Happy Veteran’s Day? Is that what you say? How about Thank You to all our American Veteran’s, past and present. That sounds better but it still doesn’t quite feel like enough. It thanks them, but it doesn’t quite honor them.
Perhaps we should open our eyes to what the world is today…Open our minds to what the world could be…and open our hearts to grasp full and wide the precious blessing of freedom they have battled to secure and preserve for us. We call it an inalienable right, and yet thousands, hundreds of thousands, down through the years have laid down their life that we might have it.
We take for granted that we can work all day and collect a paycheck that will put food on our table. That each and every one of us is entitled to knowing how to read and write and add and subtract. That we can gather openly to protest, to worship, to fellowship…as if the peaceful life provided by our freedom is free and irrevocable and can not be challenged.
It is not.
How do you honor those men and women who know better than we ever can that freedom isn’t free?
That “there is a peace only to be found on the other side of war?” (Anyone know what movie that is from?)
I think to honor our veterans, we should start by honoring our freedom and our American ideal of democracy. By protecting it fiercely. By sacrificing the momentary comfort that comes with compromising it for the inalienable right to have it. We should never lose sight of our founding, our beginning, and the fiery passion of each generation that has followed, that has fought and died and turned rivers red with blood, to hold firm and insurmountable to it’s cause.
We are free today because we believe in choices and we have chosen freedom.
Thank you to all our veterans and their families that have sacrificed to keep that for us.
Today, we honor you by staying the course. We pledge to keep our God, to keep our guns, to keep our liberties. We vow to raise our children to remember their history, to honor our nation, to prosper from hard work and sacrifice, to be principled and merciful. Our sons will be warriors for freedom and our daughters champions of peace. We will celebrate our independence and let freedom ring across our generations.
Your sacrifice was not in vain.
