Monday, May 30, 2011

Memorial Day

For my friend and mentor Glen Delong, for my uncles Ellery and Thadeus, for my Grandfather Poppa Eich, for my father, for my wife's grandfather John, and for my recent acquaintance David Rester, and many, many friends and co-workers and teammates and shipmates - a humble thanks for doing the things that you did, for playing your small parts, for making the military we all served something we can be proud, and something that served not a man or a regime, but a document.  The Constitution, tainted as it was with slavery, remains the genesis of an exquisite idea, that the state should serve the citizenry, not vice versa.  I hope it will be so for my children.

I didn't really understand what the flag meant until she was raised at the end of my SERE training - and then, it's clear.  That flag stands for the idea that a man and woman are given at their birth the right to live or die on their own terms, to suffer the consequences of their own choices, and not at the hands of those who would choose for them.  Injustice is the result of coercive action by individuals or when backed by the state, and justice is when those who would coerce are repelled by the state.

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