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Another great letter to the editor

Here is another great letter from the Memorial Day issue of the Spfd paper. Don't know this person but she is quite a writer!

Dusk had barely settled before the first loud boom echoed across the shallow valley where I live, just a stone's throw from Wilson's Creek National Battlefield. Then, the barrage began. Fireworks season again.

As the trees darkened into stark silhouettes against an uneasy, overcast sky, the sounds of explosions surrounded my backyard. It wasn't too difficult to imagine myself back to the time on this very soil when artillery shells and bombs were meant to maim and kill fellow American citizens, warriors for both the North and the South.

Back then, the blast of gunpowder exploding in cylinders resulted in more than high-fives and dares to see who among a crew of foolhardy middle-school boys would hold onto the lit roman candle the longest before tossing it (hopefully) skyward.

How many women in that distant time listened, as I did now, to the sounds of battle ricocheting off the hills surrounding their once quiet homesteads?

I felt a sad kinship to this sisterhood, who surely wanted many of the same simple comforts women today strive for in our modern lifetimes: a secure place to raise our children, plentiful food, clean water, and most importantly, peace.

The complacent security we've known in brief restful spans as a young nation has once again slipped out of our grasp. Distant battlefields in foreign lands are remote no longer with the advent of live-action feeds from cell-phone cameras.

Somehow, the celebration inherent in lighting wicks on a bouquet of bottle rockets escapes me this year. Young men and women in uniform are risking their very heartbeats in a throat-parching desert far away from these green hills. They must awaken daily dreading an encounter with all too real eardrum-shattering artillery.

Wouldn't it be great if, instead of incinerating a $20 bill in the form of fireworks, we all put together care packages for our neighbors serving overseas instead? After all is said and done, they're the ones preserving the very freedoms we celebrate on Independence Day.

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