CONDOLENCES

Our sympathies are extended to Police Director Carl Riley and his family. His son 21-year-old Pfc. Jamie R. Riley died due to injuries he incurred when two U.S. Army military training vehicles crashed in southern New Mexico. 

What can be worse than the premature loss of a child? Unimaginable!!

Additionally, non-battlefield deaths in the military   are nothing more than a needless waste of life.  Combined  it is a tragedy of extra-ordinary magnitude.

This training accident led me to reflect how lucky I have been in life.  I too was involved in a training accident in 1945.  Shortly after Normandy our Division had been moved from the USA to Camp Chisledon at Ogden-St.-George, a small village in Wiltshire. which had been a British army base for further training before being inserted into the continent. We were still there during the “Bridge to far” fiasco although we had been alerted. 

During this time some brainy individual at Army headquarters thought it a good idea if we trained on the British Horsa glider which carried more men than ours.  They were made of plywood and had been out of the open ever since the Normandy invasion. 

There were to be two separate groups of flights.  We all want to get on the first flight and get this bother over with.  Fortunately, I lost in a drawing to be in the first group from Headquarters Co. to go.  Their glider lost its tail in flight and all 30 men aboard were killed.  I was sent down to identify the bodies.  Many killed in the crash were my friends including my commanding officer and the section dentist. 

30 lives lost for no reason, we were never going to use those gliders.

We are not masters of our own fate

Our  pipe framed canvassed covered CG4A carried a pilot and co-pilot plus 8 men, or a jeep with 4 passengers.

ON MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY

Let us remember and adhere to Martin Luther King’s vision otherwise celebrating today is to be as cynical as most of today's politicians

 The words below were written by David Von Drehle for today’s Washington Post. Their order has been altered.

 "Today, Monday, the nation commemorates 90 years since King’s birth. This year’s holiday finds many of us in our own dark places. Love for enemies is in short supply. Solidarity with the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, is widely mocked. Tribes, sects and identity groups command loyalty, while the principle of universal and essential humanity goes begging"--

 "We honor Martin Luther King Jr. not for his victories, which remain incomplete at best. We honor him for his vision, and for his sacrificial commitment to that vision. He saw what we might be capable of — as individuals and as a nation — and believed in that possibility so deeply that he dropped everything else, even life itself, to hold it high where we can always see it. At such a time, it is good to remember that the life we revere and celebrate this week was shadowed by doubt, stalked by division, haunted by fear and plagued by a sense of failure."-=

 "Like King, we also choose each day whether to live in hope or fear, with love or hate, as builders or destroyers. From King, we learn the lesson that these choices are never as easy as they sound and never as popular as we imagine. In King, we have a model for choosing, and a fierce example of the final refusal to give up"--

  "At the time of his murder in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had become the proverbial prophet without honor in his own land. A survey by the Harris Poll found that the 39-year-old civil rights leader appeared to have lost his grip on the American imagination. Three out of 4 white respondents said they disapproved of King’s work after his turn against the war in Vietnam. More striking, roughly half of all black Americans also disapproved.

 Only a few years earlier, King had been at a zenith: In 1964, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year and the youngest person to date to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His success in seeing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law was followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

  But 1968: This scant time later, King was widely criticized, even by his peers in the civil rights movement. African American leaders admonished him not to bring his protests to their cities. Of black leaders such as Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) of Harlem,  King lamented:  “Their point is . . . Martin Luther King is dead; he’s finished; his nonviolence is nothing. No one is listening to it.”

UPCOMMING COUNCIL MEETING

  There have been no blogs this week since I spent most of the last weekend in “The House of Horrors” aka JFK ER and holding area for non-cardiac chest pain which is now slowly getting better.  I have had only one short excursion from home but lots of sleep thanks to medication.

  Monday is JFK Day so Council meeting, which I do not plan to attend, is Tuesday and I assume that City Hall will be closed Monday even if there was no storm. 
  AJ posted the agenda on Friday, but I could not open or download any of the specific Resolutions. In addition, there were several typo errors. He posted Saturday about noon time an updated Agenda, but I was unable to open the link to read it.

  There were several interesting items in the original agenda such as the Mayor’s request to approve Michael J, Mandell as “Director of the Fire Division for the City of Plainfield”. I could not open or download the Resolution printout to learn about his qualifications. I subsequently was informed, but could not verify, that he had appealed his score for Battalion Chief in North Bergen in 1999 but was not appointed.

   Although my addition may be slightly off, but this Council is going to approve the commitment of almost 6 million dollars in a combine session where they in the recent past do not have time to question or review appropriately the agenda. I note that there are request for 325K for various legal corporations services including 20K for Minchello’s firm in addition to previous approved contracts, his and court judge.    
  There is also 317K for settling a compensation claim, which we have no explanation.