I want to keep a link to Nick's powerful story on this page now.
I want to challenge you to figure out how to join us in our grief, to lead our nation and world in healing, peacemaking rituals in which grow closer by sharing our suffering. We in Gold Star Families need this. You need this. The world needs this. Jim Wallis says that religion is always personal, but never private. The same is true of a soldier who is killed in action. Each one has an immediate family. But we are also a national family and a global family. I want to challenge you to end policies that isolate us, such as the secrecy when our heroes’ bodies come home. There is a policy, which nobody seems admit exists, that the department of defense offers no help for the Gold Star families to contact each other, which is why projects like Eyes Wide Open and Arlington West are so important. More than one million U.S. soldiers have served in Iraq – can we tell a million families that if they hang a blue star banner on their house, their neighbors will offer compassion and not judgment?
Will you lead our nation and our world to adopt and celebrate, even for an hour or a day, the lives of Wes, Erik, Casey, Mike, Travis, Sherwood, Patrick and all the others, to share our grief because they are your sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews? And let us remember that the human family is bigger than just one nation, so that we might share in the grief of our brothers and sisters in Iraq and so many places where we rarely turn our eyes.
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