My Hometown Paper's Lead Memorial Day Article Focuses on Depression, Suicide in the Military

Ah, Memorial Day in Ithaca, NY, a town that looks upon Berkeley, CA as suspiciously conservative. OK, perhaps not quite, but Ithaca is so liberal than in her 2006 Senate primary [bet you didn't know there even was one], Hillary lost the City of Ithaca to a [very] little-known far-lefty named Jonathan Tasini. So liberal that a certain NewsBuster lost a 1990s mayoral bid to the then incumbent, a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

So how does our hometown newspaper celebrate Memorial Day? What does it choose as its biggest headline on the front page? "Military Faces Growing Need for Therapists: Private pyschiatrists offer free services for returning troops." You get the idea, but here are the opening paragraphs to the AP story [emphasis added]:

Thousands of private counselors are offering free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, jumping in to help because the military is short on therapists.

On this Memorial Day, America's armed forces and its veterans are coping with depression, suicide, family, marital and job problems on a scale not seen since Vietnam. The government has been in beg-borrow-and-steal mode, trying to hire psychiatrists and other professionals, recruit them with incentives or borrow them from other agencies.

Yes, what better way to–at least in Ithaca–to observe Memorial Day than to focus on "the depression, suicide, family, marital and job problems" encountered by our troops? You wouldn't want anything highlighting their valor and their achievements in defending freedom. Too much of that, and the next thing you know, you wind up with . . . a flag pin on your chest.

Note: for some reason, I can't find the article on the Ithaca Journal's web site, though I assure you it has pride of place on the paper's print edition front page. Here's a link to the same article, with a slightly different headline, in another publication.

Bonus Coverage: Maya's Shame

It was graduation weekend here at Cornell. The convocation speaker: Maya Angelou.

People of my generation are ashamed of the world we are leaving,” she said. “I am.

Thanks for sharing.

PS: I invite people to post the names [and background info if necessary] of the graduation speakers at colleges in their areas. Let's see if any college outside the service academies and the few avowedly traditional places had any but liberal speakers.