So, as promised, today’s blogging will all be about good things. My picks might be quirky, and you might argue that they don’t qualify as news in some cases, but this is my blog and I get to set the rules.
Anyway, first up is good news of the heartwarming variety, which you will have missed unless you subscribe to the Boston Globe. It seems a Korean War vet is going to North Korea to search for the remains of a friend who he tried without success the save. He got the Medal of Honor; his friend was a black man who had to fight for the chance to die for his country.
WASHINGTON — In the decades since returning home to Massachusetts from the Korean War, Thomas J. Hudner Jr. has been haunted by what he left behind.
The former fighter pilot risked his life, and earned the nation’s highest medal for valor, by crash-landing his own plane and attempting to save his downed wing man, Jesse L. Brown. But he was unable to pull Brown from the burning wreckage before Chinese troops closed in.
Now, 60 years after the war, Hudner, frail at 88 but determined as ever, is making one final attempt to give his friend a long overdue homecoming, setting out to find Brown’s remains and bring them home.
It is the final chapter in a saga that is about not only loyalty, but about race. Hudner is white, and Brown was African-American.
Their story is credited with advancing equality in the military, which had been integrated just two years earlier. Hudner’s efforts to save Brown helped put to rest lingering doubts that whites would risk it all for their black comrades in the heat of battle.
Hudner is set to arrive Friday in North Korea to examine the purported wreckage of the F-4U Corsair in the rugged mountains where Brown, the Navy’s first African-American aviator, is believed to have died.
It will be an unprecedented expedition, stage-managed by the notoriously propagandist Communist regime. Hudner, who deliberately crash-landed in the snow after seeing Brown waving through billowing smoke, “has regretted the fact that Jesse Brown was never recovered,” according to an overview of the mission shared with the Globe: “He dreams about traveling to the Democratic Republic of Korea and visiting the wreckage of Brown’s Corsair, to pay his respects to his fallen comrade and search for any trace of his remains.”
For Brown’s widow and childhood sweetheart, Daisy Brown Thorne, 86, the news of the expedition came as a shock before the stirring implications, after these many years, sunk in.
“At first I don’t know what my reaction was,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Hattiesburg, Miss. “Then I was really happy that he wanted to go and happy that he is going to get a chance to go back. Whatever the success is, it will bring some closure.”
(via The Boston Globe)
Who cares if the Koreans make propaganda hay out of it. In the days of Trayvon Martin and Fox News racism, a story like this can’t help make you feel good.
Now, for something completely different. I’ve often noted that there’s a bit of a double standard in this country. The right and the South, their politicians included, are allowed to mock us Northerners and liberals endlessly, but its taboo for us to respond in kind, and point out, for instance, that they are a bunch of slack jawed uneducated racist cretins that live off the dole while lecturing us on self sufficiency. It is, of course, asking too much of our own politicians to stick up for us. Well, enter Lewis Black. Odds are, you’ve seen this, but if not, definitely watch it. It’s funny and feel good at the same time. I mean I hate the Yankees and all; it’s my duty as a Red Sox fan, but I love New York and I love the fact that the people in our biggest city have by and large developed a culture of tolerance that’s an example for the world.
So, that’s it. Edition One of what I hope will be a weekly series of no-downer CTBlue posts. I hope you enjoyed that. I’m trying to figure out something to go along with it for music tonight. Back to doom and gloom tomorrow.
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