Leaders today don’t appreciate heroes of the past

Dear Editor:

Edward Jasper Webb was one of the “old white men” our leftist socialist leaders of today espouse are “irrelevant.” He was my wife’s grandfather.

He was an unknown hero in the Royal Navy who selflessly saved nine men after his ship, a light cruiser, was sunk in the midst of the Indian Ocean in the Second World War, with a loss of over 400 men.

They gave their lives for our freedom. These “old white men” fought to keep politically correct idiots and their lemming followers free to disparage them.

Fortunately, many appreciate the sacrifice. Webb lived to tell of his experiences after immense suffering for our freedom. Out of respect for his and his shipmates’ unwavering fight for freedom, I share a poem he wrote:

“There we stayed and fought in that ocean vast,

All Hell’s inferno; that Torrid High Noon, And we cursed as the (enemy) went flying past

When our blazing Oerlikons breechjammed too soon,

And never, I think, in the years gone by, Since I saw that bloody battle begin,

Did the dying so long refuse to die,

And the wily Nippon’s so hardly win.

Oh, my shipmates’ eyes, where victory shone,

Lay dying for Freedom’s cause, so true, But I who could only bellow “Fight on,” Had the hellish and hardest task to do,

For they whispered my name with their dying breath,

And I who now live in this world of today, Still see those brave young men engulfed in death,

But I am whelmed in deeper gulfs than they, Oh, my fleet-mates — Old Time Memory brings, Though in all those ships now their coffins, lie,

Like the Ancient Mariner’s thousand slimy things,

Still live on this wicked world – and so do I. Oh, those brave young men in their righteous rage,

Their doughty deeds unwritten by History’s pen,

And their glory unmissed in this mindless age,

Whose selfish greed disowns those forgotten men””.

Words cannot express the suffering that these men paid for the price of our freedom, these “old white men” and countless others of every colour who were freedom’s fighters.

They are now forgotten, by clueless government officials in the highest offices in the land who disdain them as “irrelevant” in this age of political correctness and stupidity which is dressed up as “enlightenment” by mindless bureaucrats.

Garry Rayner, West Kelowna