Ryan's gifts and the great task remaining before us.

"John Ryan Dennison was a shining light..."

When a young man's story opens by celebrating his life in the past tense,  don't expect a happy ending.   Unfortunately, not all stories worth telling have happy endings.  That doesn't make them any less important.  

Look past Ryan's megawatt smile and you may notice a glint of metal on his chest.   It is subtle and easily missed.  It's a decoration that doesn't call attention to itself, yet speaks volumes.  

John Ryan Dennison was more than merely a graduate of West Point, as if that distinction could ever be characterized as "merely" an achievement...

Skydivers know why the birds sing.
That decoration is a parachute with wings.  Ryan was airborne.  But he was not merely a thrill-seeker who jumped out of planes.  He was president of West Point's elite skydiving team, the Black Knights.  That is a position of leadership awarded by peers who have all distinguished themselves as leaders in their own right.  That is a singular distinction.

You can't charm your way into that position.  You sure as hell don't buy it.  You don't fool people into giving it to you, and you can't demand it.  It's not the sort of honor one solicits.  You get it the old fashioned way.  You earn it.  You earn the respect, trust, and loyalty of your peers.  You earn the privilege of representing them by setting an example that motivates everyone else to reach deeper and work harder.  By all accounts, that was one of Ryan's gifts.  

"He led from the front."
That is how his brigade commander characterized him.  His mother said, "He just did everything 110 percent."  His father called him "an extraordinary young man" and proudly noted that throughout his football career at Urbana High School, Ryan never played in a losing game.  All parents want to believe their kids are special.  Most believe that whether they have reason to or not.  The fact that Ryan gave his parents  ample reason to say that about him is just one more of Ryan's gifts.  

"He was someone we could always rely on."
That was how his high school football coach described him.  He noted that Ryan wasn't the biggest player, he was just the one who trained hardest.  That's high praise from a man who coached Ryan and his teammates to the  Maryland state football championship two years in a row.  His squadron commander echoed the assessment when he described Ryan's care for his men, "If they didn't have enough to eat, he gave them what he had. If they were tired he let them sleep and he stayed up."  

"Ryan had direction."
John Ryan Dennison was not merely a jock.  It is no surprise he met his wife at West Point in a philosophy class.  Even in high school he was an avid student.  He took college level courses as a junior in high school and excelled.  He could have chosen any field and done well, but his passion was history - particularly the Civil War.  Growing up in Maryland's Frederick County, Ryan would have been surrounded by history.  Anteitam, Monocacy, and South Mountain were all fought in his neck of the woods.  Gettysburg is just a few miles over the border in Pennsylvania.  It is clear that Ryan found his place in the world by exploring the history surrounding him.  That is a remarkable level of insight for a young man raised in a society where people wear their ignorance of the past like a red badge of courage.

"...the great task remaining before us."
As his principal so poignantly noted, "When you lose a young life, it somehow diminishes all of us."  I suppose it would be easy to mourn this latest loss as yet another example of our present March of Folly and leave it at that.  However, I think it would be a disservice to Ryan.  That is not how he would want to be remembered.  Instead of mourning, I think this sorry story can motivate us to redouble our efforts at ending the madness that steals our future.  

How many more shining lights must be extinquished before we put a stop to this?  How much further can we stand to be diminished?  The answer to these questions lies in the future, but the guidance we need can be found in the past.  The address President Lincoln delivered at Gettysburg one hundred and forty-three years ago takes on new and urgent meaning when we consider the unfinished work left for us to complete:

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

-- November 19, 1863

If not us, who? If not now, when?