More veterans to come
Monday is Veteran's Day. (Or, as the 6-year-old boy at the house where I'm staying put it, "Tomorrow is Veterinarian's Day!") I just finished reading The Greatest Generation, the Tom Brokaw paean to the men and women who served in World War II. It was an eye-opener, certainly; I know intuitively that the people of my grandparents' generation went about life in a completely different fashion from the way you and I go about it, but I don't always think in detail about how incredibly different it was. Children of the Reagan years, such as myself, take a lot of things for granted. I'm OK with that; we're able to do so because of what those who went before us did. It proves that their efforts and losses weren't in vain.

I hope.

As we stand on the brink of yet another war, where yet more mothers will lose sons for reasons that aren't entirely clear and have really very little to do with my daily life in Florida or your daily life wherever you are (and don't you wish your daily life was in Florida? If you don't now, you will in a couple of months) ... as we stand on the brink of yet another war, I hope our leaders are really really thinking about what they're doing before they take us on the plunge. Make no mistake: that GOP sweep on Tuesday was a war mandate. We're whipped into a war frenzy. That election was not about cutting taxes or fixing the economy or ending abortion. It's about war.

In the memory of all those who are laying under grass in France and Germany and Japan and Vietnam and in national cemeteries all over the United States, I hope they know what they're doing.