Remembrance Day

In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae (1915)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

It is Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth and Veteran’s Day in the United States of America.

Today, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr. are in Geneva, Switzerland, telling the United Nations’ Committee on Torture that police in Ferguson, MO are systematically targeting and harassing black people in a predatory and degrading manner.  They are calling into account a government that treated their son, Mike Brown, and thousands like him, as less than human.

They have taken up their son’s quarrel with the foe of systemic oppression.
Let us join them.

Let us not break faith with those who have died in defense of human rights, human dignity, human life.

May we recognize the grief that flows in and among us today
and may we keep the faith.

PS: In Orleans Parish, mark your calendar to vote on Dec. 6^th too, when the state legislature has tried to do an end run around the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) and give away its money and control to the Recovery School District (RSD) through a millage vote that doesn’t even list the RSD in the summary that will appear on the ballot.  It is slick, my friends, and it is as wrong.  Mark your calendars for Dec. 6^th and vote no on the grand theft masquerading as an education millage.