I was putzing around on the computer at lunch a month or so ago and was just searching for random stuff and typed in French Foreign Legion. I had remembered when I was very young watching cartoons all Saturday morning on a black and white TV in my pajamas until the last of the 3 available TV stations, ABC, CBS, NBC all played their final episodes. After Johnny Quest and that creepy Clutch Cargo series was finished for another 7 days. And, I would once in a while be treated with a chicken pot pie on a TV tray for lunch, still in my PJ’s! Ah 1970! what a life!
One of those afternoons in particular I remember watching the old movies that would come on after WWF (before it as WWF or WWE) wrestling on Channel 8 WQAD broadcasting from the Quad Cities. Beau Geste. what a great movie. The French Foreign Legion, those rugged guys in the pale featureless, hot unforgiving desert, march or die! you can sleep when your dead! kind of guys. I ran across this article on Vanity Fair’s website The Dark Romance and Grim Reality. I can see all the raised eye brows now, Vanity Fair?
Around page 3 the reporter interviewed one of the FFL Officers, “a French officer complained to me about the local citizens. He said, “They speak about their rights, their rights, their rights. Well, what about their responsibilities? In the Legion we don’t speak about our rights. We speak about our duties!”
I said, “It angers you.”
He looked at me with surprise, as if to say, And you it does not? “
Everyday we see in the media and how many times in a conversation we hear “my rights” or “their rights” After reading the Vanity Fair article I have been thinking hard about the FFL Officers comment. “Well, what about their responsibilities? In the Legion we don’t speak about our rights. We speak about our duties!”
There was a time in this country that we as a society not only said that same statement but lived it. Even the Progressives first family, American royalty, the Kennedy’s more specifically John Kennedy during his 1961 inaugural speech
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.
and finally, And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
This all was said before I was born, my grandmother raised me this way.
Well, what about their responsibilities?, Well, what about your responsibilities?
Responsibilities? such a queer word for our world today, when nothing is our fault. As preppers we have no choice but to be responsible. It is our duty to ourselves, our families and in some part to our communities to be responsible. Learning a new skill, or improving an old skill, added to our preps. Even teaching a skill to a friend or neighbor.
My rant is over, but what about our responsibilities?
Ad Parare 