11. 11. 2018 - The 100th Year Anniversary of Armistice Day

Never forget.

Humbled and grateful on this day, and every day, for those who sacrificed everything for us.

Ashamed and forlorn that those sacrifices are being trampled on and ignored by most of Europe today.

I pray that someone or something will somehow turn this around.

I pray that we never surrender our values, our morals, our duty to future generations and our humanity.

I pray that we are not too late.




John McCrae's In Flanders Fields is probably the best known poem of WW1. But there is another very famous war poet from that era, Wilfred Owen, who gets forgotten and overlooked. His most famous and most devastating poem is titled:

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Notes: Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”