Thank you to all who serve.
As has already been said here, today is for all those who never made it home, kids and young men who never got to enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice, that the rest of us could.
I have known far more than my rightful mortal share of them, far more than any man should.
I try to keep them all in my heart, I really, really do, but memories fade and the river of life rushes on. That damn river, it does not care, it just keeps flowing on
Over in P&N, a gaggle of turgid, fatuous fools are busy "debating" the pros and cons of a modern Southern secession.
Let me just say this:
There has only and ever been ONE flag for me, and that is the Stars and Stripes, Old Glory. I put my life on the line for her, as did my father, and if necessary, I gladly would again.
E pluribus unum. From many, ONE.
In P&N, juvenile partisan twerps have have tried without cessation to smear the memory and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. To him, I say, we owe
everything.
He kept the Union whole, and all our subsequent greatness and supremacy has flowed from that.
It is said that the ghost of the great American statesman Daniel Webster, whenever encountered, had but one question, "How stands the Union?"
Well, despite hordes of bickering, ungrateful yahoos, I am proud to say that the Union still stands.
Lincoln said it all, and he said it best:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before usthat from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotionthat we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vainthat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedomand that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
May God, Thor and The Flying Spaghetti Monster all bless the
United States of America, that the blood and death and sacrifice of all our fallen may truly not have been in vain.
Tl;dr? Click, listen and remember: Semper Fi!
