One job that I would not want...

I will never be a morning runner. Ever. I'm just go to wave the white flag and say never again. I love sleep too much to disrupt it by bounding out of bed and running. I've skipped running the last few days because of thunderstorms in the evening. I think the weather will hold out today so I may be able to get back out there finally.


I've found a job to add to the list of ones that I would never want. I was reading news articles this morning and came across one about construction workers uncovering a mass grave in Ukraine. Not so surprisingly, it's from the Holocaust near an area that Hitler was using for a camp in 1941. I know construction is a great trade and all, especially here in the U.S., but I just can't imagine some of the things that have been unearthed in Europe. A construction worker in Europe would almost have to expect a discovery like that every time a project was started. Whether it was the millions that died in "no man's land" during the trench warfare of The Great War or the millions more taken during WWII, it seems that every area would have remains of some kind.

In the young life of the U.S., we've lost soldiers and civilians during war time but it's nothing like that of Europeans. And most of our casualties were overseas, in the same "no man's land," alongside the British and French corpses. The only significant loss of life on the home front would have been during the Civil War when streams and rivers literally ran red with blood. The bloodiest day of fighting on U.S. soil saw only 23,000 casualties at the Battle of Antietam in 1862. I say only because really 23,000 compared to the million or more casualties taken at numerous battles during WWII is just a drop in the bucket. Some 72 MILLION deaths are scattered across Europe from World War II alone. Add on the 19 million from WWI and it seems that not an inch of ground would go untouched by death.

What I find interesting though is the battlefields of the Civil War, Revolutionary War, and Pearl Harbor are preserved. The mass graves of Gettysburg, Antietam, and Vicksburg are hallow grounds, forever preserved from the forces of construction. Construction workers in a America typically don't have the problem of uncovering mass graves. If Europe enshrined all their battlefields, it seems as though no one would have anywhere to live.

Yes, one article made me think this much. I just think Americans take a lot for granted. Sure, we have had a rough and tumble history for only being 230 years old, but it's probably a walk in the park to what most countries have experienced.