If you choose to not offer a discount, you are using your freedoms provided by the sacrifice of those men and women who serve.
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely thankful for the people who fought, and died, for our freedoms. I'm thankful for the policemen who have been hurt or died trying to help someone else, or put themselves between danger and other people. Firemen who just burned searching through a burning building for a child are right up there next to angels in my mind. The Marine who gets a rifle shoved in his hand and gets shipped to the desert to defend people he's never met....who shoot at him for his efforts....is someone I'll support completely.
Those people have earned the right to be called heroes. Those people deserve to be put on a pedestal above the rest.
But just being part of "the club" does not make you a hero, and does not make you anything more than an employee. Sorry, the motorcycle cop who spends a career writing tickets is not a hero. The fireman who drives the truck and nothing else is not a hero. The guy running the warehouse on a military base is not a hero. They're just people doing a job, just like me and you. It's no more "service" or "sacrifice" than what Bob the mechanic across the street does. My grandfather spend five years in Australia and the Phillipines in World War 2. He never saw real combat, he pitched for the Army baseball team He's told me several times he wasn't a hero, the guys who were out there getting shot at were the heroes and that's always made sense to me.
Do you offer discounts to everyone who does good? Do you have a foster parent discount? A blood donor discount? I helped a lady change a tire a couple of months ago do I get a discount? My point is
(and I know most people have already jumped into "Oh my God...Pat's the anti-Christ" mode and will miss it) is that we toss the terms service, sacrifice, and hero out there way too much because the PR campaigns have convinced us that's what we're supposed to do.
Sorry, just my opinion.
