Veterans Day

Veterans Day
It's Veterans Day, a day for honoring those who served. It was once Armistice Day, a day to celebrate the veterans of the War to End All Wars, but time and experience forced that lofty ideal to be changed. It would appear that there is no war to end all wars. At least not yet. As long as evil exists there will always be war and a need for war.

My father graduated from West Point many years ago. I still have his sheepskin diploma and his gold graduation ring from there. When they came calling for me I considered going. But my father wouldn't hear of it. He said it was a terrible place to go and insisted that I'd hate it. I had no idea at the time that he'd already planned to trick me into a position whereby I was left with no choices and would have to go to the college he'd chosen and become what he wanted. Ironically, this is how he said West Point treated him and the reason I shouldn't go.

We have a lot of idealists here in America, people who think that if they elect the 'right' leader then we won't go to war anymore and our soldiers will never leave to go fight anywhere. Interestingly, every single one of these 'great leaders' has gotten us involved in military conflicts that cost American soldiers' lives one way or another. One of them sold our greatest military secrets to communist China in exchange for cash and reelection assistance. It was treason, but politics being what it is, nothing was done about it. He later launched a missile at the Chinese embassy in retaliation for the embarrassment that resulted from the American People finding out about his betrayal of us.

We have a low tolerance for war here. It seems that no matter how viciously we're attacked we can't stay angry enough to fight back for longer than a few short months. After that we're all stressed and whiny and want our soldiers to surrender and come home. Our soldiers don't appreciate this lack of resolve much and openly say so.

We have a considerable segment of our population who actually despise our soldiers, even as those soldiers are giving their lives in defense of ours. Many of these haters hold highly paid positions in our most prestigious colleges and universities where they take full advantage of the daily opportunity to proclaim their hatred of America and its fighting forces. Others hold public office and use their power over the military to sabotage it with social experiments and lack of supplies wherever possible.

Still, a shrinking, but loyal segment of America remains resolute. We stand by our soldiers. We salute them for their sacrifices and their integrity. We wish more Americans and especially American leaders had as much integrity as our soldiers do. We wish America would wake up before it gets blown up.

This is my salute to our veterans and our current soldiers. You deserve better than you got. You deserve better than you're going to get. Thank you for what you've done and what you're doing.