VETERANS DAY 2017

LONG IN PEACE MAY IT WAVE

 Saturday, 8:30 AM.  29 degrees F at the ferry dock, 26 on the back porch.  Wind SW, brisk.  The sky is cloudy and overcast but should clear, the humidity is 80%.  The barometer is falling, now at 30.74".  The highs tomorrow and Monday will be around 30, with cloudy skies.
   It seems as though our flag is under nearly as great an assault these days as it was over two hundred years ago at Fort McHenry.  Maligned by leftists and misguided NFL players and politically correct pundits, the nation is blamed, even reviled, for not being perfect at its birth, when if it had tried to be so it would have been stillborn, and the great nation that we love would be a European mess of separate, continually warring states.
   So this Veterans Day let's salute the good, free and brave men and women who have saved that banner over and over again, through bloody and stubborn conflicts at home and abroad.  They didn't take a knee to protest its past, they stood and fought, and many laid down and died, for the promise of its future.


                               THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER

Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
W hat so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thro' the mist of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep.
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
'Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footstep's pollution. 
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation,
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n - rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation.

Then conquer we must, for our cause is just,
And this be our motto--"In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

                                                                               Francis Scott Key