National Veterans Day

The nation's oldest and largest Veterans Day remembrance is held every year in Birmingham, Alabama. Due to the efforts of men such as Major Bert Bank, recipient of this year's National Veteran's Award, and hundreds of thousands of men and women like him, we live in a better, freer, society.

Their sacrifice and service to an ideal, their devotion to duty and honor and freedom, have kept alive our great experiment in government.

Tomorrow has been set aside as a day to honor the devotion of the veterans of this nation's military. May those who still serve, serve with dignity and pride. May those who have put away their uniform know that they contributed to a great and just cause. And may those who in conflict laid down their lives in our stead, find peace at last.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

--John Stuart Mill

posted by Terry at 5:06:00 PM