Bob Kalsu and division

Memorial Day brings thoughts of the Americans that died in battle and the Forgotten Superstars series looks at the only active professional athlete to be killed in the Vietnam War.

Bob Kalsu played just one season for the Buffalo Bills before going to Vietnam and losing his life.
Kalsu had been an All-America guard at Oklahoma and in the waning days of the American Football League, Kalsu was the backup to future Hall of Famer Billy Shaw and was thought to be moving into Shaw's position upon his retirement (Shaw's final season was Kalsu's rookie year and it's easy to assume that would have happened without Kalsu's military commitment)

I'm not going to get into Kalsu's story too much here.
Sports Illustrated and the defunct Grantland did that in the linked articles and very well at that.
However, what it does make me think of is patriotism in the country then and now and how our country is as divided now as it was then, but for differing reasons.
Back then, the dividing line was the Vietnam War and I could respect someone's view on the issue, no matter the opinion.
War is a moral decision and one person's justified encounter can be another's invasion without cause and it is one that can be seen either way.

The Vietnam War divided a nation and yet here we are again with another divided country and the divisive party this time is not as much about a political party as much as it is about one man and his party relentless rolling over to his behavior.
Not that the opposition has done anything to make themselves a viable option other than say "we dislike....." and I think that's the problem in opposition.
Stand for something.
One side stands for keeping power no matter the cost, the other simply in taking that person away without plans for doing so and there is your divide over nothing.
Stand for something.

Bob Kalsu stood for something and left a potentially lucrative career to serve, much as Pat Tillman would do later, but I wonder what Kalsu would say today about the division in our nation.
Would he be as fast to serve again if needed today?
Would he be OK with a country grinding its gears against each other?
I wonder how far we have come in the interim since the Vietnam War and how as a country we haven't seemed to learn about unifying as a nation.
We can have differences in policy, opinions and how we see things, but as a nation, we have never seemed to recover from the cleaving of the nation over the Vietnam War,

That being the case, There are few people alive (and those numbers dwindle every day) that lived during a time that truly was Country first.
Not partisan ideas, Not political parties and certainly not over the political leaders that have been chosen to represent their parties over the last decades.
No matter your side, I'm not sure I'll ever see the days of a united country again unless it's a short term coming together after tragedy.
It's too bad and after a day of remembering lost lives for a country and way of life that the world used to envy, that my thoughts went to division, not unification.
Bob Kalsu and so many others like him., deserve better.