Memorial Day: Honoring the Truth with David Jay's Gallery, "The Unknown Soldier"

Elizabeth Blair of NPR News is right when she entitled her May 25, 2015 article, “It's Not Rude: These Portraits of Wounded Vets Are Meantto Be Stared At.”

It is deep, in your-your-face awareness of reality of war that will influence human enlightenment leading to nonviolence and genuine peacemaking. Images are clearly necessary since the ordinary, everyday person will not have contact with a real, wounded soldier.

Ron Shirtz writes, “These should hang in the office of every congressman, senator, and President to make them think twice before sending our troops into harms' way for dubious goals . . . [and] not a bad idea to have a brochure of these photos to hand out to teenagers when recruiters come calling at their high school to give them their pitch.

Link to David Jay Portfolios 

William Stafford in "Peace Walk" conveys the perceived awkwardness of the journey of pacifism among the masses that so easily gloss over the destruction of their own people in the name of a freedom over and against other’s freedoms and the natural environment with amnesia on one hand and almost religious ceremony to pacify their distaste for the horrid reality of failed wars and fallen people.

Peace Walk

William E. Stafford

We wondered what our walk should mean,

taking that un-march quietly;

the sun stared at our signs— “Thou shalt not kill.”

Men by a tavern said, “Those foreigners . . .”

to a woman with a fur, who turned away—

like an elevator going down, their look at us.

Along a curb, their signs lined across,

a picket line stopped and stared

the whole width of the street, at ours: “Unfair.”

Above our heads the sound truck blared—

by the park, under the autumn trees—

it said that love could fill the atmosphere:

Occur, slow the other fallout, unseen,

on islands everywhere—fallout, falling

unheard. We held our poster up to shade our eyes.

At the end we just walked away;

no one was there to tell us where to leave the signs.