A Day for Remembering

Dear A-Letter Reader:

Today we celebrate Memorial Day - a day when Americans pause and focus on the ultimate price so many have paid over the centuries to win and preserve our freedom. This day also reminds us that each generation must take up and continue the unending struggle to protect liberty.

There's a hip phrase amongst young folks -- "To die for..." In essence that means that some object or person is so enticing that the attractiveness suggests a willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice to obtain it.

But how many Americans today would be willing to die for, as more than a million have done, the freedoms and liberties we are said to enjoy? And ask yourself -- do we really still have those liberties. Or have they been slowly taken from us, devaluing the sacrifice of all those who died. Did they die in vain? In his eloquent Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln suggested that what we do will determine the answer to that question.

Americans live in an era of overwhelming numbers; the bloated national debt, the huge budget and trade deficits, opinion polls, holiday weekend highway fatalities, hurricane and tsunami deaths. But many seem more concerned about the latest American Idol winner or the stock market than they do about the very real loss of freedom.

The cruelest numbers of all are those some say are senseless. Nearly 3,000 Americans have died in the Iraq war, as well as untold thousands of Iraqis. Aside from the merits of this war, each of these Americans, many of them very young, were unique individuals. Each with his or her own life, loves and each with great potential in the eyes of God. Was this really necessary? It's worth considering in comparison that in all the wars America has fought, including our own Civil War, 1,290,200 died.

In The A-Letter we often speak of freedom and liberty, usually in terms of very real threats to both of these precious commodities. To observe that so many have died in the American cause over so many centuries only accentuates the meaning and importance of the cause for which they died. They died before their time, much of their promise unrealized, and in the service of their country. Their very real sacrifice for our liberties makes it all the more important that we guard against diminution of those liberties in our own time -- whether the threat is from abroad, or from within our own government.

The call to duty and service to country remains distant and unreal to far too many Americans. As a nation we need always to be certain that in any war, including the so-called "war on terror," our cause is defensible and just. And we should never forget and always pray that those departed may rest in God's eternal peace.

That's the way that it looks from here.
BOB BAUMAN, Editor