On a grey and showery day, skydivers at Weston on the Green commemorated D-day, not by skydiving, but by jumping static line at what for us is a low level: 3500ft. It makes you think.
D-day Commemoration – Dornier G92, originally uploaded by stevenjbaker.
Sport parachuting is relatively low risk, believe it or not. We go high with modern equipment: it works reliably and there is time to take the reserve if the main fails. No one is, or will be, shooting at you. But to be on a static line, lower, is a little unnerving.
Consider then, how it must feel to paratroop into enemy territory, with less reliable gear, at a low altitude. Even with modern gear, the following is the paratroopers’ experience at around 1000 ft:
To jump on D-day must have been a truly terrifying experience. What heroes those men were and remain.
WildWildWeston 160, originally uploaded by stevenjbaker.
Why put them through it? To maintain a free and open society.
As Labour support collapses, as social democracy fails across europe, as I sit listening to Andrew Brons MEP (BNP) on Vine’s Radio 2 show, I believe we owe it to those paratroops and to all who fought or supported, lived or died in two world wars to think again what such a society should be and to work towards it.
Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.
— Virgil: the motto of Ludwig von Mises, The Last Knight of Liberalism
