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Sunday, May 29, 2011

In Memorium

A moment this Memorial Day Weekend, to remember all the warriors and innocents who have fallen and continue to fall to the God of War.


5 comments:

M said...

Hopefully they will never be forgotten, and the reason for which they gave their lives.
Sincerely, M

Sewertoons AKA Lynette Tornatzky said...

Thank you Ann for a very important thought and a beautiful photo.

Bev. De Witt-Moylan said...

When I was teaching high school back in 1972 PBS aired a groundbreaking series. I never had a chance to watch “The Ascent of Man,” though it came recommended by some of my students. I was either correcting papers, preparing for the next days’ classes, or asleep by the time it came on around 10PM on a work night. Through “the miracle of Netflix” I can watch it now. So Bill and I are enjoying Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” at last.

Disc 4 ends with Bronowski at Auschwitz. What he said about that time and place, in a program produced and broadcast during the Viet Nam War, may be even truer today. He said then, “There are two parts to the human dilemma, [one part] the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit, the assertion of dogma that closes the mind and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts, obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.”

Churadogs said...

Bev, yeah, it's so easy to create The Other. Then go kill 'em. I would argue that this propensity is bred into our tribal-monkey brains alongside the equally powerful impluse to reach out and care for one other. The trick is to increase the reach of the hand that reaches out to help and reduce the reach of the hand that reaches out with a knife.

Alon Perlman said...

Good to see that that documentry has stood the test of time. There has been nothing like it since, but I do recommend James Burke "connections".


Bronowski (The Ascent of Man) on Auschwitz & Science ... Into this pond...