A stupid idea withdrawn

Simple. Master lease overpasses for a dollar each to Gold Star Mothers, who would no doubt arrange for appropriate, safe memorials to their children who paid the ultimate price. Similar arrangements could be made with the USO for returning veterans. Both groups know how to navigate the bureaucracy and are pretty much immune from political demagogues. Steve, do YOU want to tell a Gold Star Mother that Michael Moore trumps her pain?

Hey Rick, I’ll gladly tell her that to her face. There are precious few Americans who have “pain” anything like most of the world has.So what if your kid died in Iraq? You wanna tell an Iraqi mother who’s lost five children to a US bombing run that you have more pain than she does? How about a Sudanese mother in Darfur who’s seen her entire family killed while she was raped and beaten for years.As far as I’m concerned, the US military has done precious, precious little besides perpetuate itself at the cost of trillions of taxpayer dollars for the last forty years. I personally am no fan of having reminders of that shoved in my face while half-awake and dealing with rush hour traffic in the morning…and sooner or later one of those damn memorials is going to come loose and cause a crash.Take the damn signs down. Any other person did it, we’d call it graffiti and bitch about the person who did it…why should these folks get any special exemption?

“man who’s an anti-war fan” brings to mind what “fan” is short for. You probably WOULD “gladly tell it to her face”. If you’re as guilty as you sound about the U.S. in the last 40 years, take public transportation during the rush hour traffic that so troubles you and send the savings to those mothers in Sudan and Iraq. If you were interested in anything but rhetoric, you would not have ignored the words “appropriate and safe”, i.e. smaller, less distracting, DIFFERENT from what now exists. Steve, this isn’t the forum to explain to you who the USO and Gold Star Mothers are. Try Google for that and what a “master lease” is. If we can let fast food companies sponsor toll booths, we can say thanks to people who gave better than they got from America.While free speech demonstrations are laudable, people like the “Westboro Baptist Church” (who demonstrate at military funerals), show me that America still has a lot of ingrates along for a free ride. (Including a lot of the “chicken hawks” in Washington and at least one angry guy stuck in traffic).

Steve,If we don’t want them to exist, they won’t. Yacht and rowing clubs have been enjoying the Charles River courtesy of these things for a hundred years, to mention only two of the entities less deserving than the Gold Star Mothers. I will defer to you on I.T. matters but if these leases don’t exist, I must have hallucinated the last 30 years of negotiating them. I still think we can come up with an unobtrusive way to honor the troops.

Nope, just the banks thereof if they don’t already own them. Became controversial a while back when it turned out that some organizations were not paying fair lease rates to the Commonwealth. If a low-key memorial prevents accidents while allowing the bereaved/returnees’ families to make their statement, so be it, IMHO. We can agree to disagree on the relative merits of competing voices. Increased funding for the V.A., for example, is no threat to the constitutional rights of the Freeway Bloggers and is probably a more sincere way to thanks to the troops.