Happy Liberation Day!
Dear friends: On this Liberation Day, I tip a solemn and melancholic salute to veterans and their comrades who paid with their lives in defense of our freedom.
Yes, the term freedom has been echoing in my ears since my grammar school days attending flag ceremonies every Monday. But it wasn’t the Star Spangled Banner that I find patriotic nor is it Gi Talu` Gi Halum Tasi or the staccato Battle Hymn of the Republic.
It was America The Beautiful that says in part, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain! O beautiful for patriot dream, that sees beyond the years…and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!
Ti Gi Un` Palasyun I Riku reminds us that home poor we may be but I won’t exchange it for anything in the world. These pearly isles are home for our people. Happy Liberation Day!
John S. DelRosario Jr.
As Gonno, Saipan
Something that I don’t understand about our government, each year we celebrate Liberation day and are grateful for what the United States Armed Forces did for the Mariana island chain, but they despised the idea of having the Marines to set up camp on Tinian and Pagan. Life in general is a give an take cycle and we need to be more receptive of the idea of having a military base economy in the near future.
I am going to be missing such festivity and happy Liberation day Mr. Del Rosario.