[img attachment=”10331″ align=”alignleft” size=”full” alt=”Don’t forget what they did!” caption=”Don’t forget what they did!” /]We have been a country now for almost 240 years, and many who have made the absolute sacrifice to make and keep this a reality lie in graves throughout this land. Here in Clay County, hillsides are dotted with cemeteries that entomb our soldiers that died during war as well as those who passed after returning home from battle. These men and women thought this nation was worth fighting for and who thought the people back home were worth the same fight. The nation has stayed the same – it is still a great country, but the people have changed. We have become a nation whose freedom, fought and died for, now hangs by a thread, whose very existence is dictated by the dollar bill and not the power and strength of its people. A nation whose flag has been flown mighty in battlefields and has draped the caskets of the fallen, but is now often dismissed, disrespected or disgraced. A flag, though often tattered, that has never fallen and has been handed to families at gravesides to honor their husband, son or daughter that gave up their life in the worst possible pain for the cause of freedom. Our flag was raised on many forgotten islands and hill tops. Soldiers were proud to watch their tattered flag wave in the smoke after a battle, even as they looked back at comrades who had fallen on a mud soaked hill, a beach or desert and realized the cost of victory. That same flag is now burnt, stomped on, and often spit on by the very same people who enjoy the freedom that was handed to them by the ones who died so that they could enjoy it, all in the name of free speech. Our own high courts uphold the actions and laws that are made to protect those who seemingly despise what this country stands for. Yet they live, work (sometimes), and have the opportunity to live a free life in a country that so many have sacrificed and died for. With the freedom our brothers and sisters died to provide for us comes responsibility, the responsibility of law makers, parents, teachers, and leaders that the abuse of our freedom is met with equal and ardent retaliation. People, for the most part, look at their freedom as cliché, take the idea for granted and pride in our heritage is laughed at or thought of as a forgotten class in school. Libraries are full of book give a ways or sales of books related to our past because no one is interested anymore. Everything that made this country great is being lost through time. True history is being forced out of classrooms, and when people lose touch with history, the generations to follow will never know what made and who made it great. Memorial Day is about remembering and honoring those who died during the many wars America has been involved in. Our freedom will always be pursued by other countries, but it is the forgetting by the people and its government that will implode us as a nation. If we allow this to happen, human life forfeited for freedom will eventually mean nothing. Remember those this Memorial Day who charged into a hail of fire to defeat an enemy bent of destroying our freedom, whose life was blown out in that hail of fire; they had families, they had jobs, they were our brothers and sisters, they were our family. There is no greater love than a man lay down his life for a friend.
