THIS WORLD WAS LUCKY JUST TO SEE HIM BORN

President’s Day is one of those minor holidays that functions mostly as a disruption in mail delivery and trash/recycling pickup.  Today, I’ll ignore those minor inconveniences and tip my hat to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s 32nd president. 

Why him?  Apart from the fact that he ranks with Washington and Lincoln among our greatest presidents, he was president on February 19, 1945, when the first wave of Marines landed on Iwo Jima, as the image accompanying this post illustrates.  Two of my uncles, Roy and Dayton Cline, enlisted in the Marines after Pearl Harbor.  They made it home.  6,800 Marines died on Iwo Jima.

My brother-in-law’s father, who was part of the D-Day invasion force in France eight months earlier, also made it home.  When I was in college, I heard him try to describe what it was like.  He said “I saw things you wouldn’t believe,” and then he started crying.  2,500 Americans and 2,000 more British and Canadian soldiers died on those beaches.

I literally can’t imagine what they went through, and I’m in awe of their courage.  Both my parents also served during World War II, though in less hazardous circumstances.  My father was an Army Air Force airplane mechanic in the South Pacific, and my mother was an Army nurse in Europe.  And I’m determined that none of those veterans, living and dead, endured their hardships just so the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could turn the country over to Russia.

Register, vote, and resist. 

(FYI, the title of this post comes from an obscure Woody Guthrie song, “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt.”)