Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Praise for Voice
"A smart fellow...I do like, recommend and learn from Barbera's blog." -Roger L. Simon
"Your blog is bullshit"- anonymous angry French reader.
Watching the miners in PA come up was a flood of memories. I spent alot of time growing up in Somerset County. My Grandfather has a cabin in Glen Savage and I must have fished every stream wider than a foot and every pond that held more than a gallon of water in that county. The hospital where most of the miners ended up, Somerset County Hospital, is where my Great-Uncle Ed died after having an anuerism on a hunting trip. I saw one of the rescuers with a Berlin PA t-shirt (hey Rich) a town I know well. And another with a Greensburg PA Fire Department t-shirt. I was born and spent some years living a couple of hundred yards away from the hospital in Greensburg. Which also became a more widely known name during the Gulf War when a scud hit the barracks of a regiment of troops mostly from Greensburg and Youngwood (where my Grandparents lived next door to Mike Blanda. George Blanda's brother).
This is a region that is in shouting distance of Philadelphia and even NY yet is quintesential flyover country. Hills, mountains, farms, pick-up trucks and gun racks and a number of towns that remain dry. The people are Polish, German and Dutch. They are miners, farmers, steel and iron workers, factory workers. Pragmatic and full of common sense. It was good to see such a moment of joy and thankfulness come to them. I can't even begin to imagine how tough it must have been for their families. The tenacity and positive spirit shown by all of the Pennsylvanians made me proud to be from the state and to know that half of my roots lie there.
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