Quiet vigil honors 4000 fallen soldiers

By Debbie Boen | March 25, 2008 |

A group of eleven gathered on Monday at Public Square to light candles, view the statistics of war, read poetry, hear a song, sing a song, and acknowledge the 4,000 US military dead in Iraq.

We who gathered this time are all disconnected from the war, in the way that we are not relatives of anyone enlisted. But we know co-workers, students, clients, neighbors and acquaintances who are connected with the military. We are surrounded by military.

David and I read Christine Piesyk’s recently published poem, Songs, written for vigil we held 1,000 soldier fatalities ago. The pain of picking up all the pieces of war from Vietnam to Iraq, is potent angst; something that you never want to have to do again. It is unfair for wars to take our best, chop them up and dump them back on our society, often as shells of their former selves, haunted by the war they waged in the name of duty. We who oppose the war have good reason to do so.

There is no good bomb. There is no good war, said my Grandmother, who survived WWI as a child in Germany. We who gather are in between, in between the “nothing is going on” stance of the media, and the overwhelming way the war rages on. In attendance this time were all middle class white Americans with one veteran. Three of our group were under 18. On this occasion, all of us except the vet, are Unitarian Universalists (UU’s). «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: News, Opinion | 3 Comments

New York City: Like visiting a new friend

By David W. Shelton | March 25, 2008 |

When I told a friend of mine last week that I was going to visit New York City, he poked at me a bit: “Oh, there’s nothing there but socialists and liberals.”

I smiled and said, “then it’ll be a refreshing change.”

All kidding aside, there’s plenty to say about visiting our country’s most populated city. Its history is replete with everything that makes for great movies, including making movies. It was Hollywood before Hollywood. The country’s comic book industry began there. It’s the first place in the world where “going up” meant REALLY going up. Skyscrapers became the norm as early as the 1920s. They hit their heyday in the early 1930s when the Chrysler Building and the legendary Empire State Building was built.

Sure, I knew all this before we arrived in Manhattan. No matter how much about New York I thought I knew, I could never have been fully prepared for the staggering reality that the Big Apple would present. «Read the rest of this article»

Sections: Arts and Leisure | 3 Comments

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