Sunday, May 28, 2017

Some Verse for Memorial Day


I’m sick and tired of hearing this young generation denigrate the men and women of the American military. Without them there would be no Memorial Day because there would be no soldiers. There may be no America because there would be no soldiers fighting for it.

So here’s this bunch of no-accounts defaming the people who have and are protecting the homeland. These people have contributed nothing, have nothing to offer, and have no clue about what freedom means. They’ve always had freedom, never had to fight for it.

A lot of this attitude can be put squarely on American politicians and American middle school and high school teachers for failing to teach American history to students who desperately needed to learn the subject. Without history they had no way of knowing of the tyrannical governments that were everywhere before our own Revolution (and are still everywhere in the world, for anyone who cares to look around).

I sometimes wonder why former soldiers don’t confront those howling anti-American slogans and slamming those who go to war to protect the rights of our people. It could be they are prohibited from doing so, (it sounds like something BO would arrange. I understand ex-military were disarmed before being allowed to go home.



Below is a poem I ran across, written by a guy named Gary Huddleston (if you know him, be sure to tell him I attributed his poetry).



It’s called Battle of the Flag.



A protest raged on a courthouse lawn,

Round a makeshift stage they charged on,

Fifteen hundred or more they say,

Had come to burn the flag that day.

A boy held up a folded flag,

Cursed it, and called it a dirty rag.



An old man pushed through the angry crowd,

With a rusty shotgun shouldered proud.

His uniform jacket was old and tight,

He’d polished each button shiny and bright.

He crossed that stage with a soldier’s grace,

Till he and the boy should face to face.



“Freedom of speech,” the old man said,

“Is worth dying for, good men are dead,

So you can stand on the courthouse lawn

And talk us down from dusk till dawn.

But before a flag gets burned today,

This old man will have his say!”



“My father died on a foreign shore,

In a war they said would end all wars.

But Tommy and I wasn’t even full grown,

Before we fought in a war of our own.

Tommy died on Iwo Jima’s beach,

In the shadow of a hill he couldn’t quite reach,

Where five good men raised this flag so high,

That the whole world could see it fly.



“I got this bum leg that I still drag,

Fighting for this same old flag.

Now there’s but one shot in this old gun,

So now’s the time to decide which one.

Which one of you will follow our lead,

To stand and die for what you believe.



“For as sure as there is a rising sun,

You’ll burn in Hell ‘fore this flag burns, son”

This riot never came to pass.

The crowd got quiet and that can of gas,

Got set aside as they walked away

To talk about what they’d heard that day.



And the boy who had called it a “dirty rag”,

Handed the old soldier the folded flag.

So the battle of the flag this day was won

By a tired old soldier with a rusty gun

Who for one last time, had to show to some,

Our flag may fade, but the colors don’t run.



I could almost see this happening. It’s too bad we don’t hear about it happening. Maybe more than the kid in the poem would see the light.

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