The flag stands for a set of principles, not the lack of adherence to them.

To consider the rights of others before I exercise my own, to see my fellowman as my opportunity not my liability, and to understand that a life shaped by Biblical values is a life of deep endurance and raw power...to embrace all of this is to be the very thing that a wounded world is begging for.

Thank you to those men and women who put self aside because they held the thought of us on the inside. So, whether that be the bloodied beaches on D-Day or any number of other battles remembered or forgotten, we now hold you on the inside and we say “thank you.

If I have become so pathetically dulled that I hold freedom as my right and the privileges of liberty as my due, I can stand beside the stilled graves of a thousand soldiers fallen in defense of freedom and not feel a thing. And my most solemn prayer is that I will never be this.

May the many monuments that abound remind me of the desperate need for courage, the inestimable value of valor, the honor evoked of sacrifice, and the fact that a life spent in the service of self embodies none of these.

It is at the precise moment that I take something for granted that I have placed myself in the precarious position of losing that very thing. And if that thing I risk losing is liberty, taking it for granted is foolishness of the most foolish sort.

I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause.