September 11th, 2001

This generation's Pearl Harbor. Worse because mostly civilians who died. God bless the brave individuals who brought the fourth plane down at Shanksville, PA. We shall never forget. Apparently we didn't learn anything from the 1993 attempt. A bipartisan screw-up of the first magnitude. Words fail me.

Nagasaki Bombing, August 1945

Along with the bombing of Hiroshima a few days earlier, this event usered in a new era of danger (an potential) for the world. Was it necessary? Was it moral? Morality had long since gone out the window in the second world war, just ask the citizens of London, Dresden, Moscow, Leningrad, Berlin, many cities in Japan, China, the extermination camps.  The first total war against civilian populations. We got a taste of this during our own civil war when Sherman marched from Atlanta to the sea. Nobody listened, nobody learned anything.

The atomic age also usered in the "long twilight war" against world domination by communism. Sometimes that war got hot, just ask the men who fought and died in Korea and Vietnam. Now it's been over two decades since the Belin Wall fell; a whole generation of Americans has grown up not living in the shadow of nuclear holocost. But new enemies to freedom have arisen.

November 22, 1963

Just moments before John F. Kennedy is gunned down in Dallas, Texas. Conspiracy theories abound to the present day. If you were alive then, do you remember where you were when you heard the news? I was in art class when someone, I don't remember who, came running in to announce that the president had been shot. Nobody could believe it. Notice the flag on the front of the limo, that's how slow it was moving. What was the secret service thinking?

Dr. Martin Luther Kin Jr. at the reflecting pool in washington D.C. I doubt if he was imagining a world of racial preferences and race-baiting. Will race be with us always as an issue? Whatever happened to Obama as the first post-racial president?

Flag raising at Iwo Jima. Perhaps the most recognizable photo of WWII. Six thousand American marines died there in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war in  just over a month. Keep that number in mind the next time someone suggests that the War on Terror has been too costly in blood and treasure. Of the five men in the picture, three died before the island was secured. This event happened 65 years ago this year. Semper Fi.

Not Exactly in the same league as the others, but important in Natick nontheless.

This image represents tradition here in Natick. Now I'm not a big sports fan (I tape the superbowl so that I can fast forward through the game to watch the commercials), but I do appreciate the importance of shared community values. Give us a break with the PC nonsense, OK?

 A prime example of arrogance on the school committee, something I'd like to work to change.

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