The Tear Of Grief

The Tear of Grief also known as the Tear Drop Memorial.  Ever heard of it?  Probably not.  Despite my personal interest in sculptures, provided they are not abstract, I'd never heard of it until a friend of mine posted an article about it on Facebook.  Considering what it was created in memory of, you'd think most people would have heard of it, but I think the "issue" of what country it came from became the focus.  Officially called To The Struggle Against World Terrorism, this 10 story sculpture was created and given to the United States as a gift from Russia as a memorial to the victims of 9/11.  Located in Bayonne, New Jersey it consists of a 100-foot-tall, 175-ton bronze-clad tower with a huge open crack running down the center.  Suspended within the crack is a forty-foot stainless steel tear drop.  Engraved on the eleven sides of the marble base are the names of those people killed on September 11th in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania as well as six other who were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  As you can see in the picture, the memorial is in a bit of a remote location, deliberately placed there so as to have Manhattan as the back drop and to be in sight of where the World Trade Center once stood.

Act of Valor

Many of you probably know that there is a new movie out now called Act of Valor.  While the movie itself is not fact, the events that take place, the action, and basically the entire movie could be true and could happen.  Many people might find themselves disappointed with parts of it.  This isn't like some of the movies or tv shows where people are doing things that could obviously never happen in real life or they have impossible endings.  In many ways, this is real.  This is what happens.  This is what the men and women of our country do for us in our fight against terrorism.  And to make it even more realistic, the actors in it are actually active duty Navy SEALs, cast because as the filmmakers went about making the movie, they realized that no actor, regardless of training, could realistically portray these men.