MEMORIAL DAY 2024: Honoring the Fallen and Reminding the Standing

On this Memorial Day, we honor the fallen as we remind the standing: The single greatest threat to the United States of America and its people are its domestic enemies.

Memorial Day is a particularly special occasion for Americans and this is especially so for me. Beyond the occasion itself, it normally envelops two things that shaped my experience growing up for decades: the Indianapolis 500 and my birthday; and they sometimes fell on the same day and always the same weekend. I grew-up in a small town north of the city that is now a sprawling suburb where the only distinction between it and the other municipalities around it is a line on a map. My dad worked in middle management for GM and he operated from the Speedway for a couple of months every year providing fleets of courtesy cars to race teams and sponsors; and running the entire show for GM when Pontiac had the pace car for that year. Like it was yesterday, I still remember him ripping around the track in front of nearly half-a-million people to position a pace car for the start of the race. On those occasions and after arrival, we would never see him until the race ended. Eager for the torrid start just seconds away and spying a single Trans Am tearing down the track, as it passed we said, “There goes dad.”

I grew-up at the track with regular access to the race teams, the drivers, their hospitality suites, Gasoline Alley and the rest of it.

My younger brother was a Rick Mears fan through and through; posters on the bedroom wall and everything.

Mears’ Penske “Yellow Submarine” sat on the pole this year driven by team driver and New Zealand native Scott McLaughlin.

Like it was yesterday and my brother being completely oblivious to it until we told him minutes after the fact, we were in the Penske suite before the race and Rick, in is driver’s suit, walked up to my brother, patted him on the head and said “excuse me” as he walked by and exited on his way to the start.

In a crowded room and being so young, he had no clue; he was maybe 6 or so.

I can’t remember if that was the same year he got a stomach virus for race day and vomited all over the floor of one of the hospitality suites or not.

We always sat near the top of the Northwest Vista in turn 4 because from that vantage point, you can view part of 3, the short shoot, all of 4, the entire backstretch, the start/finish line and part of 1 – hands-down, they are the best seats in the house unless you’re behind the wheel.

They don’t make men like my dad anymore and on this Memorial Day, it’s important to remember his service to this country.

He knew about everyone that mattered at Indy and they knew him – owners, drivers, team managers, sponsors, law enforcement, etc.

A man’s man.

Respected, appreciated and liked by everyone, you couldn’t find an honest man who knew him that would say a bad thing about him.

The type of “shirt off his back” individual that is a rare commodity these days.

On race day, the drive into the track can take 3-4 hours from the outlying areas knowing that on a normal day, it’s about a 45-minute haul or at least it used to be.

The drive ends when you cross beneath the track in a tunnel to the infield to park alongside the race teams’ motor coaches.

For the world’s largest single-day sporting event that draws hundreds of thousands, the entire city of Indianapolis is converted into one enormous schematic for emergency ingress/egress featuring designated emergency routes that extend from the track entrance to those outlying areas.

Those routes and roadways remain closed preceding and for the duration of the entire race where all traffic is prohibited and there is law enforcement controlling every single intersection….

…..unless your dad has the emergency placards plastered all over the front windshield of his car, which was normally a pace car replica or similar rocket ship; and where Pontiac was the first manufacturer not required to augment the engine for performance when it took the Buick Regal Grand National’s supercharged V-6 and plugged it into the Pontiac Trans Am in the late 1980s.

I drove that rig and holy shit, rocket ship is right.

On that route on race day, the regular 3-4 hour drive only took about 25-30 minutes and the speed limit didn’t apply – drive as fast as you want with the right credentials and dad’s foot was made of lead.

There were no other cars on the roadway for almost all of the trip making for an odd experience.

As we approached those controlled intersections without slowing, dad would extend his law enforcement badge and credentials out the window – it pays to know people – as police waved us through.

After the race for the exit and drive home, you’re on your own and it’s a somewhere between a goat rope, a shit show and herding cats; and it’s always fueled by alcohol consumption.

If you’re ever heard of, seen or experienced the Snake Pit, which back in my day was raw, gritty and legitimately dangerous; and not the more upscale version it is today, that all mixes into the drive home.

We normally avoided that mess by kicking-back in the hospitality suites and strolling through Gasoline Alley until the scene was clear.

The post-race garage scene is an interesting one; entirely different than the month that preceded it.

After getting home, I’d watch the race replay on TV.

We were about as middle-class as middle class gets growing up.

We always had what we needed and anything beyond that for us kids, we worked for and got for ourselves.

Going to the track with my dad during the month of May is about as close to royalty as this middle of the road, middle-class kid ever got.

He passed in October 2019 after an 8-year battle with lung cancer dying at their home down south while receiving hospice care.

I often think about how his circumstances allowed him to forego the misery delivered by the fraudulent “pandemic” that was unpacked on us about two months after his passing.

He is always heavy in my mind and on my heart but especially so this time of year.

The other aspect of the Indianapolis 500 that is so clearly etched into my childhood memories and that is so obvious to anyone in attendance or watching on television is its annual place on Memorial Day weekend and its ceremonial dedication and tribute to our military, its personnel, its veterans and of course, its fallen.

The pageantry, the military flyovers, the parades and the rest of it made for a race day experience that was rich with history, relevant to the present and steeped in tradition.

I can’t begin to explain the power of silence when that silence occurs in the presence of nearly half-a-million people gathered in one place at one time for one moment of observation.

I can’t begin to explain the feelings and emotions that are elicited when the hundreds of thousands of people in your presence transition from dead silence into roaring applause before the command is given to start engines.

Those memories are from a different time when the country wasn’t steeped in lies, chaos, fear and terror.

A time when its borders weren’t overrun by 15 million illegals for inherently suicidal political purposes.

A time when evil actors didn’t fake pandemics to steal elections.

A time when fake pandemics didn’t lock Americans in their homes with a shuttered society and causing them to miss everything that was ever important to them.

A time when the Department of Defense didn’t hold contracts with corporate partners to engage in biowarfare against its own people via “vaccination” for the “pandemic.”

A time when soldiers weren’t forced out of the military because they refused to bend a knee to the unjust demands to inject oneself with that bioweapon..

A time when the nation’s institutions, agencies and departments weren’t rigged in favor of the few and against the ordinary.

A time when as a function of their employment, Americans weren’t required to forfeit constitutional protections and the right to informed consent in being required to wear a mask and participate in human genetic experimentation disguised as a “vaccine” -or- stand to lose that employment and everything it sustained, like homes, vehicles, savings, etc.

A time when men were men, women were women and everybody knew which restroom to use without worry of someone else invading a reasonable right to privacy because of a mental defect causing them to discount universally accepted biology and genetics that have been on the books forever.

A time when Americans weren’t punished by having their economy run into the ground causing historically unprecedented inflation; and all to exact a political agenda of self-inflicted and internally controlled demolition.

A time when Americans welcomed debate rather than having their First Amendment rights eliminated by the federal government and corporate partners for off-reservation thinking and speaking.

A time when the American military proudly stood as the most formidable force on the planet; not one that is gutted, infested with cultural Marxist policies and positioned for defeat on multiple fronts as traitors pick a fight with China and Russia, which will be lost by design in order to hand over the US to a Globalist cabal.

A time when the President and his DOJ didn’t hunt to eliminate political opposition.

A time when most former presidents secluded quietly and privately back into society instead of interfering from the shadowy backdrop because no more presidential terms were available.

A time when other former presidents weren’t ridiculed and marginalized and then attacked and raided by the current president and his DOJ for the purpose of imprisoning him as an insurance policy against losing an election the incumbent has already lost.

A time when talk about “democracy” and the “Constitution” actually meant something instead of serving as cover for Marxist communism and the cultural Marxism it delivers.

Times are different now and in all of the worst ways.

As those times bear down on the present and as we honor the fallen on this Memorial Day; the ones who sacrificed everything for the sake of this Constitutional Republic and all of its rightful citizens so that we may continue on and leave for future generations what was left for us, it is incumbent upon us to also issue a reminder to those American troops still standing and still in service; and it is a severe one.

The reason for times being different now is a simple one that is defined by a single term and a single illustration.

The single illustration is this:

The single term comes from this:

“I, _, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”

“All enemies, foreign and domestic,” it says.

The United States could never be overthrown from the outside-in because even if foreign enemies established a footprint on CONUS, they have no way to reconcile the Second Amendment, millions of gun owners and millions more guns.

The only way to overthrow the United States of America for the apparent purpose of conversion to Marxist communism as the enforcement mechanism for a one world government leveraging medical tyranny, is to overthrow it from the inside-out.

The month of May is important for another reason, too.

On 06 May 20, I wrote the article MAKING THE CASE FOR TREASON and one can’t have TREASON without DOMESTIC ENEMIES.

Four years later, that case is stronger than ever.

On this Memorial Day, we honor the fallen who sacrificed everything as we remind the standing that their oath obligates them to defend the Constitution of the United States and the citizens it protects from all enemies foreign, like China, and DOMESTIC.

The single greatest threat to the United States of America and its people are its domestic enemies and bearing down on that single fact with full might is the oath taken by those standing in the military.

To each and every man or woman who has taken that oath, when you did so, you made a promise to each and every one of us that if the present time ever arrived, you would defend us from DOMESTIC ENEMIES.

As my dad instilled in us forever, “You’re only as good as your word.”

Please be reminded that your words included “DOMESTIC” “ENEMIES.”

-End-

P.S. To the race teams and drivers and especially Team Penske and Josef Newgarden, congratulations on a thrilling race.