Whether you’re enjoying Memorial Day from afar and reading this online or you’ve bowed to skyrocketing gas prices and remain here on the home front, we ask that at some point today, amid your leisure activities, you take out your checkbook and make a proper donation to the Doris Miller Memorial. Many of us would like to see this project break ground along the Brazos on Dec. 7, 2011.

We ask that you do this today, of all days — not only in memory of a hometown hero who inspired a nation in a time of crisis but in memory of all men and women in our military who have died in war.

Last week, former Ambassador Lyndon Olson Jr. and wife Kay formally kicked off the $1.2 million national campaign to honor Miller, a 22-year-old black Navy mess attendant on the USS West Virginia who on Dec. 7, 1941, crossed color lines during the attack on Pearl Harbor, dragging his ship’s captain to safety, then manning anti-aircraft guns against Japanese planes.

Miller’s example made others think twice — not only of rare things like courage under fire but the concept of race and color that has so terribly divided this nation since its earliest days. Indeed, our government suddenly saw a hero in a mess attendant from Waco, dispatching him on a national tour to raise war bonds — a temporary assignment before his return to war and his death in the churning Pacific in November 1943.

Now it’s our turn to do a pep talk for him and all like him.

Over the years, some Central Texans have complained we Americans don’t do enough to celebrate our real heroes, that we don’t do enough to honor our military or respect the war dead, that somehow we excuse ourselves to other pursuits, other business. We agree. But we also believe actions speak louder than words. Now is the time for each of us to put his or her money behind easily voiced beliefs. Indeed, if we cannot break ground on this project in December, we may come to the stark realization we are not as patriotic as we have long claimed.

It seems Wacoans have talked about somehow honoring Doris Miller for decades. Now is the time to donate to this unique and noble cause — now, today, Memorial Day 2011, when we again find ourselves in an increasingly complicated, hostile and uncertain world, when we again count heavily on the courage and selflessness in the very best of us.