The United States of America: its name, for generations, has echoed around Planet Earth in sounds of freedom singing. 

Today, even as its people fight among themselves like kindergartners without a teacher, its soldiers stand at attention in respect for the flag of red, white, and blue and what those colors represent. Maybe, if the rest of us pay attention, we can learn what it is those soldiers fought for and take a good look at ourselves.

The generations speak to us. In another November, 107 years ago, World War One ended, having claimed over 100,000 American lives and having left another 200,000 injured. Those men came home to go through a flu epidemic that claimed even greater numbers. 

Steamboat Springs, like many other communities around the nation, struggled as their elders died, but the still-young town, then only a little more than 30 years old, enjoyed a brief time of surging tourism. 

Veterans, then in their late 20s, used what they had learned as soldiers to step into leadership positions in the thriving town. Skiers made runs down the mountain slopes and a few roads were cleared in winter. Former high school valedictorian Elmer Combs became a police officer and City Council member. 

Claude Luekens served 16 years as mayor and 21 years on the Board of Routt County Commissioners.

At age 24, George Allen, who had manned a ship’s guns during the war, became mayor. 

By the time those soldiers had begun enjoying families of their own, the shadow of a financial depression closed over the entire country, then deepening and worsening until war drew America into a worldwide confrontation with evil. Fathers who had been soldiers knew what their children were going into. 

As years passed, the United States learned as a nation what destruction meant and of what war was capable of destroying. Grandchildren of those men and women gained their own understanding in far off places like Korea.

Many of today’s grandparents rode in the parade that welcomed them home from Desert Storm at the end of the last century. Now some 1.3 million Vietnam veterans are still alive in the United States, fewer than half of those who served. 

The generations learn first hand. Then they change and we are where we are today, men, women, and children riding bicycles on the hills around this small community on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains.

Routt County has held onto the center of itself, somehow knowing what freedom is about.

The veterans center adds its brightness to Lincoln Avenue. Costumed adults and children shared laughter and candy on Halloween night.

Winter is just ahead, our country in its own winter, its people divided, too few prepared to offer the strength that will be needed for what lies ahead. Once again America will depend upon its veterans to sustain our next passage into springtime. We in the mountains of Colorado know about winter and our respected veterans show us how to withstand the danger of what lies ahead. 

Today we honor you, our soldiers, men and women who are our protectors, a precious part of our hope for this great idea that unites some 300 million people in a place named America.

We who have experienced its rise into leadership have witnessed what the beauty of freedom can do.

You, our veterans, know that America is not a gift, but rather what, working together, we must earn.

You and your families teach us.

It is up to us to learn.