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4A Daily News – Thursday, September 5, 2013 Opinion DAILY NEWS RED BLUFF TEHAMA COUNTY T H E V O I C E O F T E H A M A C O U NTY S I N C E 1 8 8 5 Greg Stevens, Publisher gstevens@redbluffdailynews.com Chip Thompson, Editor editor@redbluffdailynews.com Editorial policy The Daily News opinion is expressed in the editorial. The opinions expressed in columns, letters and cartoons are those of the authors and artists. Letter policy The Daily News welcomes letters from its readers on timely topics of public interest. All letters must be signed and provide the writer's home street address and home phone number. Anonymous letters, open letters to others, pen names and petition-style letters will not be allowed. Letters should be typed and cannot exceed two double-spaced pages or 500 words. When several letters address the same issue, a cross section of those submitted will be considered for publication. Letters will be edited. Letters are published at the discretion of the editor. Musings on perpetual childhood When I was in middle school my hobbies were watching sports, reading comic books and playing video games. Twenty years later my hobbies are watching sports, reading comic books and playing video games. Am I happy about that? Well yeah what 13-year-old at heart trapped in a 33-yearold's body wouldn't be? I figure two things in my life, or the lack thereof actually, have contributed to my neverending childhood. First, I don't have children, which puts my own self front and center. Second, my own parents live thousands of miles of amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties away. That keeps the guilt factor at bay. But sometimes even that's enough. Take the other weekend for example. It was the last chance to preorder the new Playstation 4 video game console in order to have it on the Nov. 15 launch date. Knowing November Rich would want it, I decided to do the mature thing and plan for my future. I woke up early, headed to the store and placed my deposit. I even picked up some pet food while I was at it. I was so proud of myself. I can purchase my own electronics without having to butter up a grandparent during the holiday season and I can take care of a living creature at the same time. I turned out of the parking lot and then noticed something peculiar. A swarm of children were picking up trash in two huge fields near Mill Street and Reeds Avenue as part of a Boy Scouts activity. It was a Saturday morning, shouldn't these kids be inside playing their soon-to-be outdated video games? I pulled over, found a parent with a camera and handed him a business card so he could send in a picture and the Scouts could get credit for their work. But I'd like to take the time here to give someone else credit — the parents. I thank my parents for instill- ing that guilty feeling within me. cheaper than a Playstation 4. When I got home from orderMy parents made sure I had rides to every after-school activi- ing the game my friend Ryan called. ty I wanted to be a part Ryan and I go way of — from school plays back. We roomed to countless sports practogether for a semestices. When no other ter in college and parent could, my dad before that we played always volunteered to be basketball together in a coach. middle school. His Those were truly the older sister used to things I loved growing give us rides to comic up, reading comic books book stores. and playing video games He had seen a just passed the time in Tweet I had posted between. Rich boasting of my new I think most children purchase. would rather be out He said he was at doing something and it's the mall with his nice to see those willing to sacrifice some of their own wife and kid. He wanted to know all the time to give them the opportunidetails about the new system. ty. Then he told me how he wasA few months back I volunteered with the Tehama County n't going to be able to get it the Police Activities League Jr. day it came out and would have Sharks program teaching hockey to be patient and wait. I think he was a little jealous to youngsters every Saturday morning at Evergreen Middle of me. I was a little jealous of him. School. I woke up early and grumpy, Rich Greene can be reachd at but I felt great by noon each Saturday for having done something 527-2151, ext. 109 or by email at positive. Plus the gas to drive to rgreene@redbluffdailynews.com the school was considerably . Greene Your officials Mission Statement We believe that a strong community newspaper is essential to a strong community, creating citizens who are better informed and more involved. The Daily News will be the indispensible guide to life and living in Tehama County. We will be the premier provider of local news, information and advertising through our daily newspaper, online edition and other print and Internet vehicles. The Daily News will reflect and support the unique identities of Tehama County and its cities; record the history of its communities and their people and make a positive difference in "The saviors come not home the quality of life for the resitonight: Themselves they could dents and businesses of not save." -- Lines from A.E. Housman, Tehama County. scribbled in a soldier's diary. WASHINGTON -- On Oct. 27, 1947, thousands of caskets were unloaded from a ship in How to reach us New York. The bodies of solMain office: 527-2151 diers from the European theater, writes Rick Atkinson, Classified: 527-2151 "then traveled by rail in a great Circulation: 527-2151 diaspora across the republic for News tips: 527-2153 burial in their hometowns." Three young men, killed Sports: 527-2153 between the Battle of the Bulge Obituaries: 527-2151 in December 1944 and April 1945 in Germany two weeks Photo: 527-2153 before the war in Europe ended, were destined for Henry On the Web Wright's Missouri farm: "Gray and stooped, the elder www.redbluffdailynews.com Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had Fax been born. Neighbors kept Newsroom: 527-9251 vigil overnight, carpeting the Classified: 527-5774 floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers Retail Adv.: 527-5774 to Hilltop Cemetery for burial Legal Adv.: 527-5774 side by side by side beneath an iron sky." Business Office: 527-3719 Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light," the completion of Address his trilogy on the liberation of Western Europe, is history 545 Diamond Ave. written at the level of literaRed Bluff, CA 96080, or ture. If, as a U.S. infantryman P.O. Box 220 wrote, "No war is really over until the last veteran is dead," Red Bluff, CA 96080 the war has not ended: About 400 World War II veterans, almost half a battalion, are STATE ASSEMBLYMAN — Dan Logue, 1550 Humboldt Road, Ste. 4, Chico, CA 95928, 530-895-4217 STATE SENATOR — Jim Nielsen, 2635 Forest Ave., Ste. 110, Chico, CA 95928, (530) 879-7424, senator.nielsen@senate.ca.gov GOVERNOR — Jerry Brown, State Capitol Bldg., Sacramento, CA 95814; (916) 445-2841; Fax (916) 5583160; E-mail: governor@governor.ca.gov. U.S. REPRESENTATIVE — Doug LaMalfa 506 Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, 202-2253076. U.S. SENATORS — Dianne Feinstein (D), One Post Street, Suite 2450, San Francisco, CA 94104; (415) 393-0707. Fax (415) 3930710. Barbara Boxer (D), 1700 Montgomery St., Suite 240, San Francisco, CA 94111; (510) 286-8537. Fax (202) 224-0454. Commentary Voices from the scarlet calamity dying each day. Spend the shank end of summer with Atkinson's tribute to all who served and suffered. Western Europe was, Atkinson stresses, just one cauldron: "The Red Army suffered more combat deaths at Stalingrad alone than the U.S. armed forces did in the entire war." But "for magnitude and unalloyed violence, the battle in the Ardennes" -- the Battle of the Bulge -- "was unlike any seen before in American history." The 600,000 Americans who fought in the Ardennes were four times the number of Union and Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg. Atkinson's story is propelled by vivid descriptions and delicious details. Britain before D-Day "was steeped in heavy smells, of old smoke and cheap coal and fatigue." Gen. Lucian Truscott "possessed what one staff officer called a 'predatory' face, with protruding gray eyes and gapped incisors set in a jut jaw built to scowl." Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery chaffed under Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's command: "Subordination held little appeal for a solipsist." Soldiers visited Picasso in his Paris studio where Hemingway, who ghostwrote love letters for some soldiers, "had left behind a box of grenades." Churchill, whose thoughts encompassed millennia past and future, ordered German by people caught up in what he rocket sites on the French side calls "the scarlet calamity." After Conrad Nutting of the English Chandied when his P-51 nel destroyed so the crashed, his pregnant French could not use wife wrote: "It will be them "if they fall out my cross, my curse, of temper with us." and my joy forever, Some of the 6 billion that in my mind you propaganda leaflets shall always be dropped over Gervibrantly alive." An many drifted as far as American war correItaly. Jewish soldiers spondent listened in a in the chaos of the cemetery as a French Bulge hammered out girl read a letter from the "H" -- for "Hebrew" -- on their George F. a mother to her son: "My dearest and dog tags. In a German unfortunate son, on iron pit, U.S. soldiers June 16, 1944, like a found crates labeled lamb you died and "Aachen Cathedral" containing "a silver bust of left me alone without hope. ... Charlemagne embedded with a Your last words to me were, fragment of the emperor's 'Mother, like the wind I came skull." These words were on a and like the wind I shall go.'" Such reservoirs of elofortification in France: "Austin White, Chicago, Ill., 1918. quence were drawn from the Austin White, Chicago, Ill., depths of human dignity that 1945. This is the last time I survived the scalding obsceniwant to write my name here." ty of the war Atkinson In December 1944, the presi- describes unsparingly. The dent's blood pressure was 260 Battle of Agincourt (1415) is over 150, and on an April day remembered less for its consein 1945 American newspapers quences than for what Shakepublished the daily casualty speare made of it in "Henry V." list with next of kin, including World War II's reverberations this: "Army-Navy Dead: ROO- will roll down the centuries in SEVELT, Franklin D., com- its geopolitical consequences, mander-in-chief; wife, Mrs. and in the literature it elicited Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, the in letters and in histories like Atkinson's trilogy. White House." Atkinson's narrative glows George Will's email address with the poetic prose of the heartbroken -- letters penned is georgewill@washpost.com. Will