Go read this now. 

And this: 

anita bordewijk says:

June 7, 2004 at 4:00 am

those brave men stopt the war, and made me live, in a free country!!!!
thank them and there familie.
anita
in the netherlands

I’ve written before about the way this election seems to be all about abstractions, as if things of this magnitude were a thousand years ago, and all we can care about now are trivialities: someone’s demeanor, someone else’s tone, what somebody wore, what somebody ate. As if we have no choice but to fight about a celebrity’s baby or a dead gorilla, and yell at each other about parenting trends.

And then something like this comes back.

I did a story once, offline now naturally, about a man searching for his family’s history in the war, and about the people in Holland trying to help him. They talked about digging up bits of shrapnel in the fields, from this war and the one before that. Century-old metal rising to the surface. This wasn’t an abstraction. The things we do matter.

A.