Great shirt!!

[73sbVert]

We Are The .45%

There are two fundamental approaches in life: strive or blame.

You either look at problems and ask yourself how to solve them or you look at problems and explain to yourself why other forces outside your control have prevented you from succeeding.

Striving is the fundamental aspect of the American spirit. A person who strives sees opportunity, navigates obstacles, and gives back to the community. A person who strives yearns for freedom above all else, because they are confident that freedom favors them and allows their hard work to shine. Freedom gives us complete control over our destiny and assigns us full responsibility for both our successes and failures, and yes, that can be scary at times. But above all else, freedom gives us the opportunity to make of our lives what we can. It's an amazing gift that exists almost nowhere in this world.

And then there is the other option. We can dodge responsibility. We can blame others for the job we didn't get, the school we didn't attend, the game that we lost. We can make excuses for failures, develop an attitude of superiority and profess a grand understanding of the way the system works against us and mock those that strive. Life's not working out exactly the way we wanted? It can't possibly be our fault.

Life isn't fair. Lots of people have advantages they don't deserve. Congress is corrupt. We have an incestuous political system that is designed to keep the power in the hands of the few and keep us arguing about issues that are at best only minor symptoms of greater problems and at worst completely irrelevant items designed to draw us in to a my team versus your team endeavor to ensure the two-party system remains intact.

But we're still the richest country in the world and our citizens still have the most opportunity. Our poorest citizens have refrigerators, televisions, DVD players, and air conditioners. While we may not all have health insurance, we all get healthcare if needed. We all have running water. Most of all though, no matter our station we have the freedom to improve it.

I recently wrote about the 0.45%. The men and women who have served in the Global War on Terror. The rapidly shrinking group of people willing to stand on the wall and ensure that this freedom, this absolutely priceless commodity, remains for just a bit longer. There is absolutely no payment your country can ever give to reward you for your service.

I'd like to argue, however, that your value far exceeds the time you spend in uniform. Each of you will get out one day. You'll have spent 4-30 years striving, for in the military nothing else is acceptable. You'll be, for all intents and purposes, the only members of your generation who have seen real poverty, real suffering, and real evil. You will have spent years in a world where honor and integrity are essential and necessary elements of everyday life, even as you've witnessed the worst of mankind.

And you're going to be left with a choice.

You can abandon what you know to be true - that you are the master of your own destiny, so long as you're willing to fight for it - and fall in with the chattel that pine about what could be, should be, would be if only...

Or you can be who we need you to be. The men and women who take our country back. Who lead us as entrepreneurs, tear down the political machine one piece at a time, inspire other great citizens to be equally motivated, and remind them every single day that you breathe that no amount of comfort offered is worth even one minor concession of our freedom.

If you're wearing the uniform, we cannot possibly ask more of you right now.

If you've worn the uniform, you have done more for your country than most Americans will ever know.

And we need you to do more.

We need you to take the wisdom that can only be earned through the considerable trials and tribulations of military service and attack industry and politics with equal fervor.

I hope you're all eight steps ahead of me and already working down this path, but I realize that a few of you might simply be saying, "I've done enough." And you're right. It isn't fair to ask more of you. You've already given more than anyone should be expected to.

But freedom is never more than one generation from extinction, and there is no one else.

We are the 0.45%.

[RedLS1GTO]