By Curt Hendel, Veteran Writer
As we enter Christmas week and prepare to celebrate, we can look back at 2016 and be happy that it is coming to an end. I know that many good things have happened to people in their lives, but on a national scale it hasn’t really been pretty. The year has been, to say the least, contentious.
The year 2016 has seen a little of everything. The election was not what anyone would have really chosen to go through, our candidates acted more like a kindergarten class on Monday morning than the professionals we would have loved to see. There were riots every time it seemed like a good excuse was there, and our Law Enforcement Officers have been under siege from fringe groups, bad politics, and those looking to assassinate them. This year it also became popular to protest our Flag and National Anthem. It has been a year of empty gestures; many that seemed more for personal attention than solving an issue.
With Christmas and New Year’s comes the hope for a new year and better things to come. I certainly hope that we can find it in our hearts to become one nation again. Right now, the most extreme people in each faction of our great nation fracture us. I believe that a small percentage of our people are causing most of the trouble.
With all of the rabble rousing there is one group that kind of fell by the wayside. Our men and women of the military services are still out there on nasty deployments. We have had men killed in action when we were told that there are no combat troops fighting right now.
The truth is that they are still out there, leaving loved ones behind and facing a brutal enemy. It has been like this for decades, our best and brightest spend holidays in terrible places so the fortunate ones can sit at the Christmas table and choose to remember them or not.
I guess for 2017 I would still hope for that ability for all of us to get along and continue to build this nation. With 2016 out of the way I would hope that somebody would get back to mentioning the service that is happening around the world. And in the most optimistic part of my soul I would hope that our enemies fall and our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines come home from the war zones.
