Other Columns by Kevin Fobbs
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Memorial Day has several different meanings for Americans. For some, we were spending a weekend reflecting, reminiscing and reminding ourselves about the sacrifices our family members, neighbors, and fellow Americans made as soldiers for our nation. At the same time, many of us were also focusing our attention on our children, nieces, nephews and for many, our grandchildren who are preparing themselves to take the final walk across their high school or college graduation stage.

One of the questions these new graduates have to be pondering has to be "what nation and world are we graduating into"? For young people it has to be fraught with some sense of peril. These post 9/11 graduates are inheriting a nation that lived through the most vicious attack on our nation since that horrible day of December 7th, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was bombed without warning and without provocation.

This horrible event from so long ago can certainly be a guide for the young graduates of today. I point purposely to this past Memorial Day weekend, because it is at this time that families typically gather around and share some very special moments with parents, grandparents and a host of family and friends who pour through the family photos to point out perhaps their now aged warriors of World War II. Perhaps they point to an uncle or grandparent who did not return home to his native soil and now lies buried in a U.S. cemetery on foreign soil

Perhaps, the family visited their local cemetery where their father or uncle or even aunt or grandmother now lies buried, a former soldier who served, who fought, and who sacrificed for their nation, because it was the right thing to do...because it was the American thing to do.

Perhaps they visited a hospital with the soon to be graduate and sat on the side of the bed with an aging grandparent or father who was a soldier in the fox hole or perhaps a pilot or a tail gunner in one of the flying fortresses from the Second World War. The parent's son or daughter may have sat quietly and listened to stories spun from long buried memories of acts of bravery, mixed with a little bit of fear, but a whole lot of courage. Maybe the young adult son stood up and just as he was getting ready to leave his hospital room, he turned and saluted his grandfather, and thanked him for his gift to our nation, to his community and to his family.

Your daughter may have asked the question at the backyard barbeque on Memorial Day, "What about women? " as she passed the photos of the women in the family who also sacrificed during those tumultuous war years. What did Grandmother Christina or Aunt Cynthia do when they were a Wave or a WAC during World War II? In listening she probably learned that perhaps the times her grandmother grew up in were not much different from the times now as she is about to step across the graduation.

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