In all the talk of shopping and turkee, it’s easy for our media to forget there’s a war on:

A tribute is planned this weekend for family members of Iowa soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than 200 family members are expected to gather to honor their lost loved ones by attending the Iowa State football game against Missouri Saturday.

A dinner is planned for tonight. It will feature Gov. Tom Vilsack, Major General Ron Dardis of the Iowa National Guard and opera singer Simon Estes

I’ve said before and I’ll say again that one of the things that offended me most after Sept. 11 was being told that I should go shopping if I truly wanted to help my country. What does my buying a new sweater do to help people here, much less the Bangladeshi schoolchildren who knitted the thing for Target?

Look. I’m not calling on anybody to boycott Christmas or not buy from certain places. The best thing we can do right now is to get together with friends and family and show our support for one another. If you do that with sweaters, if you do it with donations to charity, if you do it with handmade presents or food gifts or just with a smile and a kind word, that to me is the most patriotic act you can commit.

There’s 200 people who won’t be able to do that with a loved one this Christmas, 200 people at least. There’s more than 1,100 families who will be missing a face around the table, missing somebody permanently, not to mention the thousands who will be praying for somebody serving overseas. The best thing we can do right now is to continue to love and work for that love, which is really the point of all our political action in the first place.

A.