from Pat R. for all of our veterans
They are leaving us at a high rate these days...
Some years ago:
The elderly parking lot attendant wasn't in a good mood!
Neither was Sam Bierstock. It was around 1 a.m., and Bierstock, a Delray Beach, Fla., eye doctor, business consultant, corporate speaker and musician, was bone tired after appearing at an event. He pulled up in his car, and the parking attendant began to speak. "I took two bullets for this country and look what I'm doing," he said bitterly.
At first, Bierstock didn't know what to say to the World War II veteran. But he rolled down his window and told the man, "Really, from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you."
Then the old soldier began to cry.
"That really got to me," Bierstock says.
Cut to today:
Bierstock, 58, and John Melnick, 54, of Pompano Beach - a member of Bierstock's band, Dr. Sam and the Managed Care Band - have written a song inspired by that old soldier in the airport parking lot. The mournful "Before You Go" does more than salute those who fought in WWII. It encourages people to thank the aging warriors before they die.
"If we had lost that particular war, our whole way of life would have been shot," says Bierstock, who plays harmonica. "The WW II soldiers are now dying at the rate of about 2,000 every day. I thought we needed to thank them."
The song is striking a chord. Within four days of Bierstock placing it on the Web, the song and accompanying photo essay have bounced around nine countries, producing tears and heartfelt thanks from veterans, their sons and daughters and grandchildren.
"It made me cry," wrote one veteran's son. Another sent an e-mail saying that only after his father consumed several glasses of wine would he discuss" the unspeakable horrors" he and other soldiers had witnessed in places such as Anzio, Iwo Jima, Bataan and Omaha Beach. "I can never thank them enough," the son wrote. "Thank you for thinking about them."
Bierstock and Melnick thought about shipping it off to a professional singer, maybe a Lee Greenwood type, but because time was running out for so many veterans, they decided it was best to release it quickly, for free, on the Web. Already they have been invited to perform it in Houston for a Veterans Day tribute - this after just a few days on the Web. They hope every veteran in America gets a chance to hear it.
http://www.beforeyougo.us/play_byg
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This tribute to our veterans of WWII & Korea is beyond words to describe. Many in my generation of the baby boomers have no idea, or worse, appreciate as to how we arrived to where we are today. That greatest generation not only won the war, preserved our (and others) way of life, liberty and freedoms but then went ahead afterwards to create and build one new college in America every two weeks for a good part of the 50s & 60s that allowed many of their children to receive a college education they were unable to have. Colleges we then have staffed with radical professors (many now from my generation) who espouse communism, socialism and now trash our way of life earned with blood with the blood of these heroes. I am embarrassed and outraged at this ungrateful and indulgent generation, they continue to trivialize everything decent about America while destroying distinctions between right and wrong and attempt to deal with new tyrants like the Neville Chamberlains of past. History does repeat for those loath to learn from it, I only hope that America can again survive the new world challenges to our freedoms that are now swirling around us like cold, dark impending storms.
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