Remembering President Ronald Reagan on his birthday

By Lynn R. Mitchell

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”
–Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States

When Germany invaded Europe, it was America that brought the people freedom. When Communists built a wall, it was America that brought the people freedom. When Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein tortured and butchered thousands of their own people, it was America that brought the people freedom.

Ronald Reagan clearly understood freedom and the role America plays in preserving it throughout the world.

When America preserves the freedom of others, it preserves its own freedom.

Freedom is the spirit of America, and it is this spirit that Ronald Reagan communicated so well.

Thank you, President Reagan, for keeping the torch burning. You will be remembered as one of the greatest leaders of all time.

The Berlin Wall … 25 years later

By Lynn R. Mitchell

Death.

As a child, the Berlin Wall represented death to me because media stories told of those who tried to escape from East Germany to West only to be gunned down by East German guards who killed anyone trying to escape the depressed world of communism.

25 years later … remembering the Tiananmen Square massacre

By Lynn R. Mitchell

It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. For those of us old enough to remember, the image of a lone pro-democracy protester defiantly standing up to Chinese Army tanks in Tiananmen Square is seared into our brains. PBS has an informative timeline of that event that led to the massacre of hundreds of Chinese citizens (see PBS timeline).

Photos from Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener at The Daily Mail are a stark reminder of an event that was headline news in 1989 (see Tiananmen Square ‘Tank Man’ photographer shares forgotten negatives from bloody government crackdown on 25th anniversary).