GMC News

Independence Day: A note from Lt. Gen. Caldwell

During America’s war for Independence, John Adams sent a message to all future generations of Americans. It read, "Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it."

On this 4th of July, let us remember all of the pains that have been to taken by so many to preserve those rights that, 242 years ago, the Declaration of Independence asserted were the God-given rights of all people: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Every generation of Americans has lost heroes on foreign soil or here at home to safeguard these cherished rights. They are the rights that were invoked by Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia in 1776, by Abraham Lincoln on the battlefield in Gettysburg in 1863, and by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington D.C. in 1963. They are the greatest of American ideals- the ideals we celebrate today and every July 4th, and the ideals we must never stop striving to preserve!

Happy Independence Day!
President Caldwell