What Cap said

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly… it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

— Thomas Paine 

In this consumer-driven, materialistic, selfish age, it is unfashionable in the extreme to point out that “the best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself- ultimate cost for perfect value”. (Not very difficult to guess where I got that from, by the way.)

Yet it is a fact that the uniquely American system of individual freedoms did not happen by accident. Freedom is costly and painful to acquire- which, given its immense blessings, is precisely how it should be. But that cost is disproportionately borne by those who voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way, to protect the rest of us. And it is to them that we owe gratitude and fidelity.

To those veterans who serve and have served- thank you.