Let me tell you a little story about what its like to know someone is going to die. You see, about a month ago we needed to order some flags... we needed about 3,000 flags more precisely.
Here at UNO we are putting on our second annual Tribute To The Fallen, an event in which we place one flag in the ground in the center of our campus for each American soldier to have died in the current Iraq War.
We were ordering more flags this year, over a thousand more than last year in fact, but we didn't know how many more to order. You see, we had to order the flags a month in advance.
This is where knowing someone is going to die comes in...
you see we knew we needed to over order.
What we didn't anticipate was that April 2007 would turn out to be one of the deadliest months of the war. And so while we ordered over a hundred more flags that we thought we'd need, we found ourselves last night being careful not to break a single flag because we knew we might run out.
And after placing 3,300 flags or so last night, we found out this morning we needed to put 9 more in the ground.
The reason I'm diaring this here and not on our blog www.unodemocrats.com/blog or on our website www.tributetothefallen.com is because I want to make a personal statement not on behalf of the UNO College Democrats.
- I'm sick of this war. This isn't a grand struggle for freedom or against tyranny or to protect our homeland. This is a civil war that we're trying to police, and it's war our country started on false pretenses. I'm sick of it and I want it to end. As a good friend of mine said last night, "I don't want to have to put one of these flags in for my brother next year."
That's how we all feel here in the College Democrats. We all have close personal friends and family fighting in this war, and we want them to come home.
- I'm sick of having my patriotism questioned. Tribute is the largest patriotic display in Omaha, and it was founded by the UNO College Democrats. That's right the UNO Democrats not the UNO Republicans. It's patriotic to demand current body armor for our troops. It's patriotic to demand a just reason to fight a war, to demand to be told the truth before the war starts. And it's patriotic to want to bring our troops home when they're being senselessly slaughtered out there. I'm a proud and patriotic American, and a Nebraskan, and I'm sick and tired of anyone thinking otherwise because I'm also a proud Democrat.
UPDATE:
Photos from the first night of Tribute are up in the photo gallery. We'll be adding more as the week goes on.
Special thanks to Senators Bob Kerrey and Ben Nelson who supplied the donations for the flags last year and this year helping to make this event possible.
As always, don't forget to check www.tributetothefallen.com for more updates.