Anti-Christ Pushes Greatest Generation Off the Front Page

Everyday for the last two weeks, in print, on talk radio, on the Internet, there has been this buzz about June 6, 2006. 06/06/06. What will happen? Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies and Prince of Darkness is going to make an appearance to usher in the final conflict between good and evil? The harbinger of the Second Coming of Christ?

More likely, this marketing blitz for the remake of “The Omen” will be forgotten hours after the calendar page flips over to 06/07/06. Forgotten seemingly like the sacrifice that the young men of The Greatest Generation made starting in the pre-dawn hours of June 6th, sixty-two years ago. Forgotten like the names Omaha and Utah, Saint-Mère-Église, St-Lo, and Pegasus Bridge.

I don’t expect parades, or a Federal Holiday, but I was surprised to see no mention of Normandy when I clicked my web browser open today and checked the headlines on msnbc.com. So I went to MSN. Nope. Startribune.com, pioneerplanet.com, surly foxnews.com will have a blurb. Nothing. The only online source I could find was CNN.com had a little video about the Normandy landings.

At the end of that day, over 3,000 Allied service men were dead - the bloodiest single day in U.S. military history since Antietam. Overlooking the Normandy beaches, there are rows upon rows of quiet, elegant, white marble crosses that stand in mute tribute to each of the thousands of Americans who fell there. The selflessness of this action is staggering to me. These were men who were attacking an entrenched enemy on foreign soil, not for conquest or riches, but to deliver it from the occupation of one of the most evil men the world has ever known. It’s memory deserves more than just a passing mention in years evenly divisible by 5.

If you want to sit around the campfire and tell ghost stories about the anti-Christ, why don’t you start with how simple citizen soldiers gave their lives on June 6th, 1944, to rid the world of Adolph Hitler’s evil and madness.