A Big Thank You.

Happy Veterans’ Day and thank you to all the service men and women, past and present, who have served our country with such devotion and distinction. Your sacrifice, the days and nights that stretched into months and years that you gave up to defend our country and to provide a more safe and secure night’s sleep for those of us at home, will never be taken for granted by most of us. But there is a way that those of us who are not serving can step up and show our support and gratitude.

I come from a family that takes its service seriously. My Great-great-Uncle, a recent immigrant from Hungary, served in the Army in WWI. He died on the fields of France. My great grand father was also an army man, serving in WWI. My grandfather was Navy. He was a tail gunner and a cook on board his ship. He also spent a terrifying period of time in a Japanese prison camp in the Pacific after serving in the Philippines. I’m told my father had a less than stellar, and very brief, career in the Army. My step-father was a member of the K9 Corps in the Air Force and served protecting bases in North Dakota among other things.

I’m asking you all to join me in saying thank you to our service men and women. An Atlanta radio station is orchestrating a way of expressing our gratitude for a second year in a row. Last year Q100 managed to collect over 350,000 hand written letters of thank you. That means every service man or woman serving overseas received a personal letter of thank you from someone they didn’t know on Thanksgiving 2007. This year the station and its morning show crew (The Bert Show) are undertaking an even larger task. This year they want to collect 1 million messages of thanks for our troops.

The how is simple. They have established a website where in only a few seconds (literally) you can enter your name and type a short message of thank you or good wishes to the troops. Imagine being a GI and being able to scroll through thousands of messages of support on those lonely holidays. To know that you are not forgotten.

After the New Year, the thank yous won’t stop. The site is set up to scroll one message every 30 seconds for a whole year. Any time of the day or night, a service man or woman can log in and see messages of support.

So consider going to www.bigthankyouproject.com and spending a few seconds to add your message of thanks. (You can leave as many as you like.) Share the site with your friends and family as well. One million signatures is a lot and it will take a lot of effort, but leaving a message takes only a moment.

Oh, and come back by tomorrow to see the pre-release contest that will kick off the one week count down to Soul Stone’s release.