It’s Veteran’s Day again, and it’s harder for me to write this year because for the first time, it’s not an abstract concept to me.

I’ve written over (2003) – and over (2004) and over (2005) and over (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009) again about taking this day to reflect on the debt that all of us owe – our patrimony – to this country and specifically today to those who offered themselves to be sacrificed in its name.

A year ago, those were nice thoughts. Today, for me, they have names and faces.

I was naive then.

None of it has changed my mind about anything; I’ve always known what color ink the bills of politics are paid in – it’s blood red. But I’ll tell you for certain that it feels different when you are sitting across from a soldier’s widow and children and making small talk while buying them coffee and a yogurt than when you’re discussing losses as an abstract number in a study.

From Crispus Attucks to Spc. Christopher Moon, Americans have faced enemies and laid down their lives for this country. Others have died and sacrificed too – died building buildings and bridges, settling the West, mining, even just driving the mail.

But in both a symbolic and practical way, the deaths of our soldiers are different. They didn’t die by accident, or chance, or in the myriad of ways an indifferent world reminds us that it doesn’t care. They died because someone who hated us or who wanted to impose their will on us killed them.

And their comrades – from the clerk in the Pentagon to the ammo carrier standing next to them – put on the same uniform knowing that as unlikely as it may be, they could be asked to step into the breach to replace the fallen and possibly fall themselves.

And we owe them for that. It ought to be obvious, but outside the core of the military, their families, and supporters, it’s sadly usually forgotten. For every beer ad where troops deplane to a terminal full of applause, hundreds of us walk past a single soldier on a hidden pay phone as she stands trying to juggle her change and make a call.

Today is a day when I hope that we can recover a bit of that sense of debt. When we can realize what we owe those old guys in Legion caps and those young ones in ACU BDU’s.

And in a very real sense, that today’s point.

What I’m hoping today is that maybe, just maybe that will open the door in each of us to realize how much we owe to how many.

I’ll suggest that in part we’re a nation in such material debt because we refuse to understand the spiritual and political and social debt that we should have been paying off. Instead we decided that America owes us, and borrowed as much as we could to make sure we got what was coming to us.

That’s pretty much over. And a big part of the Tea Party rebellion is a split between those who have been paying the debts – served, worked productively, paid their taxes, and now see everything they worked to build – not just their retirements, but the literal infrastructure of the country crumbling – and the financial and social engineers who have profited so richly in the last decades.

I’m deeply sympathetic to that.

We need to relearn the habits of debts as things to be repaid, and today – the day we’re reminded so concretely of those who have loaned us their lives, their souls, and their health and who need to be paid back.

Today take that thought – that we owe our soldiers and veterans and should through our actions and lives pay them back. Tomorrow, revisit it and see if it can become a lens you look at all of your life through. To who else do you owe a debt that can never be repaid, and how will you serve others to try and pay it back?

Today soldiers are the primary lienholder. But they are not the only one. Everyone who’s come before us to make this country what it is – and what it could be – is our creditor. And we owe them.

We owe them our respect, and most of all we owe them our effort to make this a better place – in whatever way suits us. And we owe them the admission that what we’ve inherited – not just the physical stuff, but far more valuable, the ideas – they handed us are rare, extraordinary and exceptional.

We are a country of ideas – as Schaar says

Americans, a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the world.

There are times when that covenant must be bought with blood – our blood and others’; that is sadly the nature of covenants.

The blood isn’t always rightly shed; the notion that any human action is pure is as laughable as the idea that Shylock should have a pound of flesh taken from him without spilling blood.

Sartre says purity is for monks, and he’s right. The rest of us live in the world, defended by others if we are lucky, and if we are insightful and honest grateful for all those who chose the honor of service.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.

And today especially, thank you son for stepping forward and for defending me.