The Final Return

The Korean War cease fire occurred 35 years ago, but for many, the war never ended.

For almost 300 families, the end of hostilities didn’t bring their loved ones home, but for some, the recent summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may bring some closure.

Some 250 caskets have just been sent to North Korea to facilitate the transport of remains of American servicemen killed during the conflict.

“And I understand … that they’ve already sent back or are in the process of sending back the remains of our great heroes who died in North Korea during the war,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting.

Previously, US and North Korean recovery teams had located 229 sets of remains but the return of these remains had stalled until the summit earlier this month when arrangements were finally made.

Welcome home, soldiers, your families and your country thank you for your ultimate sacrifice.

Summer!

What is “Toxic Masculinity”?

There is a new buzz phrase, “Toxic Masculinity” which, according to Wikipedia is

“The concept of toxic masculinity is used in psychology and gender studies to refer to certain norms of masculine behavior in North America and Europe that are associated with harm to society and to men themselves.”

Oh, really? This sounds like a page ripped straight out of the feminist handbook which delights in painting men in the worst possible light.

Are some men toxic? Of course, but so are some women. When we begin to assign bad behavior to the alignment of our chromosomes we begin to erase the need for personal responsibility.

If all men are predestined to be violent then does that mean all women are predestined to be docile?

It isn’t that simple, unless we want to believe that all women go through the hormonal hysterics so well demonstrated by Carole Kane in the old Taxi series.

Men and women choose whether to be good or evil and neither gender gets a genetic pass.

Birth order always has its hidden advantages…

The Origins of Father’s Day

In May of 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Wash., sat in church listening to a Mother’s Day sermon. She decided she wanted to designate a day for her dad , William Jackson Smart. Dodd’s mother had died in childbirth, and Dodd’s father, a Civil War veteran, had taken the responsibility of singlehandedly raising the newborn and his other five children.

The following year, Dodd wanted to celebrate Father’s Day on June 5th, her father’s birthday, and petitioned for the holiday to be recognized in her city. Needing more time to arrange the festivities, Spokane’s mayor pushed the date back by two weeks, and the first Father’s Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, according to the Spokane Regional Convention and Visitor Bureau.

At the first Father’s Day celebration, young women handed out red roses to their fathers during a church service, and large baskets full of roses were passed around, with attendees encouraged to pin on a rose in honor of their fathers – red for the living and white in memory of the deceased. Dodd then brought her infant son along on a horse-drawn carriage ride through the city, bringing roses and gifts to home-bound fathers.

While Congress was quick to officially declare the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day in 1914, after it was first celebrated on May 10, 1908, it took much longer for Father’s Day to be legally recognized. But thanks to Dodd’s celebration, Father’s Day steadily gained popularity.

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge said that he supported it, in order to establish closer relationships between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations, according to the Library of Congress.

And the holiday gained more traction in 1938 when a trade organization, the National Council for the Promotion of Father’s Day, which was formed by men’s clothing retailers in New York City, decided to take up the cause, according to Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995).

President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers in 1966, but it wasn’t until 1972 that President Richard Nixon signed the public law that made it a permanent holiday. Since then, Father’s Day has become a time to recognize the many different father figures in our lives.

This article was provided by Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.