A Soldier’s Funeral

Snopes.com is a web site that specializes in debunking e-mail and Internet hoaxes.

But sometimes something goes around the Internet that happens to be perfectly true. One moving example was the funeral of a Texas soldier who was killed in Iraq. One passage from the description reads:

When the Army first listed James as missing in action, his friends in Comfort (a small Texas town of about 1,200 residents) created an improvised memorial to him which grew daily through additions and messages from friends, residents, and visitors. Since James had stated before he left for Iraq that he did not wish to be buried in a military cemetery, after his parents learned of his death they obtained a plot for him at the private Centre Point Cemetery near their home.

On the day of James’ funeral, much of the population of Comfort — many of them bearing U.S. flags — turned out to line the route of his funeral procession in a moving display of community support for a lost friend and a fallen soldier.

This scene will be something worth keeping in mind next Sunday, when anti-Iraqi War British M.P. George Galloway speaks in Madison.

Unless he’s cleaned up his rhetoric, look for his speech to be hateful and vitriolic.

The people who turn out won’t be entirely representative of the residents of the city. But those who do turn out will represent the side of the Culture Wars opposed to the respectful and patriotic Texans who turned out to honor a fallen Warrior.