Just felt the need to repost this from Lean Forward

Memorial Day will be coming soon, and I'll probably be too busy to write then, H-girl and I getting married, so I'm re-posting this from my days as a bachelor blogger. Mainly, because it still bring tears to my eyes, I can only thank God that I was given the impulse to write such a thing:

Honor, and 58 years

For the last several months, I've been trying to put into words my emotions upon learning of another soldier's death in Iraq. But each time, I could not find clarity and elegance enough to meet the challenge of expressing my condolences and sorrow. Unfortunately, now the dying is continuing, and I have had time to reflect and though maybe this is not clear or elegant, I hope it is not too late.

My grandfather, Henry McKellar, won the Silver Star in World War II. One of the highest honors in our military, Henry received it as a medic, killed in the line of fire while trying to save the life of another soldier. And it is an honor to be his grandson, an honor to know how far his commitment to this country would take him.

I was lucky to have a grandmother who could bring him to life for me through her stories and her obvious love for him. As a result, I do feel like I know him, even though he died nearly 30 years before I was born.

Still, war, a decision made from above, whether just or not, takes a life with such immediacy and throws it's living victims into an abandoned new world of uncertainty. The cold, hard reality is that at one moment, Henry was braving fire to save a fallen comrade, and the next he was stricken by death's grip. In that moment, according to the social construct of "war", my grandfather entered the world of "honor" and "courage." But to us, grandaddy just left this world. He never held his wife or daughter again, he never reached down to take the hand of one his grandsons, nor did he set foot on his native soil of South Carolina.

And in his death's wake, were left my grandmother and my mother - then 3 years old. The sum total of the devastation that Henry's death caused my family can be summed up simply...58 years.

That's how many years my grandmother lived without the love of her life, that's how long she had to mourn. How long my mother had to live with a family no longer whole. Not a day went by that either didn't think about him. Both have given me much to love, but the truth is, I never knew the women they might have been, just as I never knew the man my grandfather would have been. "Honor", frankly, is a grossly inadequate substitute for the possibility of life's future. And the lost love that remains after a loved-one dies early, while strong, sears the heart as much as warms it.

My grandmother had the courage to live the life she had, she taught school for 30 years, she raised a very strong mother in her own right, she found ways to make the lives of others brighter by baking cookies, growing flowers, and demonstrating her wealthy appettite for living. But grammommy lived to her last day tragically apart from the life she had hoped to lead with Henry.

There are monuments to the war dead in almost every town in America, such is war's reach. It spreads, certainly not evenly, but thoroughly across the land. These monuments and salutes to the honor and courage of the fallen which are offered up, as they ought to be, as a salve to the bitter sting of short lives and tragic deaths.

However, we should not let our honoring cause us to leave unrecognized the sacrifice left behind. Leaders of every war have sought to bolster support for this carnage, by reminding us to pay homage to the fallen. However, the fallen are only part of war's lost.

The rest are symbolized, not by body counts, nor by monuments. Instead, they are living in a world that has been so completely, utterly and profoundly changed - a new struggling growth from a barren field of possibilities immolated by the stinging heat of loss.

In 58 years of mourning, my grandmother honored her husband, her love, and she did it with pride and grace.

But, make no mistake, it was a sentence. With each death abroad, comes imprisonment at home. Children never know their parents, parents never see their grandchildren, and the spouse faces the cruelest fate of war - making life work now that the person they had intended to make it with has been taken by decisions out of their control.

Media Grab thinks he was way off, but Leaning Forward, whoah!

This guy (at about 1:07 in) looks pretty bad now. Then again, I can appreciate, it happens.

But occasionally, at least, Lean Forward was pretty funny.

What does Mr. Creepy do when he wakes up and see's Hillary Clinton?

If you've seen Mr. Creepy, perhaps after having a birthday celebration here, and he doesn't look the same as he used to, if he looks like he's seen his own death. This may have something to do with it.

Funniest thing we've seen in a while

At least that's my opinion. Sebby Man can be hard on Media Grab on and off-line occasionally, but Media Grab is tight, with this. S-man understands going negative. Sometimes you got to pee where you got to pee.

Sebby Snacks (following Sebby's puking up a whole bunch of that nasty ABC debate)

Sebby really has got to stop eating Big Media, it never goes down well.

1. Bi-Partisanship, that ever venerated ideal, died a long-predicted death this week, when Joe Lieberman made clear in no uncertain terms that he was really a Republican, so all of his "serious" and "responsible" bi-partisanship work with Republicans really stems from the fact that he is one. Of course, there's a chance that when the elections over and he needs to figure out a new way to get the camera on him, Joe (by then kicked out by a Democratic Senate caucus that doesn't need him) as a Republican will remember all the other issues besides the worst-foreign-policy-decision-in-the-nation's-history on which he actually agrees with the Democrats. Then Joe will be a bi-partisan Republican. That's what happens when you're political leanings go whichever way the camera turns.
   
2. Leaving now, will only lead to chaos and defeat, better to stay and win victory.
   
3. If you want to see the best band in America, tell me why this isn't where you should be May 13?
4. Forgetting Main Street Deli may now begin.
5. Campaign Finance Reform NOW!
   

Sebby Snacks (or previously known as "What SebMan is thinking)

1. Isn't the best way to describe the Administration's position on Iraq and troop withdraw the "Tiger/Bear by the ears" analogy ["Good thing is we've got the insurgents by the ears, bad news is we can't let them go"]. Maybe it's just me, I'm not a spokesperson for the "worst president in the history of the country." but it would seem like that's more straight forward than what we have right now.
   
   
2. To those among the Carolina "faithful" who feel Roy betrayed his Heels when he cheered Kansas to a National Title on Monday. Does this make you feel like a pathetic loser:
   
   

   That’s how he acted in 1993, when his Jayhawks lost to Dean Smith’s Tar Heels in the national semifinals. “Let’s stay in New Orleans and watch Coach Smith win another one,” he told Baldwin.

   That’s exactly what the pair did, with Williams feverishly waving a blue-and-white pom-pom from his seat in the Superdome. On the way out of the arena after Carolina’s win over Michigan, he stopped to buy a t-shirt for Scott and Kimberly–neither of whom had yet attended UNC–that read, “I was there in New Orleans,” along with the victorious Tar Heel score.

   “I’m pretty consistent,” he says. “My team lost to Carolina in 1993 and I stayed and supported Carolina. My team lost to Kansas in 2008 and I stayed and supported Kansas. I am who I am. I’m thankful that I am surrounded by people who understand how I am and support me no matter what, because I realize not everyone in the world falls into that category.”

   
   
   
3. Really, the folks that got mad over Roy's donning a decal really, really, really don't understand Carolina basketball. I'd be mad at the team for spotting Kansas 28 points, taking 24 of them back and then running out of gas, but then you see this sort of crap, (not the post, but the comments) and you think, hell, the team "May or may not have played with the energy they should have, but they completely outclassed these fools."
   
   
4. Hey look, the last politician in Washington to realize there's a mortgage foreclosure crisis has done it! And he's the Republican nominee! Gosh, you know, it's a little agressive, but maybe the lending industry could use a little investigation. Ya Think! It's like this wasn't caused by a bunch of lying borrowers and was really caused by the people who should have all the financial knowledge to nip "deceptive borrowing" in the bud.

Ahh, the apathy of 1996 - it's all coming back to me now

At some point I'll write more about why I've chosen to support Obama, and also the hurdles which for my vote Hillary had to overcome, and which instead she dug a trench beneath. For most of this time, my internal critique of Clintonism has been focused on how I felt around 2000, in the autumn of Clinton 1. At that time I was an alienated Democrat looking seriously at third party politics (at least until I heard Ralph Nader's justification for voting against Gore). But that was once the rightward drift of the Clinton years had driven me to act politically. This Mark Schmitt column (on the "now you don't see him, now she takes his advice" Hillary guru Mark Penn) reminds me how before I got mad about Clinton's triangulation, his first term made politics seem so useless and unappealing:

Clinton's bond with Penn, we're told, goes back to the 1995 to 96 period, when Dick Morris brought in Penn to help with President Clinton's reelection effort. While it was a success for the Clinton family, it was a dreary low point for the nation's politics: Voter turnout dipped below 50 percent for the only time ever in a presidential year, young people were completely disengaged, campaign finance scandals arose in part because politics was so uninspiring that no one would give except in exchange for favors, and the ambitions of the early Clinton years were abandoned for safe, symbolic gestures appealing to the middle-class swing voters -- "soccer moms" -- in a few swing states.

Ah, yes, that's were my goal to be a political science major went. True, I voted in 1996, but there was really nothing cool at all about politics when I was in college and no passion. I had come to college in 1992, passionate and very political, first seen a Democratic victory in Clinton's triumph of the old and very shortly thereafter ...I got nothing in me calling me to join in. Looking back now, what a moribund state of affairs that was. And what a different world it is today.