Remembrance Day Remembrance

A couple of weeks ago it was Remembrance Day. I lost quite a bit of sleep at the time, lying awake thinking about another Remembrance Day, back in 1990. The events of that day played an important part in hastening my progress towards “hitting the wall” and ending up on a TPI pension for post traumatic stress disorder.

Rather than lose any more sleep, I decided that the best thing I could do for my own peace of mind was to write the whole thing down. So I have written that story on my website. I was heavily involved in the politics of the veteran community in 1990, so this is not just a personal story. It is also a small slice of Australian Vietnam veterans' history.

To read the story, click on this link.

Good On You America!

This is a day to celebrate all that is great and inspiring in the American political system.

To paraphrase something I heard today, in my own lifetime, Rosa Parks sat down so that Martin Luther King could stand up. King marched so that Barack Obama could run. Obama ran so that others could fly.

To add a personal note, when I was a baby, living in a railway tent in the Australian outback, my mother lulled me to sleep by singing Paul Robeson songs. At that time Robeson was invited to Australia but could not come, because the United States would not give him a passport. Today an African American, standing on the shoulders of the likes of Robeson, Parks and King, has been elected by Americans of all colours, creeds and ethnic origins, as their president.

It's a great day for America and the world.