Veteran's Day

I awoke from a brief nap at 3pm, feeling like a squashed toad. Earlier this week I made a mental note to remember that the mail doesn't run today. As I was stumbling out to the mail box in a drooling stupor, my mental notes hadn't made their way to my short-term memory bank yet.

Since it's such a rare sunny November day, I rode my bicycle down to the Houston Brick (utility office/library/town meeting place) to see about checking out some poetry anthologies before they closed for the weekend. Unfortunately, since it's just a small little upstairs room with books, there was nothing to suit my needs.

So I came back home and here I am. CNN is on in the next room and I just heard Jack Cafferty rambling about how Americans should all be ashamed of themselves for "celebrating" Veteran's Day by shopping, etc. Over 653,000 people have lost their lives so that we can live freely in this country. According to the CNN folks, we don't acknowledge or appreciate this fact. I agree to an extent, though I'm a little confused as to what more we can do. To me, Veteran's Day has always been a day to thank and honor the survivors through programs, newspaper memorials, etc. But does that mean it's supposed to be a day where we completely disregard other activities of our daily lives?

Unfortunately, it isn't just Veteran's Day that is minimized, though. I just saw that some retail stores are considering dropping the "theme" of Christmas all together. Now this really disturbs me and I will probably refuse to shop at such establishments all together.

But that's an entirely different story and I will have to post more about that later.

Thank you to all of those who have served this country. It may not be as free as it once was, but it is still my home country and there's no place else I'd rather be.