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My Back Pages: Memorial Day, 2012 :    Once, they filled our world, these giants among men and women. They were our mothers, our fathers, our aunts, uncles, neighbors. They nev...

   Once, they filled our world, these giants among men and women. They were our mothers, our fathers, our aunts, uncles, neighbors. They never claimed to be heroes. They never claimed to be anything more than what they believed that they were: Americans. We were raised so closely to them that we saw them with their everyday faults. Going to normal jobs, trying to make enough money to raise a houseful  of children. They were born either during, or directly after the ‘Great War: The War To End All Wars’. They toddled through the Roaring Twenties. They suffered through the  Great Depression. They watched the  war clouds gather over Europe and erupt into the horror of the European Theatre, and were surprised and shocked when America was so brutally attacked at Pearl Harbor. One thing that is crystal clear to me: The term "The Greatest Generation" is the only one that could be given those who lived and di ed in those years. They came through the Great Depression and made due with

My Back Pages: Mother's Day 2012 : If I close my eyes and listen carefully, I can still hear the echoes of their voices: our children, now grown for these many years that have...

If I close my eyes and listen carefully, I can still hear the echoes of their voices: our children, now grown for these many years that have expanded into decades. In there, in the middle of the chaotic laughter and arguing, I can hear my wife, Sheryl, trying to bring some kind of order to this madness. It was never easy for her.. she was trying to seamlessly blend two families that knew each other, but were not related by blood. What made it worse is that the other set of 'Parents' did everything that they could to make things as difficult as possible. We had two 8 year olds, a boy and a girl, and two 4 year olds, a girl and a boy. They had played together from when they were very little. Now, they were being forged into brothers and sisters. In the middle of this chaos was my 25 year old girlfriend, soon to be my wife. By shear force of her own personality, she managed to fashion us all into a semblance of a family. The kids were so well behaved when she took them shopping th

My Back Pages: My View : Well, here we are in the thick of another Presidential campaign, and the haters have been at it since the beginning of the last one. They ...

Well, here we are in the thick of another Presidential campaign, and the haters have been at it since the beginning of the last one. They don't seem to want to stick to any legitimate issues; they would rather throw whatever nasty, despicable lie they can find out there to see what they can get others to believe. "He wasn't born here!" (A lie!) He's not a Christian (A lie and, even if he wasn't, so what?) He hates America... what? Do you even hear yourselves, or don't you care about how ignorant you sound? I don't care if you don't like the man's politics or not, but throwing hateful and ignorant statements out there just makes you look bad. If you don't like where he stands on the political spectrum, fine. Go after him on the issues, if you even can, at this point. I didn't hear this kind of crap when President Bush was spending us into debt. Or when Cheney said that he didn't give a damn about what the American people wanted. Th