This Memorial Day We Remember...

 Memorial Day is often marked by cookouts and celebrations. Getting together with those you love is a great way to celebrate, but cookouts hopefully are

 

Memorial Day is often marked by cookouts and celebrations. Getting together with those you love is a great way to celebrate, but cookouts hopefully are marked with remembering also.

 

Recently, I sat at the dinner table of an 84 year-old World War II survivor from Germany. This lovely woman’s name was Augusta. Over an incredible dinner of German food highlighted with schnitzel, I felt guilty as I kept asking questions seeking the incredible information from a time long gone from this living encyclopedia.

 

She and her husband had immigrated to America after WWII. Her husband had been a member of the German army. She told of the shock and the humiliation of her people when the Allies had freed the concentration camps. She said that the German people “had no clue that was happening.”

 

She told of the Russians and how they had to flee from what would soon become East Germany. She talked of hope and fear coming to a land that had just beaten them in a war. Although 84 today, the raw emotion of the time was right under her beautiful smile and frail body. You could see the fire in her as she retold stories with great detail. Stories that for people who had not experienced it, her emotion captivated you.

 

She and her son talked to me about the WWII movies being revisited each and every holiday. I asked for and she gave me great detail about how Hitler’s speeches on radio, “captivated us. They were not full of hate. It was about jobs and economy.” It was some time into Hitler’s reign that people saw his dark side. She told of the heartbreak of learning what had happened to the Jewish people.

 

All of these years later without a tear, you could see the emotion of being a new legal immigrant to a new country that people had recently lost loved ones fighting was like. You could see her appreciation for her new country. She talked about America, even the difficult times, with a precious expression of deep faith in her land and a thankful heart for her.

 

She loves this nation. Her son told of having neighbor children seeing his father on the porch and walking by giving the hail Hitler salute. The hurt of those times only overcome by a love of this land.

 

Augusta told me one story that made me want to hug her, but I found myself frozen to my chair. Speaking in English with a heavy German aspect, “People would tell us German, German, German, like we were bad. We were Americans now. We had our papers.” She wasn’t in anyway attacking Americans. She understood the situation. She was trying to convey the time period.

 

Today there is a young man out in California who is on his way in a few days to Afghanistan. He will be asked to attack and kill taliban forces. Some say that only the young men and women from poor families fight without a draft. He is proof that that particular theory is balderdash.

 

He is a tough young man who comes from a family of means. He signed up to fight for one reason. He loves his country. His name is Gregg and he will go over to a land to fight in the mountains and the sand because that is what patriots do.

 

Both Augusta and Gregg are the embodiment of being American. This country is not perfect, but it is the best in the world. We don’t build walls to keep our citizens as history has shown us many do who aren’t us. America is not in her best shape. America has real issues that she is debating and battling right now, but we are America. 

 

What America does best is that her citizens always rise to the challenge. When our patriots are allowed to win wars we do. When America is facing an identity crisis somehow her people remember who we are and respond.

 

This Memorial Day we do remember; all of those who served, were wounded, and died. We remember all of those like Augusta whose journey hasn’t been easy, but today is as much an American than anyone. Her years of working, paying taxes, and raising children and grandchildren to be patriots have cemented in her a love of this nation. This Memorial Day we remember Gregg. He didn’t have to go to war. He wasn’t drafted and he didn’t need the money. He is a patriot.

 

He will head to fight a cowardly enemy that hides in civilian homes, schools, and hospitals. He will try to keep them from coming and cowardly blowing civilians away like they did in 9/11. He will fight and execute a war on Islamic Extremists not because he had to, but because he felt the calling of the patriot that so many have felt in our history.

 

Only in this great land can Augusta at 84 who grew up in Germany with a husband who fought us, and a young warrior both celebrate this Memorial Day arm in arm. Patriots. We salute more than the veterans this year. We salute America and her people. From those who fought the red coats to those like Gregg fighting the Islamic Extremists. From the Native Americans here long before Columbus to the baby most recently born and the legal immigrants like Augusta. Once reminded that she was “German, German, German,” who now is thanked for being “American, American, American.”

 

Thank you veterans. Thank you America. Our greatest gift is our people. Our greatest strength is that in crisis we always find our way back to who we are thanks to the moral compass this nation was founded on and a Constitution that points us to true north.

 

Today we eat our hotdogs, watch parades, and enjoy our friends. Most of all today we remember. Thanks Augusta. Thanks Greggory. Thanks America!