Here is another great letter from today's Spfd paper. Don't know this person but she is quite a writer!

Dusk had barely settled before the first loud boom echoed across the shallow valley where I live, just a stone's throw from Wilson's Creek National Battlefield. Then, the barrage began. Fireworks season again.
As the trees darkened into stark silhouettes against an uneasy, overcast sky, the sounds of explosions surrounded my backyard. It wasn't too difficult to imagine myself back to the time on this very soil when artillery shells and bombs were meant to maim and kill fellow American citizens, warriors for both the North and the South. Back then, the blast of gunpowder exploding in cylinders resulted in more than high-fives and dares to see who among a crew of foolhardy middle-school boys would hold onto the lit roman candle the longest before tossing it (hopefully) skyward.
How many women in that distant time listened, as I did now, to the sounds of battle ricocheting off the hills surrounding their once quiet homesteads? I felt a sad kinship to this sisterhood, who surely wanted many of the same simple comforts women today strive for in our modern lifetimes: a secure place to raise our children, plentiful food, clean water, and most importantly, peace.
The complacent security we've known in brief restful spans as a young nation has once again slipped out of our grasp. Distant battlefields in foreign lands are remote no longer with the advent of live-action feeds from cell-phone cameras.
Somehow, the celebration inherent in lighting wicks on a bouquet of bottle rockets escapes me this year. Young men and women in uniform are risking their very heartbeats in a throat-parching desert far away from these green hills. They must awaken daily dreading an encounter with all too real eardrum-shattering artillery. Wouldn't it be great if, instead of incinerating a $20 bill in the form of fireworks, we all put together care packages for our neighbors serving overseas instead? After all is said and done, they're the ones preserving the very freedoms we celebrate on Independence Day.

Here is the quote Sarah included with her article.
"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. "It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. "It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. "It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."- Father Denis Edward O'Brien

Good column by S. Overstreet

Elsewhere on this page I am posting today's column by Sarah Overstreet, a feature writer for Springfield News-Leader. I thought it was WONDERFUL and very much worth passing on to those of you who don't have the privilege of reading her stuff.

Sarah and I are an interesting story in ourselves which has a good point to make. Sarah has been writing for the News-Leader for a long time, certainly since before 1983. I know, because that's the year they hired me to write a weekly column for their editorial page wherein I was supposed to show my conservative social issue and political points of view in such a controversial way so as to garner more readership for their newspaper.

Those of you who know me will recognize that this was right down my "opinionated outspoken alley". Back in those days people could have their letters to the editor printed anonymously, so while my name and picture appeared each week with my philosophizing, people could come at me from all sides with their criticisms and I never knew who they were.

Sarah, on the other hand, could find fault with my writings, and did in her writings, but had to sign her name. So over the course of 9 years our picking at each other went on quite frequently, but we didn't know each other, had never laid eyes on each other.

I quit writing in 1992 because I was antagonizing my insurance clients who disagreed with me, and I needed their commissions more than the monthly small stipend the newspaper was paying for me to generate letters to the editor. Sarah, meanwhile, continued to write.

Then last year, when I took up the cause for Dr. Ramona Miller, I found out Sarah was working on her cause, too, and as fate would have it, Sarah and I met at the Laclede County jail one day while both of us were there to visit Dr. Miller.

We took to each other immediately, and have become good friends, even finding out we have much more in common than we ever had in diversity, and I just love her and admire her so much. And the moral of this story is....if everyone could really get to know each other, we might fight less and actually expend our energies working for good instead of using it against each other.

Now, if you have read this far, please read very carefully her column I have posted. And then read the veterans' tribute which she had printed along with her column. It is SO beautiful and moving.

Published July 4, 2007
Relish opportunity to celebrate Fourth
There's a poem circulating on the Internet that has some e-mailers a-twitter, both pro and con. Detractors say it's pro-military, and/or lacks the perspective that all of us who champion freedom, in our own ways, have blazed trails, held the faith and otherwise acted to preserve our freedom. Another critic says that rights are inherent, and no one "gives" them to us.
Ohhhh-kaaaay. Tell that to the people of Darfur.
The poem's detractors are correct in that it takes all of us doing our respective jobs to remain a free people, to protect our Constitution. I'm just sorry more of us don't defend it more fiercely, especially screaming like wounded crows, to our elected representatives.
The poem printed above is by the late Father Denis Edward O'Brien, who was a chaplain in the U.S. Marine Corps.
I included the poem in the recent funeral of my brother, George Keeslar. He was a veteran of the Korean War, a radio operator on the battlefield who came back home to take up a "trade," as he called it, and never received any accolades for his service that I knew of. He didn't dwell on the two years devoted to what our leaders determined was in the best interests of our country; he just went and did his job as a soldier.
Other people his age, who didn't go into the armed forces, had a two-year head start on beginning their careers, making money, starting families and whatever else they chose to do. He came back with a "suck it up, it was my duty" attitude and a duffel bag, and began to plan from there.
I wanted the veterans' tribute read at my brother's funeral, first, in recognition of what he did, but second, with the hope this message would come through as well: "It is the soldier, not the reporter ... It is the soldier, not the campus organizer ... It is the soldier, not the poet ... ."
The words also resonate for all the things I didn't have to do when we were my brother's age, nor did most of my contemporaries, even through we were in the middle of the Vietnam War. I got to start college right on time and didn't have to give a moment of any kind of civilian service to my country, to have any function that spilled over to the soldiers fighting, or to anything but pursue my own self-interests.
I'm not sure it was a good thing. I was a war protester then, so sure of myself and the rightness of my ideas at age 18 and 19, the same age my brother was when he was fighting in Korea. Ideologies aside, I had to give nothing, and I believe it colored my view of the world: that it was a safe cocoon where there would be setbacks, but all I had to do was to weather them. Certainly not to sacrifice a couple of years of my life to go in a totally different direction than I was intent on going.
So, on this, another July 4, a day I look forward to as a chance to celebrate what we have achieved in this imperfect yet glorious country, I relish the opportunity to celebrate and honor our veterans as well as our founding fathers, who were one smart bunch of cookies.
If it were not for our soldiers, I would not have the right to write whatever profound, zany or off-the-wall poem I want. Those who choose can even write any obscene poem they want. If not for our soldiers, my freedom of speech might be limited to writing on a piece of napkin in a German work camp (although I have a feeling surviving Americans would have tapped out messages to each other and hatched a plan to take ourselves back).
Yes, it does take all of us to make this giant, only 231-year-old experiment work.
It's just that I realize I've always had someone watching my back, making sure I have the safety and freedom to do what the First Amendment grants me the right to do.