Veteran's Day: The Spirit of A Family

Reposted from dcfpress.com July 3, 2021.

The everlasting devotion to one’s country is a good marker for personal integrity, loyalty and commitment to one’s duty in life: to make each day better. People wake up everyday in countries around the world, yearning to be free, and to do better. They often, are not free in any meaningful sense, but hope to be.

The dictators and the oligarchs, the bureaucrats and the military, create restrictions on speech, movement, arms, and one’s daily tasks, calling it benevolence, or “for your own good.” These empowered people play on emotions, like fear of the invisible or future dangers, or divvy people up by their identifiable characteristics because of a keen understanding of the nature of primitive thinking. Garnering a majority, manipulated people do elect themselves into that bondage, by believing in the snappy propaganda and falling prey to “their side” is morally better based on those uncontrolled dangers. Elimination of governments, and class, and control means, sounds wonderful, ideal even; but nature abhors a power vacuum, and the fight towards “stability and freedoms” will just cycle once again.

One detours back to that concept, because cycles drive our being. Books are written on that concept – and we are living through a turning of cycles for certain. Many felt that they lived through interesting times – fights for freedom or staving off humanity’s annihilation – and the stories there are too numerous and too fraught with point-of-view discussions to go into.

So we won’t go any further on that discussion.

More personally, my grandfather, William L. Clark, Jr. was born in 1926 to a barber in Paris, Illinois. His family moved to Gary, Indiana sometime in the early 1930s, if one recalls properly. William was never a great school person – never graduated high school – but one recalls his penchant for solving the New York Times crossword puzzles late in his life and his horse betting hobby and keen interest. His life had general happiness from laborer work, raising his daughters (one a U.S. Marine), and being in love with the same woman for over 35 years, Mildred.

Seventy: Moms & Their Passing

Meanwhile, his greatest adventure: driving an LCVP in World War II in the Pacific Theatre. He joined up in 1944, and a year later, he landed at Okinawa, Naha Beach, considered the 2nd largest landing assault ever undertaken. His duty was to his country in winning a war that was to end in atomic destruction just a few months later.

During boot camp, his younger brother, Harold died in a drowning accident. My grandfather made his way back for the funeral of his brother who was nicknamed “The Firecracker” because he was born on the 4th of July. Harold’s death may have prevented his brother’s. The ship grandpa was assigned to, would later be sunk in 1944 combat. As my grandfather said, “my brother saved my life.” His brother died just one day before the largest amphibious assault ever mounted in World History.

My grandfather was aware of much – as he, was like many of his generation, dismayed by eager U.S. politicians importing in “cheap Jap and Chinese shit,” as he called it in 1980s. This was back when people said what they meant. And holding such opinions, while seen by these Postmodern-Marxists as racist and bigoted, were just his way of expressing displeasure at the “Globalization” forces that he once fought against. (People that now extend their rule over others through asymmetric hybrid warfare, subverting another’s society.)

His identity was being a strong man during perilous times. One can only hope, in this day and turning, one can be half the man he was during his perilous times. One remembers his desire to be like our Founding Fathers and praised the Independence they sought. As history will note: William L. Clark, Jr. died on July 4, 1986. 210 years had past since our nation’s formal declaration of such Independence. Now, over 35 years since his passing, such Independence and Freedom lays in the balance for humanity, once again.

God Rest, Grandpa. God Speed, Americans. God Save Us All.

[https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/higgins-boat/ All aboard. The craft that won the War in Two Theatres.]

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