1959...

48 years ago tomorrow I was born,and the world has not been safe ever since.Seriously,I have lived and experienced things that most of my co workers don't even know about.It's a sad statement on the education system in this country,especially in regard to history.My parents always taught me that you had to understand where we've been to have a grasp on where we were going.
Seems like the passing on of information and history has become more selective and convenient in our society,ignoring certain important events over others and the end result seems to be a bunch of people who have no clue about events that helped form the countrie's conscience.
Case in point:At work this week we watched American Gangster during our lunch breaks over 3 days.This is a dramatized recounting of actual events that happened during the peak years of the war in Viet Nam.There are TV's going in scenes in this movie of live combat news reports from Viet Nam.After lunch today I commented to the guys I was working with that I remembered watching those reports on the news as a teenager.It was amazing to them that those reports were real,which led to a discussion of how sanitized the reporting of this current "war" is.It also afforded me a chance to share some of my own experiences at anti war demonstrations I attended at UT as a teenager with my Dad,who had 6 years in the navy and 27 in the air force.When he retired and attended UT on the GI bill he encountered men who had been in the Nam and it turned his head around,from super lifer to hippy at the age of...that's right,48.
My Dad and I made history,and today I was able to relive part of it to a couple of guys who had no clue what those days were like.
So tonight I celebrate by going to bed in the next hour and putting in a movie that I will most likely fall asleep 20 minutes into,but that's ok-I've seen it before,so I know how it comes out.And tomorrow morning I'll wake up in a bed surrounded by my wife and my dogs (who will be thrilled that I don't get up as I took the day off.Who should work on their birthday,right?) and begin another year.
I need to tell these guys more stories I think.