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Friday, November 28, 2008
Duty and honor never part-time
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The end of a long and polarizing political year draws nigh. Tuesday’s runoff races for the U.S. Senate, a seat on the Georgia Court of Appeals and a seat on the Public Service Commission are all that remain. After that, the nation’s campaign season will have ended.
Through this much-too-long process, the group of Americans whose lives are most thoroughly affected by national election outcomes remain scrupulously uninvolved in partisan politics. Thanksgiving weekend is an appropriate occasion to give thanks to them and for them, and for the democracy their sacrifices preserve.
For three decades or more, this newspaper has participated with the Georgia Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve to honor six exceptional men and women in the enlisted ranks — three from the Guard and three from Georgia-based Reserve units. The honorees are selected by the Guard and Reserve from among three rank categories for their leadership abilities, duty performance and for conduct.
It’s an impressive and representative group. Those honored in the week before Thanksgiving included a group of volunteers you ought to know.
First Sgt. RICKY HALL SR. of Atlanta is a 31-year veteran of the Georgia Guard. Already, he’s pulled six tours of duty abroad — three in the Republic of Georgia, where he helped train Georgian soldiers headed to Iraq in logistics and in equipment maintenance, and three in Iraq, the last with Macon’s 48th Infantry Brigade. In civilian life, Hall runs a warehouse for Superior Printing in Atlanta. He’s been married for 31 years. He and wife Barbara are the parents of four children — two boys and two girls.
Six tours abroad are only possible, he said, “if you have an understanding second part of you, which is your spouse, and you have to keep her informed. You’ve got to have an understanding and strong counterpart; you can’t do it by yourself.”
Pfc. EUGENE RICHARDSON JR. of Smyrna wanted to marry his high school sweetheart, Nicole, and put down roots. So he chose the Army Reserve. The day after his required military training ended, he married Nicole.
For Richardson, the military is a family tradition.
“As a family, we were inspired by my grandfather’s military service; we wanted to follow somewhat in his footsteps. Me, personally, I felt as though the miliary would give me a better chance and a more secure life.”
His goal is to complete a business degree and own a company that provides heating, ventilation and air conditioning services.
Pfc. KEVIN D. GENTRY of Gaffney, S.C., is the first in his family to join the military, and family members have been incredibly supportive, he says. He plans to marry soon, and while he works now in the plumbing department at Lowe’s, his civilian career goal is to own a plumbing company. “That’s what I love to do.”
The military, he said, “helps to make me a better person; it has changed my whole way of life for the better.”
Sgt. 1st Class RICHARD M. COLVIN of Loganville is a high school history teacher and football coach in Walton County, and he has served two tours abroad as a reservist, the first in Bosnia with the Guard’s 48th Infantry Brigade in 2001. “Then 9/11 happened, and a friend and I started looking for a unit we knew would be activated pretty quickly, so we went to” the 310th Psychological Operations Company. In 2002, the unit was indeed called up and posted to Afghanistan.
He credits his wife, Carol, and their family, a supportive school system and other teachers for allowing him to continue to serve. His and Carol’s oldest son, Troy, now in college, intends to join the Marine Corps over the Christmas holidays.
Dad, who could retire from the service, intends to stay on, too. “I kind of want to pass the mantle to him, so to speak. I want to be in long enough for him to get in and get established.”
Staff Sgt. RACHEL J. DRYDEN of Columbus met her future husband, Capt. Christopher Dryden, at Fort Benning, where her Wisconsin National Guard unit had been deployed 13 years ago to replace a regular Army unit assigned to Bosnia. Now the two of them are preparing for duty in Afghanistan with the 48th Infantry Brigade.
Three years ago, they both served with the brigade in Iraq. Their military careers have prompted them to delay starting a family, “but we’re planning on that once we get back,” Dryden said. “That is an incentive to actually make it back. We’ll be there for a year — I hope just a year and that it won’t turn into a 15- or 16-month deployment.”
Sgt. TERRANCE R. ADAMS of Stone Mountain joined the Army Reserve while attending Georgia Southern University three years ago.
“It definitely has made me more responsible, more mature and has given me a sense of pride and self-confidence,” said Adams, an early achiever with an impressive list of military schools he’s attended.
“What I want to do is become a schoolteacher,” he said and, like Colvin, he’s convinced the military experience will help him. “It’s helped me determine where I want to go with my life.”
America’s strength is that while the rest of us debate issues such as how long to remain committed to a ground presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, reservists train, balance civilian careers and military obligations, prepare for deployments and still remain focused.
The republic’s resilence, as this election cycle demonstrates, is that it evolves and strengthens. Less than half a century after the civil rights movement, a man whose skin color was once a barrier to full participation in the American Dream was elected as the commander in chief, the president whose decisions will, literally, affect the lives of the men and women here.
It is a measure of the country’s greatness, too, that the two general officers who stood to honor the six soldiers would, half a century ago, have hit a glass ceiling long before earning a general’s star. And yet they are here, two of them.
Brig. Gen. Anne F. Macdonald is chief of staff of the U.S. Army Reserve Command at Fort McPherson. Brig. Gen. Maria L. Britt is commanding general of the Georgia Army National Guard in Atlanta. Both are West Point graduates — Macdonald in 1980 and Britt in 1983. America is, indeed, the land of opportunity, an open and evolving democracy where citizenship is something to be cherished.
To these men and women and to others in uniform who remained scrupulously above politics and focused on the job of preserving our freedoms, thanks.
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On politicians’ pay, parents’ responsibility
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
Atlanta’s next mayor should be paid $225,000, up from $147,500, advises one of those commissions that politicians appoint to provide pay-raise cover. Ostensibly the higher pay is to attract better candidates. That assumes, of course, that losers know their worth and won’t qualify for jobs that pay them more. That’s never been documented in politics.
Children are more likely than their parents were to drop out of school. Schools are blamed. Stop trying to solve problems caused by absent and uninvolved parents by trying to pump more money into the same failed models. It’s no longer the teacher’s fault, nor the principal’s. When adults don’t marry and parent their children, a government institution that has them eight hours a day for half the year can’t. Either change the model or conduct a smoking-type campaign to salvage marriage and two-parent families.
Save this headline: “Israeli, Egyptian leaders to talk about peace plan.” And this one too: “Governors, mayors ask Congress for cash.” Both are as durable as my John Deere 4230 tractor.
Money matters. The candidate with the most money won in virtually every race from Congress through the presidency, according to a group called the Center for Responsive Politics. Money won in 93 percent of House races and 94 percent of Senate. Public financing is toast. The best solution now is disclosure of money and of practices that evade full, timely and honest disclosure.
During lunch at a meat-and-three, the television blares. It’s Divorce Court. Almost every commercial is a law firm hustling clients. So does this mean that only the mindless are harmed by medicines or that they’re the ones easily convinced that their ailments or their subprime mortgages are somebody else’s fault?
One of the options for homeowners who bought more house than they could afford, or lied about their income, and were forced to pay the risk-appropriate interest rate is that they now have the chance to get a rate reduction. Yet, the fiscally prudent who sacrificed pleasures to save for a down payment, who bought the house they could afford, who paid their mortgages on time, get nothing. Government should reward people for desirable behaviors that build strong communities. That is, they should get interest rate reductions. Instead, we reward people for scamming the system, thus buying irresponsible behaviors that harm families and communities. A real problem in this country is that social policies reward people for failing to save, or buy insurance, manage their finances or delay gratification. Thus is work — as in, “do a good day’s work for a fair wage” — diminished, as are the consequences of freeloading. Nobody works whose lifestyle requirements are met by not working.
I agree with my colleague, Mike King, that Cobb County is the place to look for well-managed elections and vote-counting — as he notes, thanks to Sharon Dunn and her staff at the Board of Elections & Registration. As a longtime watcher of partial returns from vote-counting across Georgia, Cobb almost always gets it done quickly while Fulton County almost never seems to be up to the challenge.
Headline: “Stomach bug found to be too common.” My sentiments exactly on the winter sniffles, unaccompanied children serving themselves at food bars, reporting on the sexual preferences of entertainers and other celebrities, the can’t-let-it-go assertions by the left of George W. Bush’s alleged incompetence, and liberal commentators telling me what conservatives believe and how to fix the Republican Party.
It’s entirely news to me that Dr. Julie Gerberding is a Bush administration toady — or some such nonsense. The problem is that those who hate Bush would burn at the stake all of his appointees involved with issues — global warming, for example — where they disagreed. The real politics in the CDC occurred before she got there — and that’s when they got into the root causes of social problems, the stuff of liberal arts faculties, not scientists. It’ll be pure vindictive politics if she’s replaced.
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