Two Stories, Both Are True

Posted on 28/10/2013 by Grumpa Joe

WW2_Iwo_Jima_flag_raising

In two weeks, on November eleventh, we celebrate Veteran’s Day, at least I will. I suspect most moderns don’t even know the day exists, or why.

A veteran friend sent me a story about the Marine Memorial in Arlington, Virginia, better known as the Iwo Jima memorial. it is the world’s largest bronze statue, and it depicts the Marines raising the US flag on the Island of Iwo Jima during World War Two.

There are actually two stories here. The first is about Michael Powers a school teacher from from Wisconsin. The second story is by James Bradley whose father is one of the six Marines in the statue. I give teacher Powers credit for taking kids to Washington as part of their education. I commend him for his dedication to teaching real American history. This story is proclaimed “TRUE” by Snopes except for a couple of add-ons at the end which were not attributed. I stripped those statements off to keep the stories true.

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Six Boys Raise the Flag of Freedom

1.) By Michael Powers.  Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capital, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall’s trip was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history — that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, ‘Where are you guys from?’

I told him that we were from Wisconsin. ‘Hey, I’m a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.’

(It was James Bradley who just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.) 

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.)

2.) ‘My name is James Bradley and I’m from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I just wrote a book called ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ which is #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list right now. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.

‘Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called ‘War.’ But, it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old – and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.

(He pointed to the statue) ‘You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph…a photograph of his girlfriend. Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.

‘The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank. Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go kill some Japanese’ or ‘Let’s die for our country.’ He knew he was talking to little boys.. Instead he would say, ‘You do what I say, and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’

‘The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona… Ira Hayes was one of them who lived to walk off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad. President Truman told him, ‘You’re a hero’ He told reporters, ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’

So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down, drowned in a very shallow puddle, at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken).

‘The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky. A fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, ‘Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn’t get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.’ Yes, he was a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

‘The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews. When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say ‘No, I’m sorry, sir, my dad’s not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don’t know when he is coming back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell ‘s soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn’t want to talk to the press.

‘You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn’t see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, ’cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a combat caregiver. On Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.

‘When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero. When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, ‘I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.’

‘So that’s the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.’

Suddenly, the monument wasn’t just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.

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Ashamed of Their Country

Posted on 19/09/2013 by Grumpa Joe

Grumpa Joe intended this blog site as a place where he would post his work exclusively; He would share with readers the wisdom of his years. For the most part about half of what he posts is original stuff and the other half comes from contributions from friends on subjects that touch his nerves. When he does post a contribution he adds words of his own to give a rationale.

Today, he has a piece from a Dorothy, a friend he knows from the company they worked for. She and he were at different ends of the building but they made enough contact to become friends. She worked in Carpet Land, and he worked in the trenches. Whenever he got called to see the Boss, she was the one who announced his presence. After many years of retirement they somehow hooked up again via the blogosphere. Dorothy sends him really good stuff regularly. Today, she got him going with this little known piece of news that didn’t really make the news. This is the kind of stuff that gets his juices flowing.

First is her contribution, second will be Joe’s thoughts on why this happened.

Whattheh

George Washington statue is hidden at the MLK rally in Columbia, SC

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia, SC had an interesting twist this year. 

The event is held on the North side steps of the statehouse.

Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington.

This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the father of our country from view so that participants would 

Not be ‘offended’ by his presence.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw this picture of the MLK Day rally in Columbia, South Carolina. 

This rally was sponsored by the NAACP, and they said that they covered the statue because they “didn’t want to offend anyone.”

Really? George Washington is the father of this nation. How is he offensive to anyone?

Can you imagine what would happen if we covered the statue of Dr. Martin L. King on President’s Day? Or, is only the statue of a ‘white guy’ offensive??

Of course, this display of anti-Americanism wasn’t covered at all by the national media (surprise, surprise!!), and the local paper in Columbia only ran a short piece on it. It has been covered a little by the blog-world, but I think the word needs to get out to the general public that this is what the NAACP is all about…militant and (most definitely) racist.

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An angel on Joe’s shoulder told him to check this out on Snopes before hitting the “Publish” button. Snopes gave it a Green dot with a red circle around it, meaning the article above is a mixture of truth. Actually, it is true but not complete. Snopes doesn’t allow one to copy their analysis, but ASK.com does and their version is identical to Snopes.

This is excerpted from ASK.com

Text example:
Email contributed by David H., Jan. 18, 2011:

FW: Father of Our Country Boxed Away

The annual MLK observance at the state house in Columbia SC had an interesting twist this year. The event is held on the north side steps of the statehouse. Prominent at that location is a large bronze statue of George Washington. This year, the NAACP constructed a “box” to conceal the Father of His Country from view so that participants would not be offended by his presence.

Analysis: I haven’t (yet) been able to determine precisely who took the above snapshot, but eyewitness accounts and other photos of the Jan. 17, 2011 event confirm that it’s authentic.

As stated above, the occasion was the NAACP’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally at the state house in Columbia, South Carolina. The participants’ view of the statue of George Washington that stands in front of the capitol building was indeed obstructed by a three-sided wooden box during the ceremonies, a measure which has been roundly criticized by right-leaning political bloggers as disrespectful of the nation’s first President.

Whereas the forwarded text asserts that the organizers of the event sought to “conceal” the statue of Washington “so that participants would not be offended by his presence,” an NAACP spokesperson offered a different explanation, as reportedby John O’Connor in the Jan. 18 edition of The State:

A three-sided structure that covered the front and sides of the statue was intended to display a rally graphic and serve as a photo-and-television backdrop for the event’s speakers, said S.C. NAACP executive director Dwight James. However, the graphic was not finished before the rally and could not be put in place.Photos from the event showed a three-sided box with Washington’s statue visible only from behind the stage. “What we had constructed was a background with a graphic to be placed on it,” James said. “We weren’t trying to obstruct anything.”

The State reported that the statue has been similarly covered at MLK Day events going back at least four years, though most groups holding rallies at the state house leave it unobstructed.

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Grumpa Joe tried researching for articles from the last four years but could not find anything. His hopes were to find another photo from another year to prove the validity of the claim that they have been covering statues at their events. He was unsuccessful.

Here is Joe’s take on why they covered George. Even though George Washington played a huge role in kick starting America into existence he owned slaves. Most of the NAACP people Joe has heard speaking resent the Founding Fathers who endorsed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the BIll of rights, and consider them all hypocrites. They wrote “All men are created equal . . .” yet never included blacks in the conversation. It wasn’t until Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that they became free men. Our government has worked diligently to pass laws to correct the imbalance between blacks and whites, but  have been largely unsuccessful. There is still racial division today, and our first black President is the main perpetrator of racial division. He uses race at every chance to his advantage. Meanwhile, even though the Founders blacks out of the original documents in favor of establishing a country which ultimately advances the black cause and has raised their level of wealth, and education to above the level of blacks anywhere else on earth they refuse to budge from dependence to self-responsibility.

The root cause is slavery. The blacks have been spoon fed by liberals that whites owe them something to make up for the sins committed by the ancestors who did own slaves. Joe’s take on this is “Get over it.” Many countries lived with slaves going back to ancient Rome and further. Eventually, slaves were freed and assimilated into civilization. Every European country had a system of feudal serfs. Serfs were freemen but belonged to the estate on which they worked. They lived free but were required to work the fields of the Lord, while slaves were told exactly what to do and how. Slaves were property, Serfs were not. Serfs could leave an estate at anytime, but because of the feudal system they could only get work on another estate as a serf. Either way, the life of a slave and the life of a serf were pretty darn close.

Yet, many serfs fled European countries to become freemen. We do not hear white immigrant descendents of European Serfs slamming their government, nor claiming restitution for years past. They are happy enough as free men to work within the system. U.S.A. Blacks are several generations removed from slavery, yet they persist in receiving back pay. Haven’t we paid enough in the past 148 years?

Blacks want us to love them and treat them equally. The country has made great inroads to doing that in the past fifty years. Laws favor blacks over whites in many cases. They have served well to lift blacks to make them more equal. In some cases they have an edge over whites. Compare white-workers to black-workers in government jobs. Blacks often have union people assigned as Discrimination Officers. They function to resolve any grievance by a black regarded as discriminatory against him in the favor of the black. Here in Illinois we had a State Mental health Center. In the beginning, it was heavily staffed with whites. With the equal opportunity laws employment swung toward blacks and the State made sure they would not be held for discrimination. As time went on, the blacks outnumbered the white by a ratio of two or three to one. Yet, the Discrimination Officer remained. Blacks discriminated whites daily, but the Discrimination Officer slept in his office waiting for a black to walk in with a claim. Black workers took advantage of white workers every chance they got. For example, telephone operators worked three shifts. The blacks had a system in play. Whenever an operator was going to call in sick to take the day off she would alert the others not to answer their phones at home. That way the supervisor who was calling around for a replacement would not find anyone. The supervisor then “mandated” the worker still at work, to work the next shift. Most of the times the worker mandated was white. In my opinion, the State should have been sued for violation of work rules but they never were. They claimed they needed to keep a health care center running at all costs. Isn’t that a form of slavery, i.e. mandating a person to work another eight hours against his will?

Another example. Two telephone operators working side by side, one black, one white. The black sits at her phone chatting with her Avon customers while the board is lighting up with calls. The white works her butt off to answer her calls, and admonishes her partner to pick up her calls or to switch her board over. “Let them wait” was a typical reply. Both workers made the same money, but the white worker had more value per hour than the black. This type of workplace behavior goes on in all government bureaus, both state and federal. Did you ever wonder why the government workers need the SEIU? Because too many blacks would get fired without a Discrimination Officer in place to shout “racism” to a supervisor and throw the place into a panic about a lawsuit.

How can whites love blacks when they surround the whites with such behavior?

Another example, the Farm Bureau has a program to pay farmers who own small farms $50,000/year to make up for the awful way their ancestors were treated on the same land. Most farmers are black and the program intends to help them. I heard an interview with a black farmer in the program who made a really good living on his farm. The interviewer asked him if he felt dishonest taking the money from the Bureau program. “No, I feel it is my place to punish the government for treating my grandfather and his slave ancestors poorly.”

The bible story “The Tower of Babel” from Genesis finds the Lord dividing people and scrambling their language to make it harder for them to reach heaven, yet we mortals strive to do just that, we try over, and over again to build a Utopia that is not worth living in.

New International Version (NIV)

The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,[a] they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there.

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone,and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scatteredthem over the face of the whole earth.

Throughout history there has been a racial divide between people of color. Let’s face it whites don’t like people of color just as people of color don’t like whites. The color shouldn’t matter but it does. The laws force us to treat each other equally, but push the equality toward people of color to the detriment of the whites.

Another example is the Affirmative Action law which requires institutions to give equal consideration to race, color, religion, etc. This one law has resulted in what I call the Dumbing Down of America. Universities and Colleges force themselves to take on black students with lower credentials than whites. The result is many of the blacks come out with degrees they don’t deserve because no University wants to admit they failed a black. Our current President is a prime example of affirmative action. He would never have made it into the schools he did without affirmative action or a lot of money. Universities also discriminate toward foreign students because they pay cash and out-of-state fees. Perhaps Obama came in as a foreign student fully sponsored by a foreign government.

Nonetheless many very capable white students are being left out of prestigious schools because of Affirmative Action. Some of the Phd degreed blacks i see being interviewed on TV are the most left leaning liberals on earth. They could never hold a real job in the private sector so they continued education by playing the system until they got the title of doctor. That gives them the air of superior intelligence. Most of them are out of their league, and expect us to love them because they are smart blacks.

I don’t deny there are some very smart blacks in the country. Favorites like Thomas Sowell,  Econ Professor in California, or Ben Carson, Brain Surgeon, or Mychal Massie, Author, or Hermain Cain, Businessman, or Walter Williams, Economist, or Col. Allen West, Retired Military and Politician are all people I would live next door to and love them like my brother. The real question is would they want to live next to me?

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Broken Balance

Posted on 06/12/2012 by Grumpa Joe

IMG

I’m tired of hearing about the fiscal-cliff. I’m tired of the posturing of the behemoths in Washington. Let’s call a Spade a Spade. Obama’s version of a balanced approach is “I tax, I spend.”  We the sheeple of the Divided States of America will pay the privilege of converting to communism.

If I were a gambling man I would start a huge block pool to predict the date on which the DSA goes totally insane, and becomes a communist nation. My guess is that it will be a lot sooner than we think.

Why am I so cynical? Here is why:

The war on God

Being rich is evil

Working is evil

Job creators are evil

Profit is evil

What is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine

Big government is the answer

No one wants responsibility

The war on Christmas

Muslims are good only a small percentage who are radical are bad

Food stamps are good

Free phones are good

Welfare is good

The one percent are greedy bastards who stole all the money from the ninety-nine percent

The forty nine percent who do not pay taxes deserve more tax return

Hollywood stars know what is best for the country

Obama is the Savior

Atheism is the new religion of the country

Guns are evil

Killing dictators is good

Sponsoring gun running to Mexico is good

Covering up by telling the people of the DSA a deliberate lie is good

Ignoring the  law is good if you are in charge, it is bad if you are a sheeple

Spending without limit is good if you are in charge

Spending without limit if you are a sheeple is bad

Taking vacation is good if you are in charge

Taking vacation if you are a sheeple is not economically possible

Borders are for sheeple who want to know when they are in Mexico

Mexicans don’t have borders

Show up to vote who ever you are

Vote as a proxy for your dead relatives

Show a photo ID to cash a check

I’m tired, I can’t go any further without taking a break.

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Repeal PPACPA

Posted on 18/05/2012 by Grumpa Joe

There are some very special people in my life who are totally committed to healthcare reform. I disagree with their opinions about the efficacy of Obama Care. It is a senseless stupid pile of paper designed to take power, and to eliminate liberty from America. Healthcare is not a right, it is a gift to us from the millions of compassionate workers who serve humanity with a desire to limit our pain and misery. They do not educate themselves for 12 years to be told by a brain-dead bureaucrat in Washington how to do the job.

The Founding Fathers did not stick their necks out to see successors take away the liberties they fought so hard to establish.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are the Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . .”

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Why Grumpa Joe Will Never Be President

Posted on 03/05/2011 by Grumpa Joe

Warning!

This post has graphically visual images which may cause you discomfort.

Politically correct people should change channels immediately.

Do not read if you are squeamish, or a radical muslim sympathizer.

It became a total waste of my time, but I watched anyway. President Obama’s Press Secretary explained how the Navy reverently readied Bin Laden’s body and buried him at sea. I also read several headlines about Muslims unhappy about Bin Laden being buried at sea.

I do not recall any news of a Muslim complaint about how to bury a suicide bomber. Most likely those guys get scrapped off the pavement and walls with a shovel and tossed into a dumpster. No one ever complains. No one writes about a respectful burial for a martyr whose remains are proudly scattered about peaceful markets mixed with the bodies of innocent people who by coincidence are in the martyr’s place of worship. The innocents become collateral damage in a war dedicated to killing in the name of God.

If I were leading the country, I wouldn’t have allowed the navy to deposit Bin Laden’s body into the Arabian Sea in a solemn, ceremonial way. The burial procedure I have in mind would be slightly more public and complicated.

First I would ship Bin Laden’s body to Washington D.C. for a service, worthy of a ruthless criminal, on the Washington Mall. In full view of the White House, Capitol, the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials. I would invite the Imam’s of every Mosque in America to witness the debacle.

There, I  have  a meat grinder of the proportions used by a sausage manufacturer with at least a 100 horsepower motor spinning the blades at 1200 rpm. Six service people who lost limbs in the war on terror would carry Bin Laden’s pathetic dead ass to the hopper and dump him in head first.

Volunteers from families who have lost loved ones in the 9/11 attack or in the Iraq, Afghanistan wars would spread the Bin Laden burger around the grounds of the Mall.

Hidden from view I have several hundred hungry dogs. When the volunteers are safely out of harms way, I release the dogs for a meal of Bin Laden burger.

Finale 1. Once the dogs finish eating the Bin Laden burger we round them up and take them to defecate within the prison cells of Guantanamo.

Finale 2. Once the dogs finish eating the Bin Laden burger we round them up and take them to defecate in Pakistan.

Vote for your favorite. One star  for finale 1, or two stars for finale 2.

This is my proposal, and I’m proud of it.

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