CM PRESS # 752

From a reader...

MARINES SET UP A DEFENSIVE PERIMETER JUST LIKE THEY'RE TRAINED TO DO BUT WITH A SLIGHT TWIST


This is little-known story from the Pentagon on 09/11/2001:

 During a visit with a fellow chaplain, who happened to be assigned
to the Pentagon, I had a chance to hear a first-hand account of an
incident that happened right after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

The chaplain told me what happened at a daycare center near where
the impact occurred. This daycare had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs.

The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do. There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs.

There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers. Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared.

The director thought, 'Well, here we are-on our own.'

About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac and the Pentagon.

Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off.

Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.

The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there. There wasn't a dry eye in the room. The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most
touching stories from the Pentagon."

Remember Ronald Reagan's great compliment: "Most of us wonder if our lives made any difference. Marines don't have that problem."
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14-YEAR-OLD WHITE GIRL ATTACKED ON TRAIN BY BLACKS WHO USE ANTI-WHITE HATE SPEECH AND IT'S RULED NOT A HATE CRIME

And, the Good Whites probably think that's just fine (until they or their relatives are attacked).
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NO BRIDGE

The CM PRESS is strongly against a 19th Street bridge.

We've written about this before and laid out our reasoning, but given the fact that there are some who are still pushing for a bridge, we wanted to make it clear that we see no advantages to the Westside in having a bridge and many disadvantages.

Who is pushing for a bridge?  Mainly those who believe it will lessen traffic on Victoria, Adams and PCH and will ensure that the Gisler Street bridge is never needed.

We understand their concerns, but given the particular circumstances surrounding the 19th Street area and the Westside Bluffs, we believe a 19th Street bridge will ruin any chances for the type of improvement in that area that is needed.

But, as we've written before, we always have an open mind and if anyone can make a persuasive argument that such a bridge would actually help the Westside, we'd be glad to listen.

Our goal is the same today as when we first proposed Westside Plans (we did that even before the various Westside Committees came up with similar plans a few years later): to improve the Westside and thus improve all of Costa Mesa.

Our view has always been that any area of our city that has too many functionally obsolete apartment buildings that act as breeding grounds for crime and social dysfunction, along with an overabundance of non-profits that help create and maintain a ghetto atmosphere, is a cancer on the rest of the city and will spread unless that cancer is removed.

Many people seem to have forgotten that the expensive studies that went into creating the three Westside Plans established the fact that large parts of the Westside legally qualified for redevelopment and eminent domain that would essentially scrape the land clean of what's there now and would allow for building a new Westside from the ground up.

That idea of scraping the land clean was rejected by the Committees working on the Westside Plans in favor of allowing the private sector to work closely with city government to bring in a more organic improvement that would be less jarring to citizens of Costa Mesa.
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Those are our opinions.  Thanks for reading them.