Since our nations founding, well over 1-million service members have given their lives in defense of our country.  Unless someone close in your family was one of these patriots, the term “service members” tends to dehumanize the actual toll.  And the further we get from those days of greatest human hecatomb, the more abstract the memory becomes.  Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers, living, breathing people that through their sacrifice, left behind sorrow, grief, despair, and a lifetime of loss to those scores of the living left to mourn their passing.  The great burden of mourning blocks the light of life from the millions that survive, suffer and remember.

Today, we make that painful effort to force ourselves to invite that old hurt, that sorrow, back into our minds in order to honor their sacrifice and to harden our resolve in remembrance so that we not forget why they died.

They died in their own moment of horror so that we might live.  While not all were called to war, all are called to duty.  That sacred obligation to preserve and protect that which they have died for.  The land of the FREE, and the home of the BRAVE isn’t a clever turn-of-the-phrase ending to a song, it is a clarion call for those of us left behind to do our sacred parts.

While we celebrate today through a veil of tears, let us remember that freedom, liberty and the manifest destiny of mankind rests in all of our hands collectively.  No matter our differences, we share our freedom, important enough to warrant wholesale death.  Let this not be forgotten or forsaken.