To those of you who served this nation, on behalf of all of us who are part of it, we express our sincerest gratitude and deepest respect. Not just anyone can dedicate the time, effort, tears, and sweat that you have. Not everyone can make the sacrifices that you have. The magnitude of what you do for the rest of us deserve an entire day of commemoration, as well as an acknowledgement from all of us here in America.

It is important that we show you what you and your service means to us. What you fight for guarantees our safety and liberty, which we are taught in classrooms with books and lessons – but we have come to understand on our own what that means. We have now seen the freedom we have, every day as we arrive to our schools, in which we are promised a solid education, and as we practice our faiths and exercise our beliefs and give our opinions, whatever they may be, no matter what we look like or where we come from.

We hear the freedom you protect for us in the words we say every morning as we gaze at the emblem of the land we love and place our hands over our grateful hearts. We smell and taste the sweetness of knowing we are not chained to our governments when we step up to the polls and celebrate our independence. We feel our freedom embrace us as we enjoy all it has to offer us, and with those senses with which we experience our liberty we also experience the love you put into the labor that provides us with it.

We wish to thank you for protecting our freedom, and to show how much we value it, we want you to know that we, too, in our own way, every day, will protect our freedom. We will not take it for granted. We will remember the price that is being paid for it and not let it go to waste.

To those of you who have fought, to those of you who were not afraid, to those of you who thought of the rest of us, to those of you who bled red, white, and blue in our name, to those of you who keep our nation the land of the free and home of the brave, from all of us, thank you.