Harvey Mains Personal

01/13/2026

Kelly vs the United States. Read about this lawsuit.

05/26/2025

My father survived the war as a marine in the Pacific Theater or I wouldn’t be here. My uncle survived the war in Europe. Beau didn’t and so many others didn’t. I lost friends in the Vietnam War. Wars are bad but all these fallen soldiers fought for our FREEDOM, OUR DEMOCRACY. LET US MAKE SURE THEY DIDN’T DIE IN VAIN.

May 25, 2025 (Sunday)

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.

For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.

When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.

Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.

When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander, Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.

It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomber squadrons.

Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.

I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.

Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.

I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.

And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.

But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name. And now, in anticipation of Memorial Day, people have asked me, once again, to repost his story.

So Beau Bryant, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

[Photo by Carole Green.]

05/24/2025

This is true wisdom we should all live by.

This was written by Chief Dan George, in 1972..
"In the course of my lifetime I have lived in two distinct cultures. I was born into a culture that lived in communal houses. My grandfather’s house was eighty feet long. It was called a smoke house, and it stood down by the beach along the inlet. All my grandfather’s sons and their families lived in this dwelling. Their sleeping apartments were separated by blankets made of bull rush weeds, but one open fire in the middle served the cooking needs of all.
In houses like these, throughout the tribe, people learned to live with one another; learned to respect the rights of one another. And children shared the thoughts of the adult world and found themselves surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins who loved them and did not threaten them. My father was born in such a house and learned from infancy how to love people and be at home with them.
And beyond this acceptance of one another there was a deep respect for everything in Nature that surrounded them. My father loved the Earth and all its creatures. The Earth was his second mother. The Earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am… and the way to thank this Great Spirit was to use his gifts with respect.
I remember, as a little boy, fishing with him up Indian River and I can still see him as the sun rose above the mountain top in the early morning…I can see him standing by the water’s edge with his arms raised above his head while he softly moaned…”Thank you, thank you.” It left a deep impression on my young mind.
And I shall never forget his disappointment when once he caught me gaffing for fish “just for the fun of it.” “My son” he said, “The Great Spirit gave you those fish to be your brothers, to feed you when you are hungry. You must respect them. You must not kill them just for the fun of it.”
This then was the culture I was born into and for some years the only one I really knew or tasted. This is why I find it hard to accept many of the things I see around me.
I see people living in smoke houses hundreds of times bigger than the one I knew. But the people in one apartment do not even know the people in the next and care less about them.
It is also difficult for me to understand the deep hate that exists among people. It is hard to understand a culture that justifies the killing of millions in past wars, and it at this very moment preparing bombs to kill even greater numbers. It is hard for me to understand a culture that spends more on wars and weapons to kill, than it does on education and welfare to help and develop.
It is hard for me to understand a culture that not only hates and fights his brothers but even attacks Nature and abuses her. I see my white brothers going about blotting out Nature from his cities. I see him strip the hills bare, leaving ugly wounds on the face of mountains. I see him tearing things from the bosom of Mother Earth as though she were a monster, who refused to share her treasures with him. I see him throw poison in the waters, indifferent to the life he kills there; as he chokes the air with deadly fumes.
My white brother does many things well for he is more clever than my people but I wonder if he has ever really learned to love at all. Perhaps he only loves the things that are his own but never learned to love the things that are outside and beyond him. And this is, of course, not love at all, for man must love all creation or he will love none of it. Man must love fully or he will become the lowest of the animals. It is the power to love that makes him the greatest of them all… for he alone of all animals is capable of [a deeper] love.
My friends, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was not the hunger of the body.. He spoke of a hunger that begins in the very depths of man... a hunger for love. Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. Instead we turn inwardly and begin to feed upon our own personalities and little by little we destroy ourselves.
You and I need the strength and joy that comes from knowing that we are loved. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others. There have been times when we all wanted so desperately to feel a reassuring hand upon us… there have been lonely times when we so wanted a strong arm around us… I cannot tell you how deeply I miss my wife’s presence when I return from a trip. Her love was my greatest joy, my strength, my greatest blessing.
I am afraid my culture has little to offer yours. But my culture did prize friendship and companionship. It did not look on privacy as a thing to be clung to, for privacy builds walls and walls promote distrust. My culture lived in big family communities, and from infancy people learned to live with others.
My culture did not prize the hoarding of private possessions, in fact, to hoard was a shameful thing to do among my people. The Indian looked on all things in Nature as belonging to him and he expected to share them with others and to take only what he needed.
Everyone likes to give as well as receive. No one wishes only to receive all the time. We have taken something from your culture… I wish you had taken something from our culture, for there were some beautiful and good things in it.
Soon it will be too late to know my culture, for integration is upon us and soon we will have no values but yours. Already many of our young people have forgotten the old ways. And many have been shamed of their Indian ways by scorn and ridicule. My culture is like a wounded deer that has crawled away into the forest to bleed and die alone.
The only thing that can truly help us is genuine love. You must truly love, be patient with us and share with us. And we must love you—with a genuine love that forgives and forgets… a love that forgives the terrible sufferings your culture brought ours when it swept over us like a wave crashing along a beach… with a love that forgets and lifts up its head and sees in your eyes an answering love of trust and acceptance..."
~Chief Dan George was a leader of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation as well as a beloved actor, musician, poet and author. He was born in North Vancouver in 1899 and died in 1981. This column first appeared in the North Shore Free Press on March 1, 1972.

02/25/2025

It is time to be angry. We have been lied to repeatedly.

Call now to connect with business.

02/25/2025

I attended a meeting with Congressman McClintock’s staff yesterday. Over 150 people packed the meeting room at Calaveras County Library. Key questions:
1. Vote on budget. No answer.
2. Get Musk out of our data. Under advisement.
3. Save the Department of Education. Under advisement.
4. Cuts to Department of Interior. No answer.
5. Cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, Social Security and Medicare. No answer.
6. Conflicts of interest and illegal acts of Elon Musk. No answer.
7. Job losses in the county and state. No answer.
8. What about cutting the cost of living? No answer.
9. NTSB, NLRB, FAA, USAID, EPA, National Consumer Protection and the U S Postal Service? No answer.

In fairness to his representative, she has only been with him for 16 years and really cannot speak for him!!!

I suggest we replace him in 2026. He is 100% MAGA and needs to go. He doesn’t represent his constituents.

Call now to connect with business.

08/30/2024

The redwood wood chips have arrived. 12 cubic yards of high quality, great smelling wood chips.