That’s saying something, because as I close in on my 36th year, I’m no longer a spring chicken myself. For those of you who don’t know, Mike Love is the lead singer for the Beach Boys. At 65 years old he is the last original Beach Boy that is currently still on tour. Give the guy credit, he can still pull it off. Just ask the estimated crowd of 15,000 at Riverfront Park in Harrisburg if they had fun watching Love and the rest of his band run through the vast catalogue of Beach Boy hits. I mean really...? Who doesn’t like at least a few Beach Boys tunes? Thanks to a slight nudge from Governor Rendell, a friend of the band, Harrisburg was actually able to have the Beach Boys play our area on the 4th. This was a pretty big coup for the ‘Burg, the Beach Boys have a tradition of playing on the mall in Washington DC on the 4th. Kudos to the Guv and Hizzoner Steven Reed for convincing them to spend their Fourth entertaining thousands along the bank of the Susquehanna River.
Personally, I’m just glad that the event actually went off as scheduled. As you probably know, weather was once again an issue, and after a strong line of storms went through earlier in the afternoon the concert was looking a bit iffy. If I would have had to come in to work on Wednesday morning and talk about Musicfest postponements, fireworks postponements, revised schedules, and an ongoing closure on Front Street, I'm sure that I would have lost it. I know sometimes the viewers get tired of a long ongoing story such as the recent flooding, but I’ll let you in on a little secret.... We get tired of it too! But when the Governor declares an emergency in your entire viewing area, you cover it, THOROUGHLY. It’s a matter of public safety. That doesn’t mean that after days on end of talking about flooded roads that I don’t get tired of it. By last Friday I had more than had my fill. Sorry folks, but after almost all of the roads had re-opened by Friday afternoon, it actually felt good to just be talking about a good old fashioned 3 mile backlog on I-81 north approaching the I-83 split. Ahhhhhhh... A return to the normalcy of 3 mile backlogs... It was bliss.
Anyway, it was a refreshing change to see the concert and fireworks get squeezed in before MORE RAIN arrived overnight. Mike Love was quoted at Musicfest as saying, "Everybody's in good spirits. We're here to spread good vibrations and brotherly love." Hmmmmm.... How ironic that at roughly the same time Love was uttering those words North Korea was testing their so-called long range, "missiles" over the Sea of Japan. Unfortunately this turn of events will give North Korean leader Kim Jong Il all of the attention that he so desperately craves. For those of you who don’t know, North Korea is an embarrassment. Kim Jong Il makes Josef Stalin look disinterested. This little missile test could be good in that the world spotlight will finally focus its glare on what has been going on in North Korea for decades.
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations accuse North Korea of having one of the worst human rights records of any nation. They severely restrict freedoms, including freedom of speech and freedom of movement, both inside the country and abroad. Nobody gets in North Korea, and nobody is allowed to leave. Refugees have testified to the existence of detention camps with an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 inmates, and have reported torture, starvation, rape, murder and slave labor. During the 1990's, famine killed between 600,000 and 3.5 million people in North Korea. Kim Jong Il literally keeps his citizens in the dark and has brainwashed his people into thinking that he is great leader. Outside observers have called his leadership a form of a cult like religion, and because of his severe restrictions, his citizens have no idea of what the outside world is like. I don’t profess to have all the answers, and unfortunately because North Korea uses all of its resources to fuel its military machine while an estimated 10% of its population has starved to death in the last 15 years, they are going to have to be dealt with. I’m sure that logically speaking cooler heads need to prevail and that diplomacy must be the order of the day, but when Kim Jong Il starts sucking his thumb and shaking his rattle on the world stage... Well, to slightly paraphrase Toby Keith, let’s just put a boot in his diaper.
