Perri Nelson's Website 

What do you see when you look at the clouds? Do you see faces? Profiles? Animals? There's more there than just dense concentrations of dust and water vapor isn't there?

You know that I live on the left coast don't you? That should make it clear that this picture is of a sunset. It's been many a year since I could take a picture like this at sunrise and I just about never get up that early.

Anyway, I know what my wife sees in this sunset, because I see it too. To us, it's a final farewell from her brother. He's been gone now for a couple of years, but that's his profile in the clouds.

I've been fortunate in my life to have a chance to see quite a few places even though I don't get around that much anymore. When I was growing up my father was serving in the Air Force. This quite naturally included travel to lots of different places.

It seems like everywhere we went, there were always interesting things to see. I remember seeing this monument with my family and only made the connection to the famous scene in the movie "Sands of Iwo Jima" sometime later. In those days, we knew how to honor men and women that fought to secure liberty for others.

Looking back, everything seemed much simpler then, but we were able to do so much. Today the technology of those days seems so primitive. Computers were massive and had less capacity than the one I'm using now. Even so the men and women of those days made them do amazing things. The sky wasn't even close to the limit!

Everything seemed possible. Men were going into space! We went to the moon! Why, even Democrats knew that we ought not to be asking what government could do for us, but what we could do for our country. It almost seems like a completely different world to me now. We were proud of our country, proud of our flag, and proud of our history!

The men and women of an even earlier time gave everything they had to secure our freedom and liberty. Sure, they were imperfect men. To be sure they left some very important questions for another day.

Generations later the recipients of that freedom fought one another to further secure our liberties. The motives of neither side were pure, but both sides of that bloodiest conflict in our history were fighting for something our founders dreamed of. One side fought to secure the rights of the States from an overreaching federal government. The other fought to bring liberty to men and women that had been denied it from our founding.

There's a lot to be proud of in our country. There's a lot of beauty to see. I think that sometimes I need to look back and remember that. It beats letting today's politics depress me anyway.

My wife wants to see a lot of the things I got to see growing up. She wants to see the places that helped to shape our history and the men and women who made it. Those things helped to make me proud to be an American.

Perhaps it's good to be reminded of the past. It's good to reflect on where we've been to remind us what it is that we've been given. Every now and then I think we need to just stop and smell these delicate looking things.

Refresh yourself before rejoining the fray. Let politics wait for another day.

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