I.
DEDICATION:
--To My Grand Daughters --
Your grandmother and I think you three are the cutest and smartest little girls we’ve ever seen. We know you will brighten the world with your beautiful smiles, inquisitive personalities, and natural intelligence. We are confident that you will go far in life, and that when you are ready, you will find love and happiness and build good lives for yourselves and those around you. We have great confidence that what will matter to you most will be the growth of your hearts and souls, the betterment of mankind and acknowledging the God of the universe who made humanity in His own Image.
The generations of your family members who preceded your grandmother and me paved the way for the blessings of liberty and freedom to endure so that your pursuits of happiness could stay boundless and unfettered. We are so very proud of you three, and, while you girls are just two, two and four years old, and beginning life’s journey, we know that you will be persuaders, thinkers, dreamers and doers.
Today is Memorial Day and I’m writing to you to record some things that may bear on that journey. “The Greatest Generation”, as it has been called, of your family and your nation’s families, worked exceedingly hard and sacrificed much to build up and protect history’s greatest nation and preserve its ideals. My generation, “the Baby Boomers,” and your parents’ generation, have inherited immense benefits from their sacrifices. Now, it is our turn to be vigilant and true to the founding principles and documents that formed the basis and produced the greatness that made America the unparalleled leader of the free world.
However, I worry that the miracles of our founding – the greatest of which are 1) the Declaration of Independence, 2) the winning of our freedom in the Revolutionary war (1776-1781), 3) the Divinely- inspired Constitution of the United States of America in 1787, and 4) the attendant safeguards of the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments-- are being taken for granted and assailed by many who would like to see our nation and its people fail.
We, as steward generations, have been largely silent as massive spending and borrowing have consolidated and centralized the levers of power by those who were elected to serve in government. We have let politicians and power-brokers mushroom out of control, waste our tax dollars, and ignore our God. It is easy to assume that things will always be as they are now. We want to believe that our normal life routines will always be what we've grown accustomed to. It is tempting to take the path of least resistance and to do nothing. It is easy to rationalize that one person can’t make a difference, feel overwhelmed and ineffectual as one small being in a gigantic system. The forces that are eroding those normal routines and undermining the very foundations of America have been working against our freedoms slowly and incrementally. These forces are consolidating power and destroying many of our traditional institutions that range from marriage and long held morals to the integrity of our currency and our economy and our standing in the world.
Are we too far gone to turn back to our roots? Are we too complacent to return to greatness and do the work it takes to preserve that which is slipping away? No! Not on this watch!
It is time to reaffirm the goodness that is the United States of America. One person can make a difference. If there ever was a time to make that difference, it is now. You three girls and your futures are the reasons for this book. To accomplish that renewed, bright future ahead requires that we all re-learn the lessons of America's history and our amazing heritage and, in so doing, act in concert to arrest the spiraling decline. Those lessons and those actions are offered and given in many forms in the pages that follow.
Memorial Day is not a holiday for celebrating – it is a day of remembering. It is a day when we commemorate the sacred memory of those who fought and died to stop evil and preserve the good. Those who fought were not complacent, and today, they are not forgotten. Today is THEIR Memorial Day.
William Arthur Sirmon, your great-great grandfather, fought in World War I from 1917 to 1918.
He was a hero in that war, and your uncle, Brannon William Sirmon, has republished his diary, That’s War, published in 1929. His work chronicles the amazing spirit of the “American Doughboy,” as the American soldiers were called then. Witty, at times dire, but always informative, it is a day-by-day account of soldiers who were training at Ft. Gordon near Atlanta, Georgia, then crossing the Atlantic from New Jersey to Britain before they fought the war in France against Germany.
The dedication page in That’s War reads:
To My Boys:
With the prayer that the lot of war will never be theirs, but
if the safety or honor of their country should demand it,
that they will meet the issue with the same
courage and fidelity with which my
comrades met the challenge
of 1917-18.”
His two boys did get called to the defense of their country.
My father, your great grandfather, George Cornwell Sirmon, was a paratrooper who risked his life by jumping behind enemy lines in 1944-45. His older brother, William Arthur Sirmon, Jr., was in the Navy in the Pacific theater. They fought to preserve our way of life during the Second World War after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Now it is time to fight again in earnest to preserve our way of life.
This book is that fight, and this dedication is passed down over the generations.
To my grandchildren:
With the prayer that the generations now in charge and those generations
yet to come will meet the challenges to the safety and honor
of their country with the same courage and fidelity as those
generations who have gone before and pass on
the blessings of life and liberty to you,
and to your families, and to posterity.
All my love always,
Pop Pop
