Wake of Echoes

Last week, I told you a little known fact about roadway deaths in America, which accumulated to more than 75,000 people in 2015 and 2016 combined. But the media has been mostly silent about those tragic deaths. Why is that? I shared my ideas (and my disgust) in part one of a series on the value of LIFE in the American Media. Today I continue that series with part two: Do All Lives Matter? War & Peace George Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze "My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war , banished from the earth." -- George Washington Just reading our first president's words brings tears to my eyes. First, because I've read extensively about Washington and what he went through to bring this great nation into being. The Revolutionary War was at the same time horrific and glorious, characterized by both needless deaths and deaths that bought liberty so precious, we who are Americans can barely comprehend life w...

Bureau of Ships Collection, U.S. National Archives. According to the Veteran’s Administration, approximately 850 World War II vets are dying every day.  There are only about two million left.  Last year, I chaperoned a middle school field trip to the Warhawk Museum in Nampa, where we got to listen to some of them describe their experiences.  Their hair was white and thin, their skin wrinkled and spotted.  Their hands shook, their joints were rheumy; their eyes watered.  Some were soft-spoken, some loud.  They couldn’t always hear the questions we asked; they couldn’t hear each other.  But at the end of the day, they stood arm in arm – brothers in arms still, though the war ended sixty-five years ago. I imagined another in their ranks:  one who might have stood by their side.  I like to imagine that he would have stood by mine.  I don’t know.  He was my grandfather.  He died in 1984, but forty years earlier, he was in the Na...