The woman in the dark suit at the front of this picture is Amarillo Mayor Ginger Nelson, who today posted a Facebook note that thanked Palo Duro High School students and their choir director for honoring our nation’s veterans.

They did so by singing patriotic songs at an Amarillo business on the eve of this year’s Veterans Day commemoration.

It’s the kind of salute this nation has been giving its veterans since, oh, about the time of the Gulf War in 1990-91.

Mayor Nelson thanked the choir director for stressing the importance of honoring our veterans, suggesting in her message that it’s a relatively new event.

Actually, the nation has performed a remarkable collective turnabout since an earlier time. I have mentioned this awakening in previous blog posts, so I won’t belabor the point here. The Vietnam War was a dark time on several levels. We were involved in a bitterly fought war in Southeast Asia; the tide never turned in our favor; emotions at home ran white-hot; much of Americans’ anger was turned on the veterans who did their duty.

The Gulf War changed that attitude. And it only has gotten more heartfelt in the nearly three decades since that conflict. We’ve gone to war in Iraq, Afghanistan, in Somalia; we have engaged enemy fighters throughout the world as they seek to harm Americans abroad or plot to bring more terror to our shores.

I join Mayor Nelson in thanking the students and their educators for recognizing what the nation should have recognized all along.