes me mourn for them all over again. So many of the things my parents and older sisters had fought for are disappearing. Just little things like equal rights, women’s rights, and societal freedoms, little things like that. You’d hardly know they’re gone, right?

A great man once said “When you abandon freedom to achieve security, you lose both and deserve neither.” *shrugs* Just a thought…..