By  E. W. Lang

Block cheese lost 10 cents this week to close at $2.28 per lb. Barrels lost four cents at $2.30, and butter gained three cents over five trading days. Class III milk futures for May, June and July average $24.85 per cwt. for a gain of six cents this week. Class IV gained 26 cents per cwt. and average $25.31 for the three months mentioned. The Class III Milk-Feed Index averages over $11 per cwt. for the rest of this year, and that indicates a modest profit level despite soybeans trading at contract high levels and July corn at $7.77 per bu., just off of the recent contract high of $8.22 per bu.

I think public memorials, generally, are something too common to us in the United States. We often as a nation are asked to remember and honour, to some degree of excess, people who are dead but didn’t actually die for a cause that is significantly greater than themselves. Often this is something I think would be better privately remembered by family and social order. There are a couple of memorials that are different, however.

Christians are instructed to examine ourselves in remembrance, as often as we meet. This is, in part, intended to precipitate better lives and a better world. Within the Christian culture, however, ‘better’ is as migrant and subjective today as it was 1000 years ago. And to be fair, U.S. foreign policy has also been less than immaculate.

In the United States we have one designated day to specifically remember and honour the men and women who faithfully answered the call to armed service and lost their lives while in service. Those lives were also freely given, in a sense.

Some who lost their lives didn’t want to be drafted…but they still joined the military. Some served in battles that history proved to be foolish or futile. There have been some unpopular wars and forgotten wars, some unknown military actions, and despite whatever degree of bad judgement or poor judgement by our elected leadership, our freedom, security and independence as a State remains. It remains to an extent that is greater than many on the ideologically left or right understand, recognize or will publicly admit.

That freedom and privilege is largely borne of armed service, including the requisite lives lost on campaign.

Here's a parallel to my argument. Eighty years ago, the vast number of homes with a spouse, child or grandchild in service during World War II were held in greater esteem than a household where no one was in service. Any unexpected knock at the door or after-hours telephone call was cause for alarm, fear and often delivered unending grief for those within. Their young service member may have died in an horrific split second or matter of hours or days. His or her spouse and parents were then left to grieve for decades, usually in some helpless degree of solitude that few can comprehend.

In the United States, we have 250 years of lives lost during military service and battle, romantic, popular, warranted, and otherwise. Their day of remembrance should be held in greater esteem than others, as they answered the call or obligation to serve all, then didn’t return alive.