Today is Veterans Day, so every American owes a debt of gratitude to all those who have served and continue to defend our great nation. I had planned to visit the Veterans cemetery today but due to the rain with this tropical storm, I’ll take flowers another day, when the weather clears up.
I ended up tweeting some about politics this morning, but I want to limit how much time I spend on politics Twitter, since I haven’t completely broken the habit. I have gone days without looking at Twitter at all and that’s progress. Another goal is to limit how much politics news I ingest. Trump declared all-out war on Ron DeSantis, apparently, while DeSantis is doing his job as governor and FL deals with another storm. Then apparently, Trump was posting crap on Truth Social, his new social media home, trashing the governor of VA, Glenn Youngkin, saying his name sounds Chinese and spelling it Young-Kin. Yes, that’s how threatened Donald Trump feels, that he wants to destroy any potential 2024 upstarts in the GOP. I say, apparently, because I didn’t verify this information and don’t have an account at Truth Social and don’t want to join anymore social media formats.
That’s it on the politics in this post, because with it being Veterans Day, one of the things I was thinking about was how the US military is now an all-volunteer force, where patriots from all walks of life, decide to serve. The glue that holds our military together are shared values and a dedication to a mission larger than yourself.
While everyone certainly is entitled to their own personal beliefs and views, we can all benefit from regularly taking a step back and looking beyond ourselves and listening to other people’s ideas, views, and beliefs. When my kids were growing up I used to tell them not to judge people based on what they look like, where they live or work, what kind of clothes they wear, etc. I told them if you take the time to get to know people a bit, not what you think you know about them (which is often gossip), that you’re likely to be surprised often when you start getting to know a bit about people and listen more. It’s not uncommon to find that even a guy working at a gas station might have developed an interest in reading Shakespeare or painting, at some point in his life or that some lady working in a store, who came to America from a much poorer country, went to college or developed great skill at some other type of work or craft. Many years ago, when I worked at Walmart, our store had Bulgarian immigrants as the overnight crew that cleaned the store. As I got to know them, I learned that one of the men had been a Bulgarian army officer and another one had been a hospital administrator.
When I joined the Army in 1979, one of the things I loved the most was meeting people from all over America and the world. It was wonderful to be exposed to so many different people, who although coming from completely different places and backgrounds, worked together as one team.
We are all fortunate to have people, who are willing to put aside their differences and commit to a common goal – defending America. We can all spend less time investing in being partisans and more in being Americans. Today is a good day to give a moment’s thought to that.
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