Does America Care?

by | Mar 28, 2012 | Blog, General

Preface: Please do not misconstrue this post or any of my others to be negative. I, along with my colleagues, have been working tirelessly on this project for eight years with the explicit vision to make this memorial the finest and most distinctive in the world. I simply want to honestly share with you some of the realities that make this endeavor, at times, frustrating. Senator Bob Dole intimated in his 2006 letter to me that this would be a most arduous task. At that time, I could not fully appreciate his counsel. Today, I do. The following quote is from the book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power by Rachael Maddow. “While America has been fighting two of its longest ever boots-on-the-ground wars in the decade following 9/11, and fighting them simultaneously, less than one percent of the adult US population has been called upon to strap on those boots. ‘Not since the peace time years between World War I and World War II,’ according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study, ‘has a smaller share of Americans served in the armed forces.’ Half of the American public says it has not been even marginally affected by ten years of constant war. We’ve never in our long history been further from the ideal of the citizen-soldier, from the idea that America would find it impossible to go to war without disrupting domestic civilian life.” Senator Joe Lieberman made this insightful comment on March 22, 2007. “Our military is fully engaged in this war, but most of the rest of America is not. Five years after September 11,...

Memorial Update

by | Mar 5, 2012 | Blog, General

It has been quite some time since my last post. This is an update. Unfortunately, I have nothing good to report. I have tried to make contacts with influential business leaders as well as a young, very popular country singer, but to date, I have had no success. The handlers will not pass along my communications. I am open for suggestions. I now have over fifty pages of attempted contacts. I do keep a log for future reference. Now that we are in the midst of the dollar driven presidential campaign, I doubt that we could get any mention about a memorial to our war dead. Not that we have had any success with that in the past. I am contemplating sharing with you some of the more, what I have to call, unbelievable contact attempts. I have always hesitated from doing that because of the perception of being negative. But up to now, nothing has generated any interest in this effort. I will give this some more consideration. If you are interested, I would be happy to share the results of those efforts...