Random Grazing Space

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This is the day we remember those who have left us over the past year.

We have Memorial Day and Veterans Day and Pearl Harbor Day and September 11 to remember the monumental tragedies of war and terror. Today we remember the people around us, who lived and died living what some call the normal life.

We visited Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts yesterday.  There are monuments to that same Pearl Harbor Day, to the Cuban Missile Crisis and to September 11th as well. 

What I found most touching were the looped videos being played at each station showing interviews of those who once sat in the same chair when the ships were in harms way.

Whether these people are alive now or dead, these videos serve as their ghosts. 

They don’t speak of heroism, but of their daily attempt to to live normal lives while on a ship where over two thousand men slept stacked deck to overhead and side by side with a volume of explosive death whose job it was for them to deliver to other people who too were attempting to maintain their normal lives living on similar vessels or crunched into lava tunnels defending islands they were commanded to steal only a few years earlier.

When we visited the Alamo, as we walked around the quite church surrounded by highways and warehouses; we saw the room where Jim Bowie was bayoneted. I wondered then how a modern war interview with combatants from both sides would have played. Did the Mexicans see this as a pursuit of terrorists from another country? Did the Texicans see this as their struggle to break free from a greater military power determined to crush the spirit of freedom they so recently won from what they saw as another dictatorial foreign invader?

What would videos of the normal people on both sides, thrust into this short usurpation/revolution say? Would they complain of the close quarters, the long walks, the noise of the cannon, the poor cooking skills on both sides?

Then I think of a the forlorn picture of a Pakistani musician in Boston.com’s recent Big Picture spread of the current conflict.  When you look at that sad and confused face, was he thinking of lines of battle, strategy for the supremacy of one mode of living over another?  Or was he thinking of the seven children that he needs to feed, of the instruments he needed to earn a living left behind, of the gigs he would miss?

While all of this continues, I hope we can still maintain this illusion of living normal lives.  It is the only way to survive.

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We’re using Windows Live Writer for most of our blog posts.  Inserted into Live Writer we have the xPollinate plug in.  This plug in has primarily been used to post blog entries made in one Famous Grazing blog to the others in the series.

There are a few of these blogs we couldn’t connect with xPollinate. We’re going to try its Ping.fm feature to connect the stories to Posterous and Vox when we post this message to Random Grazing Space.

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When I write a blog entry I never expect anyone to read it.  That is why it was a total shock to find one I had recently written while in a philosophical mood on Belltowernews.com.

It was seen by me as mostly an historical observation.  The almost instant remarks referring to me as a person of opposite political opinion of the commenter but using words that require the vocabulary of a school yard bully were a surprise to say the least....

It was almost a year ago when I took this photo in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.  The weather was the same, but the country certainly wasn’t.

On that day the ascendant party in power was full of hope and the defeated party was licking the wounds of a sounding defeat....

The local governing agencies have established new rule regarding the behavior of bloggers.

“No more Wild West” was one of the comments that drew out attention.

We will be reviewing this information.  At the time, being not affiliated much with anyone, we need to review our commenting policy to make sure it is with in the guidelines of the  the whims of the powers that be....