September 2nd, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
Don LaFontaine passed away in LA today, after a protracted illness. He was 68 years old, a man of imposing body mass and a gruffness that hid an “I’m just jacking you around,” sense of humor.
He could say, “Pass the peas,” and make it sound momentous or ominous. A deep baritone with clipped articulation: you’ll recognize his voice immediately as the one used in thousands of film trailers throughout your years on earth.
Known for the tag line intro: In a world… where nothing is sacred; in a world… in which love no longer exists; in a world where nothing is as it seems; in a world where the enemy is also the only hope for saving the planet…
August 13th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
Rick Sallinger reports from the CBS Denver affiliate
Less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention a man has been found dead in a Denver hotel room with a container of what authorities initially suspect to be the deadly poison cyanide.
…the dead man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, appears to be from outside the U.S. No passport was found on Dirie, who is believed to have entered the country from Canada.
A large container of a white powdery substance was found in the man’s room on the fourth floor of The Burnsley Hotel at 10th Avenue and Grant Street.
That particular hotel was the work of the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, and has since been a boutique hotel in downtown Denver.
Tests are now being done by the Denver Police Crime Lab to determine exactly what the substance is.
It’s believed Dirie died from something other than the substance that was in the container.
The FBI and other governmental agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force, are assisting in the probe. Hazardous materials assistance has included the Colorado State Patrol and the Colorado National Guard.
“Our Joint Terrorism Task Force is involved in this simply because the victim here is from another country and it just kind of makes sense that our terrorism guys would take a look a look at this,” FBI Special Agent in Charge James Davis said…
“I don’t see how anybody could do anything but look into the possibility that this is a potential terrorist attack,” said Dr. Andrew Ternay, a Department of Defense contractor.
Ternay has worked with the Pentagon for 25 years. He’s published text books and written “The Language of Nightmares” which is a glossary of all things deadly, including cyanide.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Isaac Hayes, the baldheaded, baritone-voiced soul crooner who laid the groundwork for disco and whose “Theme From Shaft” won both Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday afternoon after he collapsed near a treadmill, authorities said. He was 65.
Hayes was pronounced dead at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis an hour after he was found by a family member, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
With his muscular build, shiny head and sunglasses, Hayes cut a striking figure at a time when most of his contemporaries were sporting Afros. His music, which came to be known as urban-contemporary, paved the way for disco as well as romantic crooners like Barry White.
And in his spoken-word introductions and interludes, Hayes was essentially rapping before there was rap. His career hit another high in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show “South Park.”
“Isaac Hayes embodies everything that’s soul music,” Collin Stanback, an A&R executive at Stax, told The Associated Press on Sunday. “When you think of soul music you think of Isaac Hayes — the expression … the sound and the creativity that goes along with it.”
Isaac Hayes greatly influenced music during the 1960s and 70s. He was a true American icon. His album “Hot Buttered Soul” (1969) was played numerous times in my household as boy. His deep, confident voice along with spoken word and wonderful orchestration just moved me. As a musician, I also lament the loss of a musical pioneer. His 18 minute, 42 second song “By The Time I Get The Phoenix” was like a short play. Full of emotion and wonderful musicianship.
And what more can be said about the ultra-confident, ultra-cool “Theme From Shaft” song. I wanted to be Shaft when I heard that song!
Texas is set to defy the World Court and anger Mexico on Tuesday by executing a Mexican national who was not informed of his right to consular services after his arrest.
Texas, by far America’s most active death penalty state, condemned Jose Medellin for the 1993 rape and murder of 16-year-old Elizabeth Pena in Houston. Another girl was killed in the vicious gang-related assault but Medellin was convicted only of Pena’s murder.
The World Court last month ordered the U.S. government to “take all measures necessary” to halt the upcoming execution of five Mexicans until it makes a final judgment in a dispute over suspects’ rights.
So what if they do?
“The impact of ignoring this endangers Americans traveling abroad,” said Victoria Palacios, a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law in Dallas. “If the world sees us ignoring the rights of foreign nationals arrested here, there is very little reason for them to recognize the rights of U.S. citizens.”
The case has drawn international legal attention and underscores the deep gulf between U.S. views of the death penalty and those elsewhere. Texas has executed far more people than any other state in the United States—more than 400 prisoners since the Supreme Court lifted a ban on the practice in 1976.
His dramatic return this week to cast the deciding vote for a crucial Medicare bill brought tears and cheers in the US Senate, even as some medical ethicists question Ted Kennedy’s decision to undergo life-prolonging (and expensive) surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
On the New York Times Freakonomics blog, an internist involved in public health issues suggests Sen. Kennedy might have issued this statement instead:
“Because I am not a young man, the cancer in my brain will progress rapidly and is likely to incapacitate me in the near future. I trust that my doctors will do everything they can to prevent further seizures and to keep me in comfort. I will not endure extraordinary excess pain and suffering, while hundreds of thousand of dollars will not be spent on surgical debulking, radiation, and chemotherapeutic regimens which do not work.
“Modern medicine cannot cure my cancer, but it can keep me comfortable and free of pain. I have already contacted the Massachusetts General Hospital Hospice program.”
If such a suggestion seems heartless, it nonetheless reflects a crucial debate that has started about end-of-life care, which accounts for a significant percentage of Medicare expenditures.
Once again, from the Daily North Korea of South Korea, an interview with someone who is said to actually live in the Hermit Kingdom. According to the newspaper, which is staffed in part by North Korean defectors, this member of the ‘North Korean Elite class,’ says he is fully aware of the mass protests in South Korea over U.S. beef, and in his words:
“I can speak not only for myself. No North Korean citizen, apart from on holidays, ever eats meat. When I see protests against the import of U.S. beef, I only wish it could be sent to the North.”
When the interviewer - clearly opposed to the protests over U.S. beef - asks what it would be like if a North Korean protested in such a fashion, the man, using the name An Chul-jin, replies:
“I can’t even imagine a citizen beating an agent of the People’s Safety Agency. Even if it’s just a verbal attack, such a person would be automatically sent to the Labor Training Corps. As a consequence, citizens never speak out against them, even if the agent is at fault. If they physically assault an agent, they are taken to a reeducation camp. They’re the ones with the power, so citizens are automatically captured, and sometimes subject to terrible acts.”
Some years ago, there was a cartoon showing a skeleton sitting in a doctor’s waiting room with an outdated magazine in its hand. Now life has imitated cartoon art: after waiting 24 hours in a New York City psychiatric hospital’s waiting room, a video shows a black woman falling to the floor and people streaming in and out seemingly oblivious to her until she is finally “discovered” roughly an hour later — and taken away dead.
In the new Internet info age, the tragedy (and what qualifies as an outrage) can be seen on You Tube. Here is an edited version of it that shows her collapse and the time gap between when she was “discovered” by hospital officials and taken away after people came in and out and seemingly didn’t notice the somewhat-noticeable clump on the floor — yet another sign of 21st century indifference.
Even pared down to a few minutes, the hour-long surveillance video is disturbing.
At 5:32 a.m. June 19, a woman in a hospital gown in the waiting area of the psychiatric emergency room of a New York City hospital topples first to her knees before collapsing on her face.
A full hour passes. Other people stream in and out of the waiting room, including hospital security guards. The woman writes something on the ground before going completely still. Finally, someone takes notice and alerts the staff. But by then, at 6:36 a.m., the woman is already dead.
The woman, 49-year-old Esmin Green, died on the floor of the waiting room at the Kings County Hospital Center Psychiatric Emergency Department. Her exact cause of death has not been released.
The story — and You Tube — is now making the rounds worldwide, and there have been some immediately consequences: some hospital workers have been fired amid allegations that some hospital personnel tried to tinker with the time scale of what happened on Green’s records: Read the rest of this entry »
June 26th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
I spoke to Ed Warner last night, a board member of the Sand County Foundation that has great heart and works in Zimbabwe. The Foundation has expanded from being caretaker of The Leopold Memorial Reserve — 1500 acres of cooperatively mananged private land– to advising the managers of hundreds of thousands of acres of land in several countries. The Foundation works with private landholders to improve the quality of their lands through science, ethics, and incentives.
Warner is a geologist, who’s funded two endowed chairs in Geosciences, a spatial analysis laboratory, graduate teaching assistantships, and a research assistantship. He created an innovative community-based conservation institute, the Center for Collaborative Conservation, college-wide research grants, and endowments to the Department of Geosciences and the College of Natural Resources at CSU.
Hugely successful man by most standards, but last night he had that sound in his voice that men have when they’re filled with tears inside. And resolve. Still.
Warner’s been to the big Z many times, and as he filled me in about its huge beauty and what a incredible culture and strong economy it once had… and then as he described the shambles that it is in right now, how Mugabe has unleashed teenagers and young men to raid and violate and murder across the land, huge roving hoards who Warner says, are unemployed men who have nothing to live for and nothing to lose… and that Mugabe pays them with… oddly enough the same thing Than Shwe the dictator of Burma pays his soldiers with: food. Food for themselves and whomever they rage with.
I began to wonder again for the umpteenth time what the UN does for a living, anyway? I mean starting with the smallest things that somehow don’t seem right at the UN… Does anyone besides me think it’s dangerous to wear blue helmets so adversaries can get a good head shot?
And much more serious entreaties, and much more serious failures to act, as well. I do know some of the programs and people at the UN, and some, with regard to children and education and health are well warranted. But I also know some at the UN who deadly want to live like Kings and Princesses, and their ‘holding office’ is more like holding court… and their throne is more important to them and their sashaying around and making pronouncements and doing nothing, than anything else.
Making pronouncements doesn’t cut it. Not with the thug of Zimbabwe, Mugabe, and not in Burma either. In fact, the UN emissary to Burma pathetically pleading with Than Shwe to please please let aid and aid workers in after hundreds of thousands of people were drowned and maimed by the earthquake and tsunami on the Irrawaddy delta recently. What did the UN accomplish there? Make nice to the demon, literally days and weeks after help was so so needed.
What is the UN doing with regard to the mayhem, blood on black skin, in Zimbabwe that Mugabe has given the go-ahead to… and with grinning greed? Nothing. Tonight I heard one of the UN Princes on TV saying, Oh, I believe eventually Mugabe will lose power
Really? Meanwhile, red blood flowing like rivers over black skin.
I swear, if I were Reverend Sharpton, instead of scolding Don Imus over what this time amounts to a vague reference to ‘it figures’ about a black sportsman’s arrest, I would rush over to Zimbabwe and take on the real deal, a real wrecker of the ancestral black people. Man, think of it: Jesse and Al up against Robert Mugabe. Read the rest of this entry »
The good news is that roadside bomb fatalities last month were down by almost 90 percent from the last year, largely as a result of almost 7,000 heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles being rushed to Iraq since then.
The sad news is that four months ago members of Congress were seeking whistle-blower protection for a Pentagon analyst who claimed that hundreds of lives could have been saved if military paper pushers hadn’t obstructed delivery of those vehicles three years earlier.
In February, a former Marine official named Franz J. Gayl went public with a report accusing the Corps of “gross mismanagement” in delaying deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years because MRAPs, which cost $1 million each, were a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years away from being fielded.
Hundreds of lives were lost, Gayl asserted, as requests of field commanders were buried in bureaucratic paperwork until Defense Secretary Robert Gates made them the No. 1 priority in 2007 after he replaced Donald Rumsfeld.
Gayl’s revelations were greeted with Marine Corps denials. quibbles and promises of investigation.
The story sounds like the story of my grandfather Nathan Gandelman, who wanted to go back to hug his son, my father Richard, one more time after visting his son who was in the Army during World War II. My grandfather was the only one to die in a car crash right after that.
But in the case of the late NBC journalist Tim Russert read HERE about the funny feeling Tim Russert’s wife Maureen Orth had…and that last hug.
Yes, we do have the capability of sensing things..
In death, Tim Russert did on Wednesday what no living journalist has accomplished this campaign season: he got Barack Obama and John McCain to sit together and talk, quietly.
Specifically, it was Mr. Russert’s son, Luke, 22, who got the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees together. He requested that they sit next to each other at his father’s funeral at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown. Then, in remarks from the pulpit, he exhorted them and other politicians to “engage in spirited debate but disavow the low tactics that distract Americans from the most important issues facing our country.” At the end of the service, the two candidates embraced.
“Five months from now,” Luke Russert said a few hours later, “I wanted them to remember that this occasion brought them together.”
Forget all of the (fitting) cliches about wise words coming from the mouth of a young person. More than ever, Luke Russert’s comments underscore several facts.
First, it underscores the “real” Russert behind the man with the probing questions and bemused look whenever he discussed anything about politics. He was close to his son and admired his son, who admired him.
My late father Richard Gandelman used to say: “A parent achieves immortality through his children.” You can see now that an admirable quality of Tim Russert lives on through his son.
Secondly, it underscores what I’ve noticed in my extensive travels when I walk away from my computer and go out into the world in my other incarnation: a lot of young people are unimpressed by, puzzled by, and scornful of the angry, partisan demonization aspects of American politics. Rush, Sean and Randi aren’t of their generation.
Luke Russert did the final act in honoring his Dad: he brought Obama and McCain together in a non-debate forum, even if for a little while.
And with broadcast and print reporters out in force, he did something else: he eloquently articulated a view of what politics should be and could be. A final act that honored his Dad — but, perhaps more importantly, he articulated an attitude held by a lot of young people who crave spirited debate but are sick of the hateful atmosphere that permeates much of what today passes for political talk in the United States.
I’ve said it before: when the Baby Boomers pass from the leadership scene, the country may be healthier…and I’m a Baby Boomer.
And young Luke Russert’s comments suggest a better day — with a more mature discussion of issues — may indeed lie ahead.
June 16th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
You might remember my reports on the monk’s, nun’s and Burmese people’s protests in September of last year, how my contacts in Yangon (Rangoon) dried up within days as cpu’s were confiscated, cell phones smashed, communications wires cut, and various deeply good souls arrested, many children, men, women beaten, many murdered by Than Shwe’s evil orders. It was agony and remains so, not to know the fates of those specific contacts/blogger/photographers who were bravely and desperately funneling information and photos out of Burma to literally anyone who would receive them.
I pray for highly endangered bloggers and journalists and radio and broadcast press people everyday. But after such brutal crackdowns as the smug dictator Shwe’s in Burma, for instance, I dont know the storytellers’ whereabouts, if I should pray for them on earth, or perhaps they have been killed and are in heaven. So I pray for them wherever they might be, that they be given all mercy possible, that they be made invisible at just the right moments, that they somehow know we know; that they can be assured that their courage work did not fall on stones.
I would like a monument to The Unknown Bloggers of the World. I would. I am deadly serious. Those who risked their lives to tell the story. Those who gave their lives to tell the story before they were cut down.
Here is more on the hugely disturbing free-form arresting and harming of bloggers, a practice that despite public knowlege, continues without effective intervention… In this report from University of Washington, a reported 64 bloggers arrested for publishing their views in 2003, to a 192 bloggers reported arrested in 2007, the numbers only increase. It is poignant to note that ‘reported’ numbers does not include those who are maimed, disappeared, murdered. Nor does it include, as the article states, those arrested in place just like Burma where the government gives the evil eye to anyone who asks after the welfare of any citizen.
From BBC
…A University of Washington annual report….
More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.
Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.
Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task. Read the rest of this entry »
The loss is still being measured — and with each day it’s clear it is even greater than originally imagined. From USA Today:
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says, “Russert was a political analyst more than a reporter. His commentary wasn’t based off opinions. He was assessing impact, direction and implications based off deep knowledge and deep research. … That is the kind of reporting that we don’t have enough of on network television.”
Anyone with any news background or passion for traditional news reporting has to feel a special sharp stab to their hearts today with the news that NBC’s Tim Russert — one of the early 21st century’s towering news figures and a journalistic descendant of 20th century journalism greats — died suddenly of a heart attack while on the job at the NBC News bureau at age 58. It’s a day they will remember with tremendous sadness.
To those of us who are old enough to remember, there were similar days of sadness when news figures passed away or passed from the working news scene. When CBS’s Edward R. Murrow died of lung cancer in 1965 many wondered whether it was the end of an era. It was. When CBS forced Walter Cronkite’s retirement in 1981 many wondered whether it was the end of an era. It was.
Will this be the end of yet another era? He may not have been completely appreciated when he was alive, but in fact Russert was one of the last giant figures in journalism with broad-based credibility. And although there are some similar news people with great potential, his particular kind of working journalist isn’t easy to find.
Why was Russert so special?
1. Russert was frequently under fire from people on both the right and left. In these days when journalism actually has to be defined as “fact-based journalism” and “opinion-based journalism,” Russert was an equal opportunity infuriator. If he was hard on a Democrat or liberal, those partisans would insist he was biased. If he was hard on a Republican or conservative, those partisans would insist he was biased. In fact, Russert approached each interview the same way: as a nuts-and-bolts journeyman journalist who asked the tough questions, but seldom seemed to be on the verge of morphing into Rush Limbaugh or Randi Rhodes…as some TV news staffers and news personalities seem to be these days. Read the rest of this entry »
June 13th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
(Update Below in the CODA, re cause of death. An autopsy has been performed.) Tim Russert, died of an apparent heart attack at age 58. He passed away at his office. Author of Big Russ and Me, about his one of a kind father, Russert also has a son Luke, who just graduated from Boston College this week. His son hosts the XM radio show 60/20 Sports with James Carville.
Tim Russert was a lawyer, and a journalist who inherited the hosting of Meet the Press from the venerably David Brinkley. Mr. Russert was also Washington Bureau Chief for NBC news. He rose through the ranks beginning with being a counsel in New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s office, then took the position of cheif of staff to Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from 1977 to 1982. In 1984 he was hired by NBC and in the 2000 national elections became somewhat known as an oracle, when he created a whiteboard calculating electoral votes and putting pretty clear bets on who would win based on garnering votes in normally overlooked states.
There has been much speculation in newspapers and blogs that Russert was good for booking interviews for VicePresident Cheney and others when they had a message to get out, and that he was also booking Democrats as well… but seemed to be tilting to whichever side was most in power in the moment. My personal opinion is it may have seemed that way, but Meet the Press was designed to be ‘an equal opportunity venue’ for many kinds of political voices.
Mr Russert was a frequent pundit in the most recent 2008 runs between Senators Clinton and Obama giving opinions that often took on the timber of sportscasting… for following college teams was one of his great loves in life
Mr. Russert’s wife is connected with Vanity Fair magazine. Maureen Orth, has been a special correspondent there since 1983.
June 12th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
“He was the meaning of joy,” said John Nordmeyer, an uncle.
There are a bunch of middle aged men across the nation who tonight sit quietly in their living rooms. The TV set might be off.
They didn’t want to eat much tonight.
Many are at their laptops now, silently tap tap tapping out messages to reach out to others. To try to find some, something. Words would help. But, maybe accurate words would actually hurt.
When my husband heard the news at work, he’d immediately sent me an email. The email header said something this rough gruff guy never says. The subject line read: Please pray with me. His email ended, “I’m so sad for them I can’t even talk about this.” I called him right away. He said in that semi-strangled voice that men use when they feel everything and yet numb all at the same time: “Baby we lost four of our boys.”
I had heard; a call had come from a post-trauma colleague just before who was 20 miles outside Little Sioux camp. It’s bad, my friend said. It’s bad. More than half injured bad. 4 dead.
My husband is a scout master, has just raised by hand along with other hardworking scoutmasters an entire litter of little guys for the last many years. They just crossed over from cub scouts to boy scouts three months ago.
I go to banquets with long tables covered with paper tablecloths and eat baked beans and barbeque and soggy corn. I sit through the many awards and beadings and orders conferred on grown men (and women) of every age and condition …those who give huge amounts of their lives weeknights and weekends to teach wood lathing, survival skills, soup kitchen hash slinging, cooking, sewing, finances, stalwartness, honor and manners to a bunch of darling fissioning young scamps.
Then one day, it all comes together. The young scouts line up and their shirts are not sloppy at the belt line anymore, their ties are on straight instead of flying sideways They carry on a conversation that has content instead of giggling like squirrels, they pray together and mean it, play together and achieve together, and mean it.
There are some who critique the Boy Scouts for various reasons, but tonight, with two dead boys aged a mere 13, and the other two dead boys having merely 14 years on this earth… that they are gone after a fierce tornado hit a special Boy Scout camp, a camp called to rendezvous under the banner of Leadership… well, in the Scouts, even though people don’t know each other when they live hundreds and thousands of miles apart, they know each other. They do. Brothers by different mothers. Siempre.
Forty years ago tonight, hours before Robert Kennedy was killed, I was campaigning as a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention. When a man rose to spew out Kennedy hatred, I cut him off and said, “I’m running to stop the war. If McCarthy drops out, I’ll vote for Kennedy.”
Two days later, from an office window, I was looking down at a line of people more than a mile long inching toward St. Patrick’s Cathedral on a brutally hot day to view RFK’s body lying there.
Watching became unbearable, and I went down with others to wheel a plastic barrel on a dolly and hand out paper cups of water. The air was heavy with heat and tears. Without words, there was an occasional meeting of eyes in shared sadness. In that year of political murder and chaos, we were mourning the loss of more than one man.
Robert Kennedy had been his brother’s fierce protector, enforcer, campaign manager, Attorney General and, after the assassination, keeper of the flame. But like JFK before him, in the last days of his life, he became something more.
Mark Madden, who made his reputation with bold, outlandish attacks on famous people, has been permanently removed from the air by ESPN.
His dismissal, which came down from ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., came five days after he made a scurrilous remark about U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on his 1250 ESPN talk show, which ran from 3 to 7 p.m. weekdays.
The comment?
At the opening of his show last Wednesday, Madden said this about Sen. Kennedy, who days earlier had been diagnosed with brain cancer:
“I’m very disappointed to hear that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is near death because of a brain tumor. I always hoped Senator Kennedy would live long enough to be assassinated.
“I wonder if he got a card from the Kopechnes.”
At the urging of station general manager Mike Thompson, Madden apologized over the air for his remarks about two hours later.
After initially reviewing the situation on a local level, Madden was neither reprimanded nor suspended. When asked if there would be some form of punishment, Thompson said, `No. The fact is we took action right away. Frankly, it was a comment that was stupid. He admitted that. I don’t think it requires any such thing as [discipline].”
ESPN had a change of heart, and it came from the corporate level in Bristol. Krulewitz explained the change of course
“We had a chance to regroup and review the situation and consider it more thoroughly from all perspectives,” he said. “This is the decision we have made, and we feel it is the right one.”
In other words: they probably got a ton of complaints, perhaps even from outraged advertisers. OR, they sincerely looked at it and decided the remarks were not just in bad taste due to the timing, but crossed the line and didn’t want the corporation to be associated with that kind of comment.
What crossed the line was most likely not the comment about the Kopechnes. Quite a few A.M. conservative talk show hosts have done riffs on that for years.
But saying even in jest that he wants to see Kennedy assassinated?
This Memorial Day, as they have for the past five years, residents of Skowhegan, Maine will be thinking about Jay Aubin, one of the first among 4081-and-counting American troops to die in Iraq.
What the numbers conceal is the continuing grief of countless families, friends and neighbors in every corner of the country who live with the loss of young men and women like Aubin, who was 36 when he died on March 20, 2003, leaving behind a wife, two young children and memories of a good life.
On a wall at Margaret Chase Smith School in Skowhegan are pictures of him from the time he was a middle-schooler who wanted to be a pilot to photos of a Marine officer with his flight helmet next to a helicopter with markings on the side: Capt. “Sweet Pea” Aubin, so named for his upbeat attitude.
A teacher there has used him as a model to show students they can achieve whatever they want and still be kind to people. “If you can be ‘Sweet Pea’ and be a macho Marine pilot, you can be ‘Sweet Pea’ on the playground, ‘Sweet Pea’ in the cafeteria,” he explains. “There’s no reason not to be nice no matter who you are or who you want to be.”
Apparently he never changed. As a Marine, Aubin, who didn’t drink, would check a bus out of the motor pool and park in front of the dance hall after a ball to provide rides for those who drank too much.
“If the helicopter goes down and anyone is killed, I want to go, too,” he once told his mother.
Aubin died in a crash during a dust storm near the Kuwait border in the first days of the war.
Today, as politicians make speeches and veterans march and flags fly, the people who knew him will be thinking of a man called “Sweet Pea,” as countless others will be remembering young men and women like him. No words or symbols will take away the pain of losing them.
