Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey Delivers Special ‘Memorial Day’ Message
By Wayne Ivey, Brevard Sheriff // May 30, 2022
'We Shall Never Forget Our Fallen Heroes'
BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – If you woke up this morning in the United States of America, you owe the blanket of freedom you slept under last night to those brave and courageous souls who gave it all in the protection of their country.
In fact, as Americans we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for the many freedoms we enjoy each and every day, to those who gave their lives on foreign soul protecting our way of life!
We owe this debt to those who left it all on the battlefield to protect their family, their community, and their country!
We owe it to those who became prisoners of war, suffering immensely at the hands of their captors and to those who are still missing in action that left behind a family who never got closure in their loved one’s life!! These heroes gave their lives and in return gave us our freedom and safety!! We owe them our respect, our prayers, and our admiration!!
While Memorial Day is the one day of the year that we pause to honor our fallen military heroes who lost their lives in the protection of our country, it is the other 364 days of freedom each year that we owe to them as well!! While today is recognized as their day, throughout the year we should never forget what they gave to keep us free!! As Americans, part of our thanks to them is to honor them by telling their heroic stories to our next generation so that generation, can tell it to future generations!!
When you hear someone say “they gave it all” what it really means is that they gave their life for you and your family to live in a free society like no other in the world.
It means they gave up their opportunity to grow old with their spouse, to watch their children graduate high school and college, to enjoy Christmas each year with their family, to help their parents as they age and need their children by their side, to love, to play, and to live their life to the fullest, so that you and yours can do just that…live your life to the fullest in the greatest nation on the planet.
Simply put, “they gave it all” means they believed in the United States of America so much that they were willing to give their life, so that others were safe and free to enjoy something worth dying for!
That’s right, they believed in our great nation so much that they felt it worthy of giving their life to protect the very notion of freedom that we all too often take for granted!!
So while Memorial Day is the day we honor our fallen, to me we should take a pause each and every day of our lives to thank them, to thank their families, and to recognize and honor those who currently serve our great nation, who could at any moment be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice as members of our Armed Forces!!
I think to truly honor them, we must strive to be better Americans and to put our differences aside to recognize and honor those who fought side by side to give us the freedoms we enjoy!!
The freedom to be individuals, to be opinionated, to worship who and if we choose, to be successful, and more than anything else, to live our lives as we choose!!
I think we owe it to them “to be worth dying for” and to show everyone that the United States of America is the greatest place on earth to call home!!
God Bless The United States of America and We Shall Never Forget Our Fallen Heroes!
