Celebrating Light Over Dark

Not everyone will make it to Taftville's Memorial Park this morning at 11 for the Veterans Day observances sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2122 and the American Legion Post 104. It's probably just as well since it's more of a pocket park located at the intersection of South B and Norwich Avenues, but we'll miss you as we pause, if not exactly stop, and thank all of those who wear and have ever worn the uniform of any branch of our armed forces.

Today, Veterans Day is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present, today. When I was a kid, today was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of the World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. There was always a moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

We are a nation now at war for nearly two decades. We have young people in uniform serving in places like Afghanistan and Iraq who hadn't even been born when aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania and New York City's Twin Towers changing our world forever. Because it's not on the evening news or on the front page of the daily paper above the fold doesn't mean men and women in uniform are not far from home and in harm's way. 

Field of Flags at Norwich Free Academy

Don't get confused by all the attention paid to Kim, all her other K named relatives, and the other useless mouth celebrities who make headlines. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day and allowing all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault we endure.

It's a new world and a new way of war but those making the sacrifice are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at Forward Operating Bases marked with dots on the map of countries we cannot name but all those who whet the blade of the sword they wield in our name and in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

We are more filled with self-doubt as a nation than at any time in at least my lifetime but that's a temporary condition. There will always be light and dark, but we shall and will prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now, or then, in uniform who places service over self, whenever and where that is and was, thank you.

Too often we forget the words of gratitude and appreciation we meant to say, but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude we will always be worthy of their sacrifice.

-bill kenny