Chaplain's Corner

By: Chaplain Bill Karabinos
1st Issue, 2025

KRISPY KREME

What a morning wakeup call. As I started my coffee before dawn in early January, I noticed a white box of Krispy Kreme donuts on the counter. That was a pleasant surprise as we don’t usually have donuts on our kitchen counter. Must have had company yesterday. Smiling as I looked at the multi-colored Christmas lights reflecting off of the new fallen snow and smelled the coffee running through the Keurig, I noted the date on the side of the box: 1937. “Krispy Kreme since 1937.” Wow, that’s the same year I was born and rejoiced knowing that my life is still filled with miracles, small though they may be.

The miracle of being a proud American, slightly humbled the day before, as I watched the funeral rites accorded President Jimmy Carter. The military honors presented and the special care our service men and women offered as they so carefully and reverently carried him through to his internment in Plains, Georgia, to me echoed so many other military funerals I’ve attended and was again touched by the out pouring of love, respect for duty, honor, country and an admiration of a really good man. God had blessed America once again by giving us Jimmy Carter.

And then I leveled off to my profane self, and savored the Orange Bowl results as Notre Dame had beaten Penn State in the last seconds with a field goal that cleared the bar by only “a gnat’s eye lash.” This was a good week. It also was a week filled with patriotic fervor, and the thrill of victory (at least for half of America’s college football fans).

Just thinking of all this, smelling my coffee brewing, licking my fingers after touching the icing on a Krispy Kreme donut, feeling elated at a Notre Dame victory and sadly sorry for my fellow Pennsylvanians over Penn State’s loss, I still could not stop thinking that Jimmy Carter was a veteran. His funeral made me realize once again that I have lived my life within the bubble of a miracle, so much of that miracle revolving around my feelings of Patriotism.

I will not judge his presidency, history and the results of programs he may or may not have set in motion, will do that. At one time, his face had no chance of being carved at Mount Rushmore, but now, after five decades of reflection, maybe - Stone Mountain.

Still, it was a day of pride for patriots; and that is what you are.

Patriots, pure and simple.

Informed patriots, caring Americans and loving human beings, all of us had just experienced something epic. And we did so all together on January 9, 2025.

Before James Earl Carter, Jr., raised his right hand and swore and oath as Governor of Georgia, before he did so on the Capitol steps when he was sworn in as the President, he had taken that oath at Annapolis when he entered the Naval Academy: he swore that he would “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help me God.” You too took that same oath before you were sent off to Vietnam.

For me, and I really believe for you too, we all of a sudden were given a gift, a brilliant, beautiful thing, a new enlightenment, an arrangement, even a political intervention based on the astounding “assumption” that our Continental fathers had won for us a quarter of a millennium ago on the battle fields at Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Dorchester Heights, Monmouth Court House, Cowpens, Kings Mountain and Yorktown. This assumption that we are all equal, that from where you start doesn’t dictate where you end up but may dictate how much greater your triumph.

In Vietnam, we kept that assumption - keep the dream alive: father to son, mother to daughter, down through the generations, inspired by the excellence of those who have forged our way, walked point before us, set the standards and created the Legend. And despite the heartbreaks we have encountered along the way (who of us has not been affected by the depression of wars, the fluctuations of our received core values, the tearing down of statutes, the scorning of our flag, the ingratitude of our respect and the defunding of our authority figures, the changing of traditional names and the eating away of our cultural and traditional support venues) we still held our heads high, shouted the phrase “USA” and forged forward.

We, patriots, and, even the whole nation, have been doing this for 249 years since that first 4th of July even in the face of all those attitude changes of our world. For us, 53 to 55 years since we returned from Vietnam.

And, if I might add, that date on the box of Krispy Kreme donuts tells me that I have lived, and shouted, laughed and cried with you and a lot of other patriots for over one-third of our nation’s history. God grant you the same miracle.
 

Chaplain Blandin “Bill” Karabinos

 

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