SHENANDOAH, Va. - The Labor Day holiday is the last busy weekend of the summer for travelers and campers all over the country. It can be hard to find a place to stay in national and state parks these days, especially since the boom in RV living and traveling since COVID drove people outside for family entertainment.
The week beforehand, I managed to book the last available campsite in Shenandoah National Park’s Mathews Arm Campground in the north near Front Royal. You will be glad I did, since my timing could not have been better from a breaking news point of view.
As I pulled into the campground on Friday afternoon, Aug. 30, and checked in with the park ranger in the iconic broad-brimmed “flat hat” that has become a famous American icon and a symbol of preservation all over the world, I was tipped off that there is a plan in place to privatize Shenandoah. Without electric power and no internet access, I was not able to confirm this information on the weekend. So I went about enjoying the cool mountain weather, where it dipped down into the 40s at night with highs in the low 70s just in time for September.
As soon as I made it back to an electric site in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland on Tuesday afternoon, Sept. 3, it was too late to call. So I checked the press releases for the park online. Sure enough, the privatization plan - which was never publicly announced in a way to allow public comments - is included down in a press release about the new concessionaire contract, which is what the National Park Service calls private contractors.
The announcement offers a new 15-year “concession contract opportunity to operate lodging, food and beverage sales, retail, grocery, camper services (firewood, showers, and laundry), automobile services (fuel), stable operations and (all FOUR CAMPGROUNDS) in the park.”
“This includes all commercial operations at Big Meadows, Skyland, Elkwallow, Lewis Mountain and Loft Mountain developed areas,” the announcement says, and the new contract is expected to begin Jan. 1, 2026. The deadline for proposals is Thursday, Nov.. 7, 2024.
The ranger said private companies have already toured the park and campgrounds in a “site visit to provide a concession operation overview and facilities tour to interested operators,” according to the release. Operators were to register for the site visit in advance, by 4 p.m. Eastern Time on Fri., Aug. 9, 2024. As far as I know this has not been publicized in any press outlet other than the New American Journal as of deadline.
But for the sake of commentary here, when Ken Burns produced his documentary series on the national parks and called it “America’s Best Idea,” he documented how private profiteers had to be removed from many of the special places in nature when the federal government took them over to preserve them, yet compromises were reached to allow affordable public access for all Americans. This plan is tantamount to letting the private profiteers back in the parks.
(See newamericanjournal.net for more details and reaction).
It was great to see the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz celebrate Labor Day in Detroit, Michigan alongside the United Autoworkers Union. Let’s hope the unions can deliver more rank and file votes for the Democratic ticket this time around than they did in 2016, when Trump got many of their votes. Joe Biden got some in 2020, but no where near all.
Harris and Walz will also need more voters from the ranks of the military and from veterans than Hillary Clinton got in 2016.
Former President Trump knows he need their votes, even if he considers them all “losers and suckers” for supporting him as he’s said in the past. So he and his campaign staff made a visit to Arlington National Cemetery before Labor Day to film a political campaign commercial, in violation of cemetery rules and federal law. But you know Trump and the law. He could care less. He will change it when he becomes dictator “on day one.”
Now he’s playing politics with the war dead in the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, our nation’s most sacred shrine to those who died fighting for democracy and freedom. Shame.
I have a few ancestors who gave the ultimate sacrifice for democracy, so I take this as a personal insult. Marine Cpl. Robert Curtis Wilson, 24, my dad’s older brother, was killed near the end of World War II on June 14, 1945, fighting the Japanese on the island of Okinawa. The Allied Command planned to gather forces and use the air field on the island to launch a final assault on the mainland of Japan before we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, which ultimately led the Japanese to surrender and saved countless lives.
My dad, Eschol Wilson, also a Corporal in the U.S. Army, was stationed in El Paso, Texas and was on the bus headed to take him to an airport to join the forces overseas when the news of his brother’s death reached the family in St. Clair County, Alabama. Since he was the last son to carry on the family name, he was spared the trip overseas and never had to face the horror of that war.
I recently learned from a relative doing family history research that another uncle on my paternal grandmother’s side of the family, Pfc. Ross Love. also died on Okinawa on April 20, 1945, during the first assault on Skyline Ridge just 20 days into the campaign. He was awarded a Purple Heart for his wounds and a Bronze Star for bravery in that battle. His gravestone says he fell fighting for liberty - not authoritarian dictatorship.
This renewed my interested, so I looked up and watched “The Pacific” and “Band of Brothers,” American war drama miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman for HBO, focusing on the U.S. Marine Corps’s actions in the Pacific Theater and the European Theater.
My Uncle Curtis was in the First Marine Division, the first to arrive and lead the charge on Skyline Ridge in the Battle of Okinawa, the single longest sustained carrier campaign of the Second World War.
There is a scene in Episode 9, the climactic battle of Okinawa, in which survivors of the First Marines are marching out of battle and being replaced by reinforcements. It will make you cry.
In Episode 9 of the “Band of Brothers,” also the climax of that series, Easy Company happens on a concentration camp of Jews and Gypsies, many dead but also many starving survivors. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
So it is hard for me to imagine anyone who has watched these shows, or who know anything of the history of World War II, who could ever support anyone who would set out to create a fascist dictatorship here in the United States. But that is what is happening with the Trump campaign for president and this Project 2025.
So far, according to the polls, this election is still too close to call. How is that possible? As everyone knows, the people of Georgia basically saved all our butts in 2020, delivering that state for President Joe Biden, along with two U.S. Senators. But now the MAGA Republicans are toying with the election machinery in Fulton County, Georgia, trying to deliver us a dictator on Nov. 5, 2024.
I’m considering making the trip down there myself in October. I have a feeling this election could come down to Fulton County, Georgia like the election of 2000 came down to Dade Country, Florida, It could even end up in the House or back before this conservative Supreme Court.
Glynn Wilson is editor and publisher of New American Journal (NewAmericanJournal.net).
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2024
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