Honor the fallen through daily work in your community

Posted 6/3/21

Monday was a beautiful, sunny, blue sky kind of day.

Grills were fired up across the county. Boats full of friends and families took to the waters of the Gulf. Everywhere Americans celebrated …

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Honor the fallen through daily work in your community

Posted

Monday was a beautiful, sunny, blue sky kind of day.

Grills were fired up across the county. Boats full of friends and families took to the waters of the Gulf. Everywhere Americans celebrated their first holiday free of Covid-19 restrictions.

There was joy, laughter, and excitement.

Under that layer of jubilation there was also sadness, tears, and unrelenting grief.

While some families gathered to party, others gathered to mourn. While some wrapped their boats and homes in red, white and blue bunting, others quietly hung the flag that once draped their loved one’s coffin.

Flowers were laid. Prayers were said. Even the bright blue sky above couldn’t change the tone of their sorrow-filled day.

Monday was Memorial Day. It is a day set aside to mourn the nation’s warriors who died protecting us on the battlefield.

Memes filled social media outlets on Monday to ask viewers to understand the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day; to recognize their sacrifice but know they “would want us to have a fun day out with our families.”

Sure, they probably would.

But they also wouldn’t want to be relegated to a corner of the day that required a social media post to remind you to honor them.

Every single citizen should take time out to remember the fallen. They are the reason the nation continues to heave forward through time and global turmoil despite the bickering among its own citizens. They are the reason the rights every one of us continue to argue over still exist.

And we honor them by posting a meme before we fire up the grill and tap the keg on Memorial Day.

Pitiful.

We can and should honor our fallen military members and their families every single day. We can do this by working together, reaching across the aisle and seeing the other side of the discussion to find the best path forward for all members of our cities, states and nation.

We can honor our fallen by working every day to protect our natural resources and be a voice for a planet that is being destroyed under our own watch by industry and pollution.

We can honor them every day by volunteering in our communities to help those who do not have enough to eat, who do not have a safe place to live and who find themselves being abused in wars within their own homes.

We should be warriors, hell bent on protecting the nation that they died to save.

If we do not, all those lives, all those fathers, brothers, mothers and sisters will have died in vain and we will be a nation lost.