2019/06/26

Give us your tired...

Thread by @Breznican:

When I got back to the office, a senior reporter said, “So you went out with Nick? How’d it go?”
“Great,” I said, not wanting to call it “boring.” “We got some good stuff.”
“What’d you think of Nick?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer this. There was expectation in the question.
Was there something wrong with Nick that I didn’t realize?
“He was cool,” I said. “Nice guy.”
The older reporter just stared at me. Reading me. “You know who he is, right?”

2019/06/06

Leadership and Sacrifice - Against Demagoguery

My father served on D-Day. He experienced a leader who spawned hatred. - The Washington Post:

He walked by himself among the gravestones of his compatriots from the 4th Infantry Division, and eventually stopped and stood for a long time at the marker of one of his commanders, Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Later we asked my dad why he spent the most time at Roosevelt’s grave, rather than at the resting places of his fellow infantrymen... he showed us where he had landed on Utah Beach and described seeing the general standing calmly amid the indescribable chaos of battle and firmly directing the troops ashore. He said Roosevelt’s selfless, honorable leadership heartened him and, he presumed, thousands of other terrified young soldiers on that day.
They all were war heroes — the captured, the killed, the wounded, the mentally maimed, the lucky survivors such as my dad — because of circumstance, not desire. They went to war because of what happened when xenophobia and demagoguery supplanted real leadership.