Thank you, and good morning veterans, family,
and friends.
I'm not a big fan of long speeches, so
I decided when I was asked to speak that I would keep it short. I
was really honored to be asked, and I guess you always have this sense
that you'd like to shine before the hometown crowd, so I actually had another
speech written that was completely different from this one. It was
full of big words and high sounding phrases. But I put it aside because
it really didn't sound like me. So I thought I'd just be me and share
a few thoughts with you.
You know, it's really funny sometimes where
your journey in life takes you. This celebration has been a part
of my life for as long as I can remember. I was seven years old when
I came to my first Claysville parade, that was the same year I discovered
the wonderful world of penny candy at Gus Zilke's newsstand. (Although
I understand that Maggi's has a lot more traffic than Gus's used to have
because of the winning lottery tickets). But I never would have dreamed
back then that I would some day be standing up here on a podium in Claysville.
And so I'm doubly honored, both to be one of you and to be standing here
in front of you now.
We're here today to honor some very special
people. In speeches like this one, you tend to here a lot of flowery
phrases about the heroic men who sacrificed their lives for freedom and
soldiers who answered duty's call. But it all sounds so distant and
unrelated to us, as if they all just came marching out of the pages of
the history books and died for us and then went back into history.
In talking about them like that, we almost make it seem as if they weren't
people like you and me. But they were. And what it all comes
down to is that those people --- people just like you and me --- believed
strongly in our way of life, felt they had a responsibility to defend our
way of life, and finally preserving our way of life, which is to say, in
a nutshell, that these men whose names we will never know, died for us.
If it weren't for them, you wouldn't be here today, and I wouldn't either.
And we wouldn't all be looking forward to a great life in the richest,
luckiest nation on the planet. We tend to not see how lucky we really
are, because we're so used to the good life. We see the pictures
of the orphans in Bosnia but it's hard to really comprehend how lost and
lonely they feel because we aren't orphans and our children didn't have
to go through that. We can sympathize with what's going on in foreign
countries, where there is a ban on the education of women, starting from
kindergarten. But it's hard to really understand that, as we send
our own daughters off to college and buy our nieces the astronaut Barbie
Doll. We have no frame of reference for making sense of tyranny,
when life here is so different from that in every way.
This was really brought home to me in New
York ten years ago. I was taking a psychology course and I was given
the assignment to "go out and talk to a stranger", to see what I could
learn about the world and myself. What a lesson! In a dirty
MacDonald's on 5th and 18th, I timidly started a conversation with a Jewish
man who turned out to be a Holocaust survivor. And after he spent half
an hour showing me the Holocaust through the eyes of one very terrified
12-year-old boy, he said what I thought was the most extraordinary thing.
He said "When my boat docked in New York, I fell to my knees and kissed
the ground. You Americans will never understand what you have !"
What we have -- because of those veterans
who died. I wish that every one of them could be standing here today.
I wish I could look into their faces and shake their hands, and thank them
for everything they've done for me and the people I love. And I'd
yank those veterans right up here on this podium and I'd point out in the
crowd and say:
See, there's my Dad, he made sure everybody in the family got a
college degree, including Mom. And there's my husband Rick, he has
his own business, and so does my brother Jon. And there's my cousin Ron,
he came back to direct County Chorus this year. And there are my
nieces Erin, Lauren, and Shannon, they call me every week in New Jersey.
And there's Jason, he just got his driver's license, and he's a heck of
a kid. Because the bitter irony is that those veterans who died didn't
get to stick around and see what happened in this country as a result of
their sacrifice. That's the way it goes, I suppose. Some people
have to lose everything so that other people can keep everything.
But seeing as how they were people like you and me, it just doesn't
seem fair somehow. And I wish they could be here, so I could thank
them for my life.
Because of all the gifts those veterans
gave us, one gift is greater than any other, and that's this: They made
it possible for us to live in a country where you can realize your dreams
You can say " I want to be this, or do that, or have this" and it is completely
within the realm of possibility. My 4 year old niece Jessie could
say "I want to be the President" and she could do it. Now the Mountses
aren't the Kennedys, and somewhere along the way we'd have to come up with
a hefty plate of cash to help Jessie run for president. But it's
possible. And it's so important that you dream --- that's what gives
life all its juice. It's so important that you look deep inside yourself,
and determine what matters most to you and then go for it. Because
that's the way you make sure those veterans didn't die for 'no reason'.
For their sakes, you have a responsibility to dream. But you also
have to realize that dreaming alone doesn't make for reality. You
have to plan, and set up your steps toward your goal, and then you have
to just plain stick to the task of making it happen, regardless of the
setbacks. So many people people are so afraid of the setbacks that
they've lost their momentum before they're even out of the starting gate.
Do you think those veterans would be happy that they died for that?
A bunch of people who give up too easily on their dreams? I don't
think so.
What is so necessary here is that is that
you dig deep down inside yourself, and look long and hard to figure out
what really matters to you --- and then pull that out and dust it off,
and start heading in that direction. Because the older you get, the
faster the years fly by. And I can't think of anything sadder than
getting to the end of your life and realizing that you never became the
person you wanted to become. Because then you haven't honored the
veterans who died for you. And even more importantly, you haven't
honored yourself.
One really beautiful example of this that
comes immediately to mind is Christopher Reeve. Anytime you see him appear
anywhere, you see people cheering like mad, and crying, and giving him
standing ovations. And they're not cheering because he once played
Superman. They're cheering because he's Superman now. That man is
paralyzed from the neck down, and he's faced with a future that would send
any of us right into the pits of despair, but he's made it his goal to
get enough money for research so that the 200,000 people in this country
who are paralyzed from spinal cord injuries can walk again, and that he
personally will be able to see that happen in his lifetime. Talk
about dreaming big. Talk about making those veterans proud.
You and I -- all of us-- we have enormous
untapped potential inside of us. And we owe it to ourselves -- and
to each other -- and to the veterans who gave their lives for us -- to
not settle for personal mediocrity.
There's only one more thing I want to say
today. I left home 20 years ago to join the Army, and I haven't been
back since, except to visit. But although you move away, and you
move on with your life, you never really let go of your home town.
I still belong to the Claysville Presbyterian Church and I plan on being
buried in the Claysville Cemetery. And you should have seen how nuts
I got on Super Bowl Sunday this year. It was really funny -- my brother
Joe lives in Florida, and my sister Becky is an attorney in Nevada and
I'm in New Jersey, and we burned up the phone lines on every single commercial.
Because none of us will ever be anything but Steeler fans. And sometimes
I'll be sitting across from one of my patients in the hospital where I
work, and he'll be telling me about his childhood, often they are very
sad stories, because I work with acute psychiatric patients, and you don't
usually end up in a psych ward if you had a great childhood. And
I'll wish that I could give him what I got here, because it was so much
better than what he got. See, home isn't where you start from.
It's what you carry within you -- right here -- in your heart and come
back to again and again. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful
day.
Lt. Col. Sally Mounts Wright |
