Yesterday morning, the Government Shutdown took effect.

In his petulance, the 44th President of the United States, decided to close our National Parks, in order to make Americans suffer for his inability to lead.

However, thanks to some Republican House Members, including some from the Magnolia State, where I live, our Petulant President’s Plans were thwarted…at least for yesterday.

FoxNews.com reports that

What was meant to be a final gathering of heroes Tuesday instead became a final victory for dozens of World War II combat vets who refused to let the government’s budget battle block a visit to their memorial in the nation’s capital.

With bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace,” nearly 200 veterans from Mississippi and Iowa swept past barricades and security guards at the World War II Memorial in Washington in order to keep a commitment to visit the site, which was closed today due to the partial government shutdown. The veterans, in their 80s and 90s, were accompanied by Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Miss., a former Marine who earlier vowed not to let the National Park Police keep them from a planned visit to the open-air monument.

“Well, I would have been so down-and-out if I got all the way up here and wasn’t able to get in,” Navy veteran Oscar Leroy Russell, 90, who is blind after he suffered a stroke, told FoxNews.com.

Some veterans on hand wiped away tears when they saw a crowd waving the American flag as they came out of their bus.

“These men and women didn’t cower to the Japanese and Germans,” Palazzo said. “I don’t think they’re about to let a few National Park Police stand in their way.”

Palazzo, who was joined by several other members of Congress, moved the barricades at the memorial and police did not try to stop the veterans’ access.

“I’m not going to enforce the ‘no stopping or standing’ sign for a group of 90 World War II veterans,” a U.S. Park Police officer, who declined to give his name, told The Washington Post. “I’m a veteran myself.”

The veterans are traveling as part of Honor Flight, a program that enables World War II veterans to partake in an expense-paid trip to view the memorial. Tuesday’s trip is the second-to-last flight, with the last scheduled for November. But prior to their arrival early Tuesday, there was fear that the government shutdown and federal worker furloughs would mean no access to the monuments on the National Mall.

But with lawmakers leading the charge, the American military heroes, some in wheelchairs, surged into the memorial.

“It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Palazzo said. “We lined the veterans up along the blockade, we saw an opening and we took it.”

When I read what had happened yesterday morning, in Washington DC, at the World War II Memorial, my eyes teared up.

Allow me to try to explain why.

D-Day, also called the Battle of Normandy, was fought on June 6, 1944, between the Allied nations and German forces occupying Western Europe.

The codename for the invasion was Operation Overlord. The assault phase was known as Operation Neptune. Operation Neptune began on D-Day (June 6, 1944) and ended on June 30. Operation Overlord also began on D-Day, and ended with the crossing of the River Seine on August 19.

Less than 15 percent of the young men called upon to sacrifice their lives for our freedom in the invasion had ever seen combat.

Basically, the invasion of Normandy was a success, due to sheer force of numbers. By July 1944, some one million Allied troops, mostly American, British, and Canadian, were entrenched in Normandy. During the great invasion, the Allies assembled nearly three million men and stored 16 million tons of arms, munitions, and supplies in Britain.

Among the young men who stepped off those boats, in a hail of gunfire, was a fellow named Edward, whom everyone called Ned, from the small town of Helena, Arkansas.  Already in his young life, Ned had been forced to drop out of school in the sixth grade, in order to work at the local movie theatre to help support his mother, brother, and sister faced with the ravages of the Great Depression.

He was a gentle man who loved to laugh and sing, having recorded several 78 rpm records in the do-it-yourself booths of the day. And now, he found himself, a Master Sergeant in an Army Engineering Unit, stepping off a boat into the unknown, watching his comrades being mercilessly gunned down around him.

Ned, along with the rest of his unit who survived the initial assault, would go on to assist in the cleaning out of the Concentration Camps, bearing witness to man’s inhumanity to man.

The horrors he saw had a profound effect on Ned.  One that he would keep to himself for the remainder of his life.  While his children knew that he served with an Engineering Unit in World War II, they did not know the full extent of his service, until they found his medal, honoring his participation in the Invasion of Normandy, going through his belongings after he passed away on December 29, 1997.

Fast forward 22 years later…

On a night in 1966, a 7-year-old was laying on his family’s den couch in Memphis, TN, watching his favorite TV Series “Batman” with a fever of 105, brought about by a severe bronchial infection. Tending to that sick child were 3 veterans of World War II: his Daddy, a Master Sergeant with the Army Engineers, his Uncle “R” (Robert), US Air Force, and his Uncle Perriman, a full-blooded Indian from Albuquerque, who was an Army Corpsman.

Those three veterans, now all gone, took turns putting cold wash cloths under the child’s arms and on his forehead, until his fever finally broke, sometime during the night.

That child was me.

And, the young hero who stepped off of a perfectly good boat, into a hail of gunfire, fighting for our freedom, was my Daddy.

I was privileged to be raised by members of the Greatest Generation. The legacy that they gave to me of love of God, Family, and Country is a heritage that I hold very dear.

Just as it happened with Obama’s petulant actions regarding Sequestration, in which he stopped White House tours for average Americans, but kept access open for Muslim Terrorists and Lobbyists and cancelled all public appearances of the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds, Obama’s cancellation of public activities, involving “government property”, which in fact was bought and paid for by OUR TAX DOLLARS, during this “Government Shutdown, is nothing but a public display of petulance, by a President having a temper tantrum, because he did not get his way.

Just as elections have consequences, so do actions. Obama’s performance during his tenure as President of the United States has been marked by an ego-driven petulance, which has brought shame to the Office of the Presidency and has affected the way our country is viewed throughout the world.

His supporters in Congress, going through life with their heads firmly planted where “the sun don’t shine”, last night defeated a bill proposed by the House Republicans to grant access to all the thousands of WWII Veterans already scheduled to come to DC during the Shutdown, blocking these American Heroes from visiting the Memorial built to honor them.

We owe those brave American heroes, whom Obama and Congressional Democrats, are treating with disdain, our utmost respect, admiration, and loyalty for defending our freedom.

We owe our Petulant President and his Congressional minions, nothing…but scorn.

Until He Comes,

KJ