By Bob Holeman 

I drove to the Post Office on Saturday morning.  As I rounded the corner at First Baptist and City Hall, I was greeted by a full company of American Flags, each flying independently as affected by wind gusts.

I slowed to take in the sight (there was no traffic behind me).  I felt a sense of pride for my country as my glance swept down the row of flags extending all the way to the Pose Office corner.  That feeling hit me.  But why?  It’s just the flag.  It’s what we tend to see and ignore as we drive past parks or buildings or businesses where a flag is always on display.

You hear that “familiarity breeds contempt.”  Perhaps this is not contempt but a dulling of the senses, a taking for granted the Stars and Stripes of our nation and what it really stands for.  Occasionally it takes a little shock treatment like a church displaying an impressive cluster of American Flags or the Lions Club taking time to line Main Street and the railroad overpass with American Flags to make us stop and realize, “Whoa!  It’s Memorial Day, isn’t it?”

Let’s think about Memorial Day in this context.  I’d suggest that no other holiday better embodies the Red, White & Blue banner that represents for our nation.  Memorial Day is not a swimming and fishing and watermelons announcement that “Summer Has Arrived.”  It’s a time set aside to remember those service men and women through the years who have given their lives so that we in America can sit at home, go to work, and attend worship more freely than anywhere else in the world.

Veterans Day is wonderful.  It celebrates the men and women who served or even fought for these same freedoms.  But they came home, often scarred and broken, mind you.  But those we are asked to remember on Memorial Day, they didn’t come home.  They were brought back in coffins, having given everything…their lives…for this country.

The preacher Sunday morning cited John 15:13 when Jesus said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

Let me mention an irony.  Go back some decades and find parades and flags and memorial gatherings around flagpoles.  Taps was played and rifles shot in tribute.  Now in America’s heartland, it’s mostly a long weekend and celebration of summer’s start.  On our nation’s coasts, mobs gather, waving banners and chanting slogans like “Death to America” or “Death to Israel.”

So here’s the irony.  It’s those who served and died and are recognized on Memorial Day who gave these students the freedom to voice their national disrespect.  And the ultimate irony is that these students don’t even realize where that freedom came from.  Or don’t care.  They’ve just always had it.  Tell them, “Freedom has a price.”  I wonder how things would go down if they moved their riots to the streets of Tehran and chanted “Death to Iran?”  Students tried that in Tiananmen Square and it didn’t work out so well.

When I wrote about our local World War II veterans, I noted that when they recited the Pledge of Allegiance, their chests may have swollen a little more than the rest of us.  They had seen the effort it required, the blood that was shed and the lives that were given to raise the American Flag on the shores of tiny Pacific islands or in towns across Europe.  They understood what our Flag stands for.