Boardwalk ( 木板路, 遊歩道, 산책로)

All boardwalks are on a beach, but not all beaches have boardwalks. This Memorial Day weekend, MJ and I had the pleasure of walking on one of the prominent boardwalks in America, and it wasn't the most pleasurable. As expected, everything on the boardwalk was marked up, especially hotel prices (we luckily enjoy traveling vast distances by car and thus avoided being milked for multiple hundreds of dollars per night to sleep in a "crappy" Fairmount Hotel or Holiday Inn Express- MJ's standards are understandably high), with half of that charge not for the hotel but for the proximity of the hotel to the boardwalk. Ben & Jerry's was $8.50 for a "large" cup that wasn't that big (but the small cup was "just $7.50 so psychologically it made you feel like you got a deal?- that's how they get you) and the surchage to get on the "jetty" or "pier" stretching into the ocean was.... get this, $4.00 a person for "watching" the fishermen do their thing. It's a racket. The one pleasurable thing that I got out of it, though, other than the weather and calm May winds that made the weekend just a beautiful one foretelling hopefully a temperate and not sizzling summer, was the boardwalk full of U.S. war facts contributed by the local high schools' AP US History Programs, commemorating the service of military personnel for Memorial Day weekend. About every 100 feet there was a long 7 foot panel called "heroes' Walk displaying information about famous wars or individual battles in US history, everything from must-know wars like the War of 1812 to the much more obscure "Battle of Bladensberg (fought in Maryland in 1814 that allowed the British to arrive in DC and burn everything) to the unknonwable "Easter Offensive" of the Vietnam War. A worthy cause for celebration, these panels full of great history, too bad most boardwalk attendees just chose to walk past them blissfully, not paying attention to any of the contents staring them rigth in the face, usually wih head buried in thir mobile phones and oblivious to the ironically similarly shaped wall panel in front of them. I notice the same thing at art museums: there's a lot less interest in great art museum exhibits than there should be, particularly when there are various ways to get into museums for FREE while baseball games (the Amercian pasttime) charges an entry fee AND exhorbitantly charges its loyal fans whom they supposedly care so much about ("Fan Appreciation Night") $8.50 for a hot dog and $15.00 for a chicken tender + fries meal and alcohol for an absurdly higher upcharge. It's almost like at a baseball game you're paying the baseball franchise to subject you to infomercials and being exploited as a consumer, (you get less stuff for higher cost) while at a museum you get higher quality material (Frida Kahlo displays, history of Barbie dolls, famous Impressionist pieces) for often zero cost. Zero obligation to buy, no need to stay 3 hours at a museum and get trapped into having to pay for a meal. It's a racket. But yea, I like the history of warfare, liking the cool sound of wars and the names of generals who get credit for being on the winning side or the losing side, forgetting that for each battle there are at least hundreds who died probably unnecessarily, and if it's one of the more recent wars, thousands to even hundreds of thousands per war, soldiers who didn't make it to a lofty rank like Lieutenant Colonel or General of the Allied Forces who died without seeing their families for the last time, or died horribly in fire, drowned, or worse, tortured by the enemies before succumbing to their deaths. One of the panels wrote about the Tokyo Raids by U.S. Air Force pilot Jimmy Doolittle, who I had heard about from Jeopardy as doing the heroic feat of slipping past the Japanese ranks and dropping bombs on Tokyo. The Boardwalk panel stated it had the positive effect of raising the morale of US troops after Pearl Harbor had been bombed by the Japanese last year, glossing over some unnecessary details and collateral damage, but reading more carefully it said that a bunch of the planes that flew out with Doolittle got shot down and either fell into Russia or fell into Japanese-occupied China, where they were captured by Japanese and tortured, while some died instantly upon impact. Only Doolittle got the credit by coming out alive as the hero, but how many had to suffer for that one hero to emerge and some "much-needed morale to boost the forces?" Is that really worth all those lives? I certainly wouldn't want to be one of those who died and just became a statistic. O yea, they forgot about the little statistic (credit to the Boardwalk panel to include this) that 250,000 Chinese people were killed by Japanese troops for trying to help the U.S. fighters who crash landed in Japanese-occupied China. I had to do a double take on seeing that number. I know that the West doesn't value Chinese lives and thinks China has a billion people anyway, who cares, but half a million people died as a result of Jimmy freakin' Doolittle? (O and let's not forget the bombing of Tokyo probably took out innocent civilians' lives, not likely the emperor or any higher-ups in the military who actually were responsible for WWII and Pearl Harbor). I appreciate the dedication to the U.S. troops on Memorial Day, but could we also take the chance to acknowledge that some of these battles were mostly costly and might not have been the best idea just assessing the cost-benefit analysis afterwards?