November 11, 2015

Service to our country was instilled in us at a young age. It runs deep in my family: my dad, my uncles, both grandfathers and even my mom all served our country (she was in Vietnam as a nurse with Save the Children).

So I can’t let today pass without a thank you to our nation’s veterans.

I think about the sacrifices that my grandmothers made: one held three jobs while raising four boys while her husband was away. The other sent her husband off to the World War, where my grandfather served as a clergyman to the soldiers.

My grandmother was pregnant at the time, and my grandfather didn’t meet my mom until he returned home when she was three years old. It is hard to imagine sacrifices like that, but we would not be here without them.

My dad has always worn his patriotism on his sleeve. It’s how we were raised—to raise the bar a little bit higher on ourselves, to be the best that we could be, to make family and our country proud, to serve.

The courage of our military and the sacrifices of those families is something that we can never take for granted. Those liberties and freedoms were hard earned.

Right now, our children, should they take the field, would require epipens, asthma inhalers and insulin injections to accompany them. They are our future military. We have to fight for their freedoms, too.

No one is talking about this in the presidential debate, but a country that defends the health of its citizens, its children, also defends its economy, innovation, its liberties and prosperities.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve lost that. Our kids are not healthy enough to take the field.

My dad, uncles and grandfathers bravely fought for the health of our country. As we do our part, bowing our heads in gratitude for those that came before us, protecting these liberties that we hold so dear, our generation faces a unique challenge to our freedoms:

Are we doing everything that we can today to protect the health and safety of our children, so that they can protect the health, safety and liberties of our country in the years to come?

We can not afford to get this wrong. We owe it to our military, our veterans, our economy, our families and our future.