10/22/2026
Last weekend, a man at a door asked me why I was crazy enough to run for State Representative. He had just come back from a trip to Italy, and what had struck him over there was not the food or the scenery but the way people take care of each other: they talk to each other honestly, they look after each other’s kids and each other’s parents, and nobody seems to find that remarkable. Here, he said, it feels like everyone does their own thing, everything has become polarized, and the idea of serving your community has quietly disappeared.
His dad had served in World War II. He was sent to North Africa first and barely survived it, went back a second time for the landing in Normandy, survived that too, and came home to become a doctor. That kind of service, he said, doesn’t seem normal anymore for people my age and younger. So why was I doing this?
We ended up talking about service for a long time (my door count suffered that afternoon), and it reminded me of the speech I gave at the Veterans Day ceremony at our Middle and High Schools two years ago. I have given that speech a few times now, and every time I choke up and feel like I make a fool of myself in front of a few hundred teenagers. But people have always been kind about it, I think because the story is honest, so I’ll tell it here too.
Most of you know I grew up in Belgium. Both of my parents were born right before WWII. My mom still is very vocal about her experience in the war. At the end of the war, she was a child in the target zone of the German V1 and V2 bombs aimed at the port of Antwerp, and she has talked all her life about the sound of the V1s. My dad was always the quiet one about the war. All I knew for years was that my grandfather was a forester, and that the two Belgian draft horses they used for logging were confiscated by the Germans. (That is part of the reason we raise Belgian draft horses on our farm here in Suffield today.) Then a couple of years ago, over a couple of beers, my dad finally opened up, about the war and even more about the hard years after it, and it blew my mind that I had never heard these stories from my own father. He is well into his 80s now, and those memories are fading.
My father-in-law was a US Army veteran. He came to the Veterans Day ceremony at our schools a couple of times himself, and since he passed, his stories only live on if we tell them.
What has stayed with me from my parents, to this day, is their gratitude. Not an abstract one: a very concrete gratitude toward the Allied soldiers who came to a country that wasn’t theirs and gave them their freedom back. I grew up with that, and I believe it is the real reason I ended up on the Board of Education almost six years ago, and the reason I am asking for your vote now. Somebody did something for my family once that they could never repay. The least I can do is give something back to the community where we have made our home.
So this is my answer to the man at the door. I’m not a politician, and I don’t think I ever will be. I’m an idealist, maybe a naive one (my wife would say certainly). I want my kids to see what it looks like to take care of the people around you: your family, your neighbors, your town, your state, your country, and the world beyond it. I believe that is the most important thing any of us can do, and I believe it is still very much alive here. Every door that opens for me proves it.
Thank you to everyone who has served in our military, and to everyone who serves in any other way: on a fire truck, on a board or commission, in a classroom, at a food pantry, or by checking on the neighbor down the road. You are the reason this still works.
And please, talk to a veteran in your family or here in town this week. Their stories are worth more than anything I could say on a stage, with or without the tears.
