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Veterans should be remembered |
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Nov 06, 2009 at 04:56 PM |
While we won’t officially celebrate Veterans Day until Wednesday, Osceola County veterans, their families, active duty personnel and elected officials on Saturday will remember and honor the sacrifices made to keep our country free with a parade and community covenant signing in downtown Kissimmee.
Members of the St. Cloud City Council and members of the military and their family also will sign a community covenant at Lakeview Elementary School Tuesday, at 1 p.m., during the school’s annual tribute to service members and their families. The Poinciana community held its covenant signing July 3 in a pre-Independence Day event.
The Saturday program in Kissimmee and the one Tuesday in St. Cloud are good opportunities for us to pledge support for our military personnel regardless of our political beliefs or whether we now support or have supported in the past our involvement in certain conflicts around the world. We have to remember that it is not the marine, aviator, soldier or sailor who chooses to enter into a war or military action – that decision is made by the U.S. senators, representatives and presidents that we elect here at home. Our military men and women are only responding to the call of duty.
Attending one of these pre-Veterans Day events with your children would be a way to help our younger generation understand that sacrifices have been made and are being made daily to safeguard our freedoms.
Hearing about past and current sacrifices should prompt us to think deeply about the future of our military services and how we proceed as a nation. We must ask ourselves whether the economic recession and the desperate need for jobs means that certain groups in our society – the middle and working classes – in the future will be disproportionately represented among our military personnel and, unfortunately, among our casualties. That is a double-edged sword.
The recession certainly has made it easier for the military services to fill their ranks, as more men and women join and those already in stay longer because they have no other economic alternative. But the question is whether this is a good and equitable way to fill our service ranks.
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