Happy Thanksgiving!
Nov. 21st, 2012 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bradygirl_12Considering I'm not sure if I'll be on tomorrow, an early Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Americans! And a Happy Thursday to everyone else! :)
Thanksgiving Week is always interesting. It's a short week here in the States, and even if you work the day after the holiday, everyone else is gone so it's pretty quiet if you're lucky. If you don't have to cook the dinner, you're probably not running around like a crazy person, unless you have to TRAVEL! Busiest travel day of the year in the U.S. It was already backed up thirty miles on the Mass Pike LAST night, and should be even more tonight. Otherwise you can pretty much catch your breath this week if you're lucky.
Tomorrow is also the 49th anniversary of JFK's assassination. Man, nearly a half-century! Next year the 22nd will fall on a Friday, just like the day of the assassination. JFK was certainly flawed (lousy husband, to name one), but I think we were very lucky back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis that Jack Kennedy was in charge. Watching the 50th anniversary specials on the Crisis on PBS gave even more insight, and I've always been impressed reading accounts over the years how JFK used his World War II experience as a PT boat skipper and his dealings with the brass over the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to maintain a healthy skepticism about their recommendations to bomb Cuba and take out the missiles. He and his ExComm advisors, being sane men, tried their hardest to come up with a solution that didn't include nuclear war. When two messages were sent about the missiles, the first a personal one by Khrushchev and the second sounding like the hard-liners in the Politburo had written it, he decided to simply ignore the second one and respond to the first. He would have given the green light to bomb Cuba if there was no other way, but like brother Bobby said, he didn't want to be the Tojo of the 1960s (the Japanese general who greenlighted Pearl Harbor). I shudder to think if a guy like George Bush, Junior had been in charge then. Conservatives tend to trust the military a little too much, in my opinion.
History is about remembering and honoring who came before us and learning from their successes and failures, and Thanksgiving is to give thanks for those you still have with you. A very happy day to all!
Thanksgiving Week is always interesting. It's a short week here in the States, and even if you work the day after the holiday, everyone else is gone so it's pretty quiet if you're lucky. If you don't have to cook the dinner, you're probably not running around like a crazy person, unless you have to TRAVEL! Busiest travel day of the year in the U.S. It was already backed up thirty miles on the Mass Pike LAST night, and should be even more tonight. Otherwise you can pretty much catch your breath this week if you're lucky.
Tomorrow is also the 49th anniversary of JFK's assassination. Man, nearly a half-century! Next year the 22nd will fall on a Friday, just like the day of the assassination. JFK was certainly flawed (lousy husband, to name one), but I think we were very lucky back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis that Jack Kennedy was in charge. Watching the 50th anniversary specials on the Crisis on PBS gave even more insight, and I've always been impressed reading accounts over the years how JFK used his World War II experience as a PT boat skipper and his dealings with the brass over the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to maintain a healthy skepticism about their recommendations to bomb Cuba and take out the missiles. He and his ExComm advisors, being sane men, tried their hardest to come up with a solution that didn't include nuclear war. When two messages were sent about the missiles, the first a personal one by Khrushchev and the second sounding like the hard-liners in the Politburo had written it, he decided to simply ignore the second one and respond to the first. He would have given the green light to bomb Cuba if there was no other way, but like brother Bobby said, he didn't want to be the Tojo of the 1960s (the Japanese general who greenlighted Pearl Harbor). I shudder to think if a guy like George Bush, Junior had been in charge then. Conservatives tend to trust the military a little too much, in my opinion.
History is about remembering and honoring who came before us and learning from their successes and failures, and Thanksgiving is to give thanks for those you still have with you. A very happy day to all!
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Date: 2012-11-21 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-21 03:24 pm (UTC)