Today is Thanksgiving, a special holiday meant to be shared with loved ones, a day when we get to say thanks for the things that we cherish in our lives.
By the time you read this, I’ll be home on Long Island, seeing my parents, my little sister and a cornucopia of relatives, watching football and eating until I pass out. The hubbub around the day’s festivities, topped off with a truckload of tryptophan, can sometimes obscure the meaning of the holiday at our, and perhaps your, annual gathering.
Of course, the time spent with one’s loved ones is the true highlight of the day. For some families, Thanksgiving is the only chance they have each year to come together.
But for thousands of families around the country, Thanksgiving will feel incomplete.
This year, thousands of families will celebrate the holiday without a son or daughter who is deployed overseas, hidden somewhere in the depths of Iraq or Afghanistan. By now, with the “War on Terror” stretching into a seventh year, most people at least know a family with a loved one in combat. Personally, a handful of guys from my high school math classes are currently overseas.
No matter your opinions on our presence in the war-torn areas, the sacrifices these young men and women make every day cannot be questioned. It is their dedication to our country that allows us the freedoms that we take for granted every day.
Want to turn on the television and watch an extravagant Thanksgiving Day parade? Or pick up your local daily newspaper (Miss a Day, Miss a Lot!) and read the ramblings of your favorite national columnist?
While we consider these benefits automatic, it is our soldiers who have put their lives on the line every day, and will continue to do so, who let these freedoms ring.
Even the greenest anti-war protesters have the soldiers of past and present to thank for the right to gather and express dissension. Not every country in the world allows protesters; if you hate it here so much, try living — and protesting — in Pakistan.
Other families this year, unfortunately, will have to live with the fact that they’ll never again be able to sit down and celebrate with their son or daughter. Each month, scores of soldiers are killed in the line of duty, returning home shrouded in a coffin, draped in an American flag.
I can only hope that these families of the finest men and women in our country realize that the absence of their loved one this afternoon, be it temporary or forever, are not in vain.
And so today, while you and I both say thanks to our own loved ones, it is important to offer similar gratitude to those who make these annual festivities possible in the first place.
Strub is a senior at Binghamton University and a part-time copy editor at the Press & Sun-Bulletin. His column appears Thursdays.
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