Remember the Brave

Today, May 30, 2011, is Memorial Day.  Many people will take the opportunity of the long holiday weekend to spend time with family, to cook out, to picnic, to go on vacation, to shop the many sales that are offered, to enjoy the sunshine and beautiful weather.

I won't begrudge anyone for doing any of those things today.

But there are some people who won't be doing those things ever again.  Those are the men and women who laid down their lives so that you and I would have the freedom to spend time with family, cook out, go on picnics, travel where we wish, shop at any store we want to, enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These men and women have died defending our freedoms and our way of life, with honor and integrity and courage.  They fought the brave fight, and because they did, they secured our rights.  They were mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters.  They served in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines.  They died at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Normandy, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.    When the call went out for brave men and women to defend liberty and freedom and justice, they answered the call with courage.  They came home in a box with a flag, and their families are left with a hole in their lives that can never be filled.  But their families can know that their son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother, laid down their life for an idea more grand, more universal, more important than any other in the history of the world - the idea of individual freedom.  And their families can know that the memory of their soldier or sailor or airman or marine is preserved in the memory of a grateful nation.

So today, as you go about your activities, take a moment to reflect that your freedom was bought in blood.  Take a moment to remember the sacrifice of a young soldier that made your freedom possible.  Perhaps take a little time from your day to visit a cemetary and kneel at a military grave and say "thank you."  Say a prayer for those families who have lost a hero.  And thank God that there remain men and women of courage and valor, integrity and nobility, who fight for freedom every day, for us.

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”