Jack of Harts

Daniel Crenshaw is a Veteran who has recently become rather famous all over America. One interesting factoid is that he is a proud sixth-generation Texan. Assuming twenty to thirty year generations here, we’re talking Cowboy and Indian (or maybe Cowboy and Mexican) times. Spanish American War times. There are roads in Texas named Crenshaw. There is a rather famous golfer named Ben Daniel Crenshaw. I don’t know the genealogy here, but it seems evident that the Crenshaw family has been part of Texas nearly as long as there has been a Texas. That’s an impressive pedigree if you think about it.

Now Daniel Crenshaw’s father worked in an industry that many Texans have worked in over the years. Oil. Oil, oil money, and looking for more oil and oil money meant that Daniel’s father traveled and spent time growing up in places like Ecuador and Columbia where oil is also found. Daniel traveled with him as a child and learned Spanish from the natives. He also played soccer with the natives. That’s football to the rest of the world. The sport where people burn down towns when they lose a world cup match. Or when they win for that matter.

Now Daniel Crenshaw grew up to join the SEAL Teams in 2006. That meant he got to have a front row seat for the War on Terror back when George W Bush was still in charge. And yes, he went to the sand box. He was serving in Afghanistan in 2012 on his third combat tour when an IED blew up and nearly took his life. He woke up blind to the news that his right eye was just gone and he would probably never see out of his left again. He was lucky. His left eye recovered and he returned to service. Yes, boys and girls, a Navy SEAL missing one eye went back into service and they deployed him. They medically retired him in 2016, four years after meeting the IED that failed to end his life.

Boys and girls, this is a man you do not underestimate. Just in case you hadn’t figured that out from the picture.

Another interesting bit though is that he appears to be a naturally peaceable type of person for all of that. He was critical of Donald Trump in 2016 for his tone and language during the Presidential campaign. And he seems to have been rather less confrontational than the President in his own campaign for office in 2018. And he certainly has not acted like the “hitman in a porno movie” that SNL compared him to. Daniel Crenshaw never asked for an apology after that, though he did say the joke was in bad taste. He didn’t ask for the comedian to be fired either. Instead he decried the culture that demanded such reactions to bad comedy.

And when SNL wanted to save face and apologize to him, he graciously walked on set in a “surprise” visit and accepted it on camera. He even shook the comedian’s hand and said everything was good, right about the time he accepted a phone call on his cell phone. With an Ariana Grande ringtone. It appears the famous singer recently broke up with the previously not famous at all comedian. So that’s what I like to call “Trollin’, Trollin’, Trollin’…”

Daniel Crenshaw won his election to Represent his district in the Federal House of Representatives, so this is not the last we have seen of him.

This is the story of America. It doesn’t matter if you are an immigrant to America in your own right or if your family has been here a century or more. You can work hard, go to school, and go all the way to the capital of the United States of America.

This is America. The land of opportunity. This is what we celebrate.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the American artillery gun “Calamity Jane” fired a single shot. It was the beginning of the Armistice that would result in the end of The Great War. The War To End All Wars. What Americans call the First World War.

Nine million soldiers and seven million civilians died in The Great War, and the Ottoman Empire exterminated at least two million more in full-scale genocides, and many historians think it was a contributory factor to the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people across the globe. Most estimates of world population place it at between 1.6 and 2 million people at the time, which means somewhere around 5 percent of the global population died in those years.

It was the most devastating time period for humanity in modern history.

That was 100 years ago today.

Remember. Never Forget.

This is how bad things can get.

Never let it happen again.