Moving story: WW2 veteran 'escapes' his nursing home to attend Normandy commemorations.

 
Well done Bernard Jordan
 
From BBC News: D-Day: Hove veteran disappears for Normandy trip
 
A hero in a world of few.
 

Hi,
 
I find these nice, and heart warming. But it tells you how disrespectful and reckless a lot of rest homes are in relation to things like this and a person's past and their history. Most of these institutions do not give a damn ... and the person is there waiting for the reaper, and the sooner the better!
 
It's just so sad. A person, honoring other fallen friends and the memories that he has lived with all his life ... and in the end, the folks in the home are denying him/them, the one chance they have to make a meaningful gesture.
 
You can't even write a song about that!
 
Ange - Emile Jacotey -- the album was done almost 20 years before Roger Waters, and the big anthem in the side 2 is "Ego et Deus" ... which is the theme of all wars out there! Hope that you can hear this album, because it is magnificent.

Hi,
 
If you guys have a chance the story of "Emile Jacotey" is a real one from WW1, and it is in French, but the gest of it is that he survived a blast in his bunker when others didn't. The music is in between his bits and it is really well done. It's not pretentious. It's just a shame that it is in French, and not enough folks will understand it, and appreciate the beauty in it.
 
It is by far one of the best "memorials" ever done in music for individuals and what they fought for, something that too many times, we all take for granted.
 
Roger's version is nice, but is very general in concept and not complete, though it has a massive song about the Tianamman Square thing, that is very good. But not enough!

bitflipper
Next time you have an opportunity to talk to someone in their 90's, get out your Zoom H1 and let them ramble. It will profoundly change your own perspectives.

Absolutely....There is so much we can learn from them. Unfortunately, many people don't give them the time of day.

A hero then, and a hero now. 

Most people got their WWII news via newsreels at the movie theater. All of them were carefully sanitized and had to pass government censors. Defeats were given a positive spin, and the toll on civilians inflicted by the "good guys" glossed over. Some of the newsreel-inspired mythology is still widely believed, such as the necessity of using atomic bombs to end the Pacific war or the firebombing of Dresden.
 
Vietnam changed all that with the introduction of television. The raw brutality of war was no longer something you could romanticize, and it fundamentally changed people's thinking about it. Those of my generation who were being forcibly snatched from their normal lives to participate in it had a real hard time thinking of it as a patriotic duty. It made you examine your most basic beliefs about morality. Worst of all, it made an entire generation come to distrust their government, a legacy that persists today and affects every aspect of modern governance. And it just keeps getting worse.
 
Nowadays, the internet makes different points of view available to all. Everybody outside of China, anyway. "Shock and Awe" becomes bits and pieces of children and a new understanding of why so much of the world hates us.
 
Maybe, if our fathers and grandfathers had talked more about it, we could have all benefited.
 
 (Moderators: this is neither a political nor a religious posting, and does not violate the TOS prohibition against them. Morality transcends - and trumps - the domains of both religion and politics.)