Memorial Day

Today we pause to reflect on those whose ultimate sacrifice allows us to compete in sports as we know it today.

Normally I write, and you read, about the extraordinary accomplishments of the athletes who graduate from Missouri and Kansas high schools. Many of those are truly amazing. But today, we move to a completely different plane. One, the result of which, allows us to do what we do each day. Today we remember in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln:

...that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain…

Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg, November 19, 1863

There is evil in this world. I don’t know why. But there is. If that evil ever prevails, making a college roster won’t be in the top 100 of our worries.

Happiness for our freedoms and liberties is for tomorrow. That is because today we are consumed in solemnity and somberness in the rememberence of the ultimate sacrafice given by so many.

May we do what is necessary to ensure that those brave men and women rest among the fields of poppies first noted by Canandian Lieutenent Colonel John McRae. After losing a friend in WWI he wrote:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place: and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders’ fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe;

To you from failing hands we throw

the torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders’ fields.

John McRae, on a battlefield in 1915