Family heroes

In Saturday's mailbox …

Yesterday was Veteran's Day here in the U.S.

What’s a 100-year-old, flag-saluting, combat veteran, blessed to be an American citizen, to think on this Veteran’s Day? . . . On this Veteran's Day, let us reject an empty patriotism that proclaims devotion to the flag while undermining the best of what it stands for. Let us renew a patriotism of purpose, of caring for one another and for our democracy. Building a shared future will always be our task. Taking the long view, I believe we can still be “a more perfect union.”   – Norman Lear

Today's date marks the births of two other heroes:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, New York, 207 years ago today in 1815; and Neil Young, who is “...hey, hey, my, my...” still vibrantly with us, was born in Toronto in 1945 making him 77.

[T]he problems of the human heart in conflict with itself . . . alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat . . . [The artist must] leave no room . . . for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice . . . The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of [humanity], it can be one of the props, the pillars to help [it] endure and prevail. – William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance (1950).

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — John F. Kennedy