Duty, honor, country
1/7/2026
“Squirrel”
United States
“Duty, Honor, Country”
Ok, folks. I have had several blogs written up that I cannot seem to finish because I feel like I am in the “squirrel moment.” What I mean by this comment is that you focus your attention on one thing/current event and then end up getting distracted and start reading other items that you forget what your primary intent was. Like a squirrel who carries their nut from one tree to another, drops it at one tree, forgets about it and then gets distracted by another nut on another tree. Then remembers the first nut, looks for it and promptly gets distracted by another nut in another tree while looking for the first one. I am having that “squirrel moment.” I was doing more research on Venezuela's history, then got distracted by Stephen Miller’s interview on Greenland, then President Trump's comment about Mexico, then Cuba, then Columbia. Then started researching NATO’s Article 5 if Greenland was militarily invaded by the U.S. Back to Venezuela and then started getting into the Sphere of Influence (I’ll discuss in another blog). Finally ended in an “oh crap” moment when I saw that NATO’s Committee chair issued a warning that they are willing to confiscate the U.S. Military bases in Europe if Trump invades Greenland. After all of this, I started to get dizzy and had to stop myself from getting sucked into this messy and depressing black dark hole of a tornado. Now I don’t know if all of these “distractions” are meant to confuse us, get us worked up or like a sheep herder gently push us with a firm hand to blindly turn our attention back into Netflix show marathons with sound proof headphones (I was tempted too) in order to tune out this confusing world. So what did I do? I went back to WWII military history. It makes me feel better.
I gleefully dug into my vintage newspapers and military pamphlets with a vengeance. They are my most prized possessions. With this, I came to a Department of Defense pamphlet of General Douglas MacArthur’s address to the U.S. Military Academy on May 12, 1962. The speech is called Duty, Honor, Country. Now I am not going to give you the full speech as I included the link but I will provide some excerpts from it. I am going to finish this blog with MacArthur’s words. It is my hope that we forget about politics and remember who we are as humans. Furthermore, remember who we are as Americans.
Duty, Honor, Country
“Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage, when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope, when hope becomes forlorn.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.”