While this is the 2014 election issue, it is also our annual Veterans’ Day issue and this year, for the first time literally in decades, we do not have a feature story on a local veteran ready for our front page.
It is the editor’s responsibility to ensure we have a veteran’s story and it’s not done. We could make excuses and say this, that, or the other thing played a part, but who cares really? It’s not done and that’s the bottom line.
This is important because part of this company’s commitment to our community is recording the stories of our local veterans. We want to get all of them; from our oldest World War II survivor to our most recent warrior. They are all important.
Two years ago, Election Day 2012, Nov. 6, seemingly fell on top of Veterans’ Day 2012, Nov. 12.
We said at the time that it felt very much like the run up to a bitterly contested presidential election overshadowed Veterans’ Day that year. Veterans’ Day is very much a standalone holiday. It should be. Yet, it it is somehow good and right that Election Day and Veterans’ Day are so closely intertwined on the American calendar.
We ask a lot of our soldiers. We don’t pay them very well, yet we demand they be willing to go anywhere, at any time, in any conditions, to defend our interests. They don’t get to make excuses and they don’t get do-overs. Their collective efforts, in part, established and secured the right to vote many of us exercised yesterday.
All the philosophical ideals in the world about freedom and liberty are no substitute for a muscular military to support those principles.
That said, there is never a bad time to appreciate a soldier. There is never a bad time to be thankful for what the force of arms and the strength of our ideals has brought us.
