NOTE: Daily Star Editor Robert Cairns was on vacation this week.
Dad, you would hardly recognize the country you fought for all those years ago.
We are squabbling with our allies, arresting our own here at home and trampling all over our established democracy.
You were a lifelong political party loyalist, but we have discarded and forgotten your ideals and practices.
We no longer care about federal deficits. We threaten our neighbors and oppose global cooperation.
We cut assistance programs and put citizens’ hard-earned retirement benefits at risk.
We disrespect and defund the science that recognizes and counters dangerous weather patterns and deadly diseases.
When disaster does strike, we are slow to respond — if we respond at all.
We devalue service — of all types — and we hide from hard work and commitment.
We insult our veterans, and cut programs in place to support them after their time of sacrifice.
How would you feel about that?
You told me of the freezing nights in that far-away forest, of the intensity of the fighting — the bleeding and the dying — during that world-changing battle.
You came home alive, but carried the reminders in your body for the rest of your life.
You said the war’s outcome was worth the sacrifice made by you and so many.
Seems as if we’ve forgotten.
Now, we disregard our Constitution, written when a young nation moved away from tyranny and embraced freedoms — at first for some, eventually for all.
And now, we devalue our basic rights — to speak out, to report, to worship, to assemble peacefully and challenge our government — as set forth in our Constitution’s First Amendment.
We no longer see the value of transparency and accountability for our leaders. They do as they choose with little restraint.
We undermine our own system of checks and balances. We allow for control to be centralized in a single entity.
We yield our greatest power — rule by and for the people.
Your blood — many years before you became a father — helped us attain freedoms we now disregard.
But, as you know, our history was built on struggle and hardship — especially for those not in power.
We killed millions of fathers — along with their wives and children — in the taking of land and resources and launching a nation. We killed them with bullets and diseases — and by taking their home and destroying their food sources.
We chained tens of thousands of fathers and their families, and hauled them across an ocean to do the hard work to create our wealth and economic prosperity.
We enslaved millions, then persecuted them with violence and discrimination, even after the practice of slavery was ended.
And now we want to turn a blind eye to that part of our history and its ongoing impacts.
We raised a statue to celebrate the welcoming of immigrants who look like us, then persecuted those who don’t.
Tell me, Dad, have we learned anything?
You and I had our generational ideological differences. We certainly would argue and debate if you were still here.
You were far from perfect, and so am I. Fathers can be that way, right?
But we agreed on this principle: The liberties that so many died for should be revered and protected, not burned down and thrown away.
Dad, I fear that fewer and fewer of us believe in that principle.
Hope you’re resting easy, Dad.
Me? I am finding that unease and unrest are my continuous companions.