My thoughts on a few controversial issues.
An acorn is not an oak tree. It is a sad thing when the acorn must be uprooted before it unfurls even a single leaf, but is not an act of deforestization. There are times and places inappropriate for acorns to grow. I have yet to see a person who complains of and prays against the termination of an acorn offer to plant it in their own backyard.
Sometimes you have to piece the Big Story together from Little Facts. The lady was seen to get into her car at her house. The lady was next seen going through the intersection of Maple and Broad. Finally, the lady was seen at KMart. It is safe to say that the lady followed a particular route that took her from her house through the intersection of Maple and Broad to KMart. Maybe you don’t know the exact route, but you can make a pretty good guess. It’s a small town, after all.
Now that route the lady took is theoretical, but it’s based on facts. So don’t go telling me that it’s just a theory, and I don’t have any of the missing links to prove where she’s been. And especially don’t go telling me that Scotty transported her from her house to the KMart because that’s what you read in the National Enquirer, and everything the National Enquirer prints has to be the truth because journalists don’t lie.
Yellow ribbons come from an old Reader’s Digest story (later condensed even further into a saccharine song) about a prisoner coming home from doing his time. He writes his love, “If you want me to get off the bus, tie a ribbon around the oak tree in the front yard. If I don’t see a ribbon, I’ll keep on going, no questions asked.” He sees not one, but a hundred ribbons on the tree, signifying forgiveness and a welcome home.
It’s nice to see so many of you out there forgiving the soldiers.
Honestly, those things bug the heck out of me, too.
~Cali
Well, I know it’s said that the origin of the actual yellow ribbon as a huge symbol that became highly visible dates to 1980 with the Iranian hostage crisis.. I personally like the origin my grandfather taught me.. It’s completely a folk tale with no traceable basis in fact, but it’s still lovely.. They even made a movie about it called "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" with, I think, John Wayne. I always forget which spaghetti western guy is which.
A woman wears a yellow ribbon to have a visible expression of love for a calvary officer during the Civil War.. It was a 1949 film and actually predates the 1972 "Oak Tree" ballad by Irwin Levine and some other guy.. My grandmother wore a yellow ribbon button for my uncle when he was in Vietnam. Pretty cool.. Unfortunately, the nature of that war didn’t really allow for such amazingly public sentiment as we have today.
I think I can echo Gerald Parsons’ sentiments when he said, "Ultimately, the thing that makes the yellow ribbon a genuinely traditional symbol is neither its age nor its putative association with the American Civil War, but rather its capacity to take on new meanings, to fit new needs and, in a word, to evolve." Pretty cool stuff in my opinion.
I went looking for information last year when I was wondering why exactly we’d picked that exact symbol and why it seemed so universally known and accepted. I love the history of why things become less fad and more culture.. Cultural anthropology I guess.
Well done, Sal. Pithy, brief. Well done.
a further condensed reader’s digest story? wow.