WWI Memorial in Washington, Too

Seems the Federal government in Washington, DC just can't keep from spending money or creating a second World War I memorial. This broke today.

Chicago architect, 25, wins design contest for World War I memorial in D.C.

It's not a huge surprise. Maybe a bit of a local disappointment, for us, certainly, not that people would come here instead of going to Washington for one of these memorials.

We'll just know ours is better.

Check that. 

Best.

Memorial Day and the history

‪#‎ThrowbackFact‬: Memorial Day was started by former slaves on May, 1, 1865 in Charleston, SC to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. They dug up the bodies and worked for 2 weeks to give them a proper burial as gratitude for fighting for their freedom. They then held a parade of 10,000 people led by 2,800 Black children where they marched, sang and celebrated.


Thanks to Abstrakt Goldsmith for this nugget of history that most of us never learned in school and Punk Colours for sharing.

Celebrating all Americans

And why, again, we need a Black History Month:

Bessie Coleman was an American civil aviator, the first female pilot of African American descent, and the first person of African American descent to have an international pilot license. She was born in 1892 in Texas, the tenth of thirteen children, and in school showed herself to be a lover of reading and mathematics. She enrolled in what is now Langston College in Oklahoma but was forced to return home due to lack of funds.

At 23, she moved to Chicago, where she heard stories from returning World War I pilots about flying during the war. Due to her race and gender, however, despite her interest in aviation, no American flight school or aviator would train her. Determined to become an aviator, Bessie went to France in 1920 and, a year later, earned her aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, becoming the first American of any gender to receive a license from that organization. She trained as a “barnstorming" stunt flier in order to make a living.

Known as “Queen Bess," she was well-known for her daredevil maneuvers, though her flamboyant style was often criticized by the press. Though offered a role in a film, when she learned that her first scene would show her in tattered clothes with a walking stick and pack, she walked off set rather than perpetuate the derogatory image of African Americans. In 1926, in preparation for an air show, her plane failed to pull out of a dive and began to spin, causing Bessie to be thrown from the plane, 2,000 ft. above the ground, killing her instantly. She was 34 years old. 

Leonard Wood?

Scrolling headlines on the internet today, I saw one that said "Just Who Is Leonard Wood, Anyway? And, well, since all of us in this part of the country have "Fort Leonard Wood" just roll off our tongues since, after all, it's little more than a stone's throw from here, I had to see why this came up. The reason? "Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has been calling his opponent Mitt Romney the weakest front-runner in modern times. On CNN, he clarified it when he said the former Massachusetts governor is probably the "weakest front-runner since Leonard Wood in 1920." That according to NPR (link at bottom, as usual). So if you're interested in the good gentleman or in this bit of American history, you might check it out. It's very brief. While you're at it, you might look into the role Ft. Leonard Wood also played in spreading pandemic influenza worldwide, back in WWI. Really fascinating stuff. (2nd link). Link: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/18/148878850/just-who-is-leonard-wood-anyway?ft=1&f=1001; http://www.jackson.army.mil/sites/leaderdevelopment/docs/608

Quote of the day--on the US and war today

WAR! (don't look!)

Nov 2, 2010 - A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities - as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war's horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.
Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding "entangling alliances" and conflicts abroad. It was tied to America's historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army - a tradition in which many Americans took pride. Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been "too proud to fight".
Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether. Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking on Adolf Hitler's rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.
In the decades since World War II, however, "isolationism" has been turned inside-out and upside-down. Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they've done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war's brutal realities.

Links:  http://warisacrime.org/content/war-dont-look;  http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LK02Ak01.html