AZ State Rep. Justin Wilmeth

Happy Independence Day, everyone! America at 250 - wow. A long time and a short span all at once. Look at all the impact this country has had on the world in such a short time. American Exceptionalism is real and this image is a reminder of that. Me dressed as Washington is just a fun bonus.

Happy

Yorktown - 1,300
Gettysburg - 51,000
Meuse-Argonne Offensive - 122,000
Battle of the Bulge - 89,000
Normandy - 73,000
Okinawa - 49,000
Heartbreak Ridge - 3,700
Tet Offensive - 9,000
Operation Iraqi Freedom - 4,500
Afghanistan - 2,400

Those numbers represent Americans killed in some of the bloodiest battles our nation has ever endured. Today, let’s all pause, reflect and feel gratitude for those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives to keep us free.

Never forget those lost on this Memorial Day.

This is what our society needs to get back to - disagreement without being disagreeable.

"On the evening of February 6, 1983, when President Ronald Reagan turned seventy-two years old, the celebration at the White House included a moment that perfectly captured everything warm and improbable and genuinely moving about his friendship with House Speaker Tip O'Neill — because there was O'Neill, the barrel-chested Democrat from Boston who had spent the better part of two years fighting Reagan's economic policies on the House floor with passionate and relentless opposition, standing in the Oval Office grinning beside a birthday cake and trading Irish jokes with the president like two old neighborhood friends who had never spent a single day on opposite sides of anything, which was in many ways exactly what they were after six o'clock, two sons of Irish-American working families who had grown up steeped in the same rich oral tradition of storytelling and humor and warmhearted argument, who could spend an entire dinner party swapping tales passed down from their fathers and forget entirely that one of them was the most powerful Democrat in Washington and the other the most powerful Republican in the world, and at O'Neill's retirement party in 1986 Reagan stood before the crowd and said something that silenced the room with its simple and unguarded sincerity — telling the Speaker that he was grateful he had been permitted the singular honor of calling him his friend, not a colleague, not an opponent, not a rival across the aisle, but a friend, the most honest word either man ever used in public life, and the one that history has remembered longest."

Today was ANZAC Day. Many Americans aren’t familiar with what that means. But you know of their exploits, as the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps. have fought bravely alongside US troops for over a century now. In 1915, ANZAC fought in one of the bloodiest battles of WWI, Gallipoli. That battle, in modern-day Turkey, took the lives of 8,709 Aussies and 2,721 Kiwis.

That’s why I was beyond honored today to attend the unveiling of the ANZAC Memorial Monument at the Phoenix Irish Cultural Center. It was a stirring ceremony, with the laying of wreaths and speeches from key dignitaries, including Australian Navy Lieutenant Commander Andrew O’Shea.

A true labor of love by ANZAZ - the Australians & New Zealanders of Arizona Social Club - the installment of this marker now means Arizona-based Aussies and Kiwis now have a spot to remember their fallen.

God bless those lost - lest we forget!