[Rhodes22-list] Veterans Day

[Brad Haslett]

John,

That reminds me of something funny that happened to my brother on the MS
Gulf Coast.  One of our first jobs was for a Vietnamese couple.  The
Vietnamese community started out shrimping on the coast in the 70's and have
prospered, now they own convenience stores, motels, all kinds of small
businesses.  We quickly developed a good reputation with their clan and for
a while when the demo business was hectic got several calls a day from
Vietnamese clients.  My brother asked a Vietnamese kid, about eighteen,
working the counter of a convenience store if he'd be interested in a part
time job handling phone calls from  clients in their own language (Gary's
hard of hearing anyway).  The kid started laughing and said, "I'm second
generation, I don't understand it any better than you.  If you need some
translation for jive I could probably help you out".

Brad

On Nov 11, 2007 1:28 PM, john Belanger <jhnblngr at yahoo.com> wrote:

> just one thing brad. look at the lessons the 2nd generation american
> learned from his immigrant parents experience: don't break your back doing
> hard labor, get an education, put clothes on your childrens back and a roof
> over their heads, and go to church. the church part was too rigid, but the
> rest was good, as far as it went. now it seems, what everyone wants is an
> mba, and the history channel. knowing history doesn't  make money. and media
> always reports the exception...not the rule.
>
> Brad Haslett <flybrad at gmail.com> wrote:  Just so there is no confusion,
> the Marines Birthday is 11/10. My reference
> to 11/11/11 in an earlier post was regarding Veterans Day and the
> 'eleventh
> hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month' which was the signing of
> the
> Armistice. After WW2 we changed it to Veterans Day and moved it to Sunday.
> Armistice Day is still observed in France and Belgium. Here's a read on
> why
> we should study history.
>
> Brad
>
> -------------------------
>
> November 09, 2007, 6:00 a.m.
>
> Teaching America
> Do you know our heroes?
>
> By William J. Bennett
>
> These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find
> that
> war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low
> approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our
> nation's capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But
> perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer
> have
> any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest
> of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the
> toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation's young people; too
> many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to
> know
> this.
>
> The truth is, we've been in far worse shape in terms of what we've had to
> endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in
> terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school
> students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not
> know the basic facts of their own country's history.
>
> This year's National Assessment of Education Progress (our "Nation's
> Report
> Card") revealed that over 50-percent of our nation's high-school students
> —
> our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their
> knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their
> education
> careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and
> 12th grades with the Nation's Report Card, you will see students know more
> in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they
> are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade
> level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know
> about
> it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest
> political story ever told so dim?
>
> Too many of our nation's adults have taken too dark a view of their
> country
> and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation.
> Too
> many in our culture would rather point out our nation's failings than its
> successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are
> politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views).
> Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.
>
> Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when
> presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why
> historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks
> like
> the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs
> and
> tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the
> tragedy
> of those failures intact — they don't redact, they don't gloss over, and
> they don't dull down.
>
> But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert
> recently wrote, "students in our high schools are rarely expected to read
> a
> complete history book." That's a history book of any sort: a biography, a
> *
> 1776* , a Bruce
> Catton Civil War
> book.
> And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school
> students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.
>
> This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about
> just
> any country's history here, we are talking about our country's history —
> the
> country Abraham Lincoln called the "last best hope of earth." We are,
> after
> all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of
> mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who
> could
> not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a
> city
> of refuge for foreigners as well.
>
> With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat
> our
> merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a
> previous
> war's dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more —
> hundreds
> of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say "we
> are
> a great nation" even as we fought for what he called "total victory"
> against
> an enemy that hewed to a "pirate philosophy" of fascism, even as we had
> just
> come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us
> the "last best hope" only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest
> day in American history.
>
>
>
> But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study
> of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the
> study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and
> others,
> how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest
> nation
> in the history of the world.
>
> While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans,
> our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life,
> in
> every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country
> again
> — the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for
> every
> anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for
> every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through
> the passing clouds
>
> Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael
> Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man's family — by
> hearing of how Lt. Murphy's "powerful sense of right and wrong," guided
> him
> his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of
> "defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves." "Murph," as he was
> known by his friends, was our nation's 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient,
> the
> highest honor our nation bestows.
>
> Why don't our schools take next week, as Veteran's Day is celebrated, to
> start a program where they learn about "Murph" and the other Medal of
> Honor
> winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not
> invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our
> children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would
> help
> repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next
> generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young
> adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history —
> and
> these stories deserve to be told and retold.
>
> A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for
> teachable
> moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and
> their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to
> studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look
> at
> the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could
> be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can
> —
> even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That
> something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect
> her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is
> worth
> the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation's
> classrooms
> to study why.
>
> *—William J. Bennett is the author of **Volumes I & II of America: The
> Last
> Best Hope —
> a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to
> Ronald Reagan)**. Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont
> Institute .
> **
> *
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