Liberty and sacrifice come hand in hand. You cannot truly have one without the other. For it is not the writer who ensures we have the right to free speech, but the soldier. It is not the businessmen that provide a free market, but the men who died in the rice paddies of Vietnam and Korea. It is not the priest who allows us to worship whomever or whatever we choose, but the private who gave his life. It is not the lawyer who has ensured our right to property, but the officer who gave his life so valiantly.
We have the freedom because others have made the sacrifice. The art of war has evolved with time. From rifleman ornately lined in orderly battalions to men sweeping between the trees and hills in guerilla warfare, combat has continually changed. The fight has gone from the fields to land in far distant countries, but one thing has remained the same: the ideals for which Americans have made the ultimate sacrifice, a society free from oppression, cherishing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Again the war has changed, morphed into a battle of opposing ideologies where the enemy no longer hides behind a building, but strikes us where we live and work. The enemy now targets our culture, hoping to change our way of life that they envy. They look to make us think twice about getting onto a plane or visiting a metropolitan area. They want us to question whether the freedoms we enjoy are a risk to the security that we can no longer afford to enjoy. We must not do this, we must show resolve. We must resist the temptation to go about our lives according to a terror alert level or new threat that the media may conjure up. Let us leave that task to the government. It is their job to think of the ways in which we may be vulnerable and develop solutions, as opposed to a public that now walks in fear with images of terror filling our thoughts and lives.
The sacrifices made by Americans were based on the premise that they were for something greater than the individual. The sacrifices came on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, but they were not in vain. Four years ago this week these sacrifices moved from foreign lands to American soil. Thousands had their lives taken, but we must not let them be in vain. While at the time they may not have been aware they paid the sacrifice of a soldier.
Let us honor and pay tribute to each and every one of them by the way in which we lead our lives and the decisions we make. Continue to cherish our culture of freedom, never giving it up, for we would be turning our backs to those who passed on September 11 and every American before that.
Whether we realize it or not, we are on guard. We are the soldier now, and while we may not be in a trench, we are the living act of our ideology of liberty and we must never relent.
