Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

The other day as I was trawling the Internet looking for some attention-grabbing news for one of my columns, I ran into a tidbit from the "Left Coast" that piqued my interest to the point that made my blood boil: A senior at the University of Washington, Andrew Everett, proposed to the Student Senate that a memorial be erected on the campus to honor an alumnus of the school, Marine Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, (December 4,1912 - January11, 1988) as the twentieth anniversary of his passing was a scant two years away. Col. Boyington was America's leading ace in the Pacific theater with 28 kills. He was shot down in a dogfight on the day he recorded his 27th and 28th victories and spent nearly two years as a POW in Japan. Boyington was not only a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, but also, prior to Pearl Harbor, flew sorties against the Japanese in China and Burma as a member of Chennault's Flying Tigers. Incredibly, the resolution was voted down: 46 to 45.

Trying to get a handle on just what it was about Boyington that so troubled the Student Senate, I tracked down the actual minutes of the pertinent meeting on the Internet. A couple of things stood out:

• One of the kids thought that UW, “honored enough rich white men”, when in fact Boyington was a product of a broken marriage, one quarter Sioux Indian and worked his way through college with a series of odd jobs in the logging and mining industries in Idaho.
• Yet another twerp declaimed about honoring someone, “who killed other people” Guess that rules out everyone who fought for their country; General Patton, Teddy Roosevelt, Sergeant York, Audie Murphy and several million other American men and women going back to the Minute Men at Concord and Lexington.
• And finally a representative to the Student Senate from the “Honors Croquet League” (I kid you not!) went on to say that she “didn’t believe a member of the Marine Corps was an example of the sort of person that UW wanted to produce.”

I would love to meet with those kids and explain a few things to them; it is the soldier not the poets or the reporters who has preserved our right to free speech; it is the soldier not the agitator or the activist who has preserved our right to protest; it is the soldier who serves our flag and, all too often, returns home in a coffin draped by those stars and stripes that bestows upon the protester the freedom to desecrate that flag.

Finally, I would remind them that America is the Land of the Free, only because it is also the Home of the Brave - after which I would spit in their collective faces.

And may God continue to bless America.