This past week I met a very interesting limo driver in Pittsburgh. He had been a navy corpsman for several years and had worked with several injured veterans in his day. He felt frustrated that the current political focus was on the health-care crisis.

“Our real crisis is that we’re fighting a two front war, and nobody seems to notice!” he said.
Jim felt that our society has placed more value on celebrity, and less on value on sacrifice. I couldn’t agree more.

We must place more value on the individuals that are sacrificing on our behalf, or we will become a cynical and self-serving society. We may also find that fewer and fewer are willing to make those sacrifices. What will we do then? What freedoms, pleasures, and indulgences will we give up? The answer is simple – all of them. But we won’t give them up. They will simply be taken from us by those who are willing to sacrifice for their cause.

That begs the question – what causes are you willing to sacrifice or die for?

As he grabbed my luggage out of the trunk and I said goodnight, he had a pained and puzzled look on his face. He felt that there was little he could do to turn the tide. I couldn’t disagree more.

My seventeen year old son and I were having lunch together this week and talking about his Eagle Scout project. The conversation turned to ‘his generation’ and what it values. I told him that I might be an “old guy”, but I knew I could hold my own against his generation because they lack backbone (or initiative). Surprisingly, he agreed.

His generation has grown up “satisfied” (also read complacent) with life. Everybody got trophies. Everybody was a winner. Heaven forbid that anybody struggled with something and learned from the struggle. How can kids learn their strengths and weaknesses unless they are revealed in the struggle of life? How do you discover what causes you are willing to sacrifice for or die for unless there is a struggle?

So, friends, parents, and countrymen, lend me your ears. We can turn the tide if we allow the struggle of life to teach us and our children. Failure reveals character and talent.

That is the failure of socialism – it removes its members from the struggle and protects them from failure. It numbs its members to the pain of failure and the subsequent revelation of character and talent.

Soldiers will sacrifice themselves for the good of their unit. They will sacrifice themselves for their homeland. They will sacrifice themselves for freedom and liberty.

Would you sacrifice your life to establish or uphold a socialistic state?

Not me.

May we honor those who have honored us by giving their all.