This post was originally published on May 26, 2014, but it’s still relevant today. 
Go ahead and celebrate today’s holiday with a grill and a swill or a trip to some big box store to buy discounted appliances. Unless you’re part of the other one percent — the tiny fraction of Americans who served in the military during the long wars fought since September 11, 2001 — Memorial Day may not feel personal to you.
But if you’re an American, it should. The 6,809 service members killed and 52,010 wounded in nearly thirteen years of war made these sacrifices on your behalf. They gave their lives so that you could go about your way. A growing gap between military and civilian populations has created an easy out for those looking for a reason not to engage in issues of foreign policy and military action. “People say, ‘You volunteered. You knew what you were signing up for,’” one veteran told me recently. That may be true.
Yet there’s a population of innocents who shoulder the burden of military service without ever having made the choice — military kids. These children must accept that their parents’ lives belong to the military first. No matter how dedicated and engaged the parent is, family obligations will always come after military ones. Deployed fathers can’t make it home for their children’s births, mothers or fathers miss a child’s first day of school or graduation.
Military families are resilient. They learn to cope. But some of them must bear the unbearable. Nearly 5,000 military children have lost a parent since 9/11. For these kids, today is a time to reflect and remember the parent that they will never fully know. Their gold star pins are both a badge of honor and a symbol of loss.
For civilians, today provides an opportunity to reflect on the sacrifices that gold star military families have made in your name. Before you fire up the grill or head to the mall, take a moment to join the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America in their #GoSilent campaign — a nation-wide moment of silence at 12:01 EDT today — to honor the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Images: Child with folded flag courtesy of Shutterstock. US war casualties at Dover Air Force Base, released to the public as the result of a Freedom of Information Act filing by the Memory Hole. (Via WikiCommons.)