We at Menofvalue.com are proud to make Chris Kasperski our Man of the Year. He served his country proudly. He is a man of faith making a difference in the world.

All of our interviewees: John Karraker, P.G. KASSEL, and L.A. MARZULLI are and we are thankful for all of them and the time they took to tell us of their journeys and their views on what is happening in the world.

Chris Kasperski is one of those people who make you proud to be an American. It’s so refreshing that, in these troubled times, when people debate and argue over some of the least of things, that there are still individuals who not only know what’s right but put their lives on the line for them. 

Not long ago, Chris was serving in Afghanistan in the United States Army where he had volunteered for one of the most dangerous jobs in the world – finding roadside bombs. This kind of courage goes back to the core values in his life.  “My values have shaped my path in life,” Chris said. “Freedom and liberty to me is a core value in my life.  I think anybody who’s been born and living in America has been blessed from the start, however, you can have roadblocks and hardships that can shape your life. My mother abandoned me and my little brother when I was only five years old. In many ways that shaped me, but it also gave me a deep respect for my father for taking on the role as a single parent. He was one of the first fathers in the state of Illinois to gain full custody of his sons.” 

Chris also has the distinction of being related to another great patriotic American, Benjamin Franklin. “Being a relative of Benjamin Franklin made me deeply aware of his philosophy on liberty, religion, and God. That has also really shaped my life and my understanding of how the world works and I think that a lot of his lessons still translate to this day. We have the freedom to pursue happiness, as long as it just doesn’t interfere with someone else’s pursuit of happiness.  In America, we have these unique liberties where sometimes our liberties bump up against one another. And I think that’s where tolerance really comes into play because being tolerant of one another, as each other’s trying to express their own liberty, is what I think allows us to be the free nation that we try to live up to be.”

Though life has thrown him a few nasty curveballs, Chris has consistently triumphed over adversity.  “You’re going to face situations in life that might be tough,” he noted, “but you just have to move on past them. When I graduated basic training, my initial orders were for me to go to Hawaii and I proposed to my girlfriend at the time.  it was just the perfect set of circumstances.  But just before graduation day, my drill sergeants pulled me aside and they said, ‘Hey, we see that you’re excited to go to Hawaii. But you also have Airborne School in your contract. If you go to Airborne School, they’re going to just recut your orders and send you to an airborne unit, and sayonara Hawaii.” They told me to drop Airborne and immediately go to Hawaii. So I did what they told me to do, and when graduation day came, my orders weren’t there for me to leave.  I had to wait for eleven days for my orders and it turned out they gave me bad advice, and because when I dropped airborne, I lost Hawaii. And I got new orders for Fort Drum in upstate New York. My wife and I decided to just quickly get married. We lived in Northern Illinois, near Lake County. At the Lake County courthouse, they told me there weren’t any judges available to marry us that day. I was in my uniform, and we were kind of looking panicked because I wanted to show up to my duty station and hand them a marriage certificate and they’d get us set with housing and everything else. So the people at the courthouse told us that if we went next door to the Lake County Jail there would be a judge there who could marry us. So that’s what we did. We got married at Lake County Jail and walked out of there happy as could be.”

Soon afterward Chris had to leave his new bride and go to Afghanistan. “I trained for about two months in cultural training and just getting myself ready to go when we deployed. On my first mission in Afghanistan, we were hit by one of the largest IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) in the war’s history.  It hit the truck right behind mine and threw it about fifty feet in the air and landed it upside down like it was a toy. And that was the biggest truck the army had in its fleet, the one that that digs up all the bombs. I lost the first friend I had made in my platoon, the guy who bought me my first drink when I turned 21.  It really tested my faith.”

Ultimately, these experiences deepened Chris’s faith and his love of America. “When I think about America, it’s not just what America is but also the promise of what America can be.  I always think about the sacrifices that we made as well as the others who came before us.”

Chris survived three IED strikes to his vehicle: “I had severely injured my back but we didn’t know until I was checked out back here in the states.  I kept serving while I was over there with a hurt back and everything. I just thought that I was really sore. And it wasn’t until I got back to the States that they diagnosed me, and I was medically retired after that.”

Chris then went to college in Colorado Springs and got his degree in political science.  He began helping people run for office, working on their campaigns, and this last election he actually ran for the State Senate in Illinois.  “I lost, but it was a good experience. It made me aware of a lot of things.  Sometimes a candidate that is running against you might be very similar and you just have a difference of opinion, but other times it can be a very big thing.  It turned out to be that way for me.  I’m very pro-life, and so the woman that I was running against was the author of the new Illinois abortion bill.  So I ran against her as the guy that was finding roadside bombs to save lives while she was writing legislation to literally kill people. But while our morals and principles are one thing, life experiences can change our perspectives on certain things.  My experience in the army, going to Afghanistan, seeing one of the world’s poorest nations, and seeing what life is like for most people really makes you try to step out of your own shoes. I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t get to experience and it’s hard for them to be open-minded. Actually, that’s one thing that Benjamin Franklin really preached to all the founding fathers. It was the message of unity during the Constitutional Convention.  He famously said that when a carpenter’s trying to join two boards together, he plains a little bit off of both sides in order to make a joint that lasts for centuries.”

Like Benjamin Franklin, Chris Kasperski is a Freemason, which he elaborated on as follows: “Part of what we believe in is you treat people equally.  One thing that I really love about the practice of Freemasonry is egalitarianism.  That’s what we really preach in the military. We say, “Nobody in this military and this army is black, or white, or brown. We are all green. Then, when you get out of the military, you find yourself back in the civilian world where everybody’s dividing and conquering. I really try to bring people together, and will fight for things that I believe in, but also at the same time can turn around and work with somebody that I might disagree with on a particular issue, but completely agree with on another issue. I think that people today really lack that skill of compromise. It was part of the values of our founders, but it has been shuffled aside in all the competition for success.”

Chris recognizes that turmoil existing in America and the world at large today and believes that the United States must return to its roots. “I think everybody is right to be worried. One of the things that I remember reading when I was in college was a book called Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville, a Frenchman visiting the new United States in 1835.  He had come to America to study our penal system, but his study ending up morphing into a study of American democracy.  If you read his book today, it is eerie because it so describes what our society is like today. He talks about how America won’t lose its freedoms from outside.  It’ll lose its freedoms from within. We’ll lose our freedoms from the gradual chipping away at our liberty. Just a little here and a little there. It’s like the frog in the boiling pot doesn’t realize the water is boiling if you turn up the temperature a little bit at a time. The thing that worries me is that people are often very content, even in their misery.”

 “ I like to think in terms of what’s your legacy going to be? You know, what are you going to be remembered as? And one of the things that Benjamin Franklin really believed was honoring your legacy and considering what you will be remembered for after you’re gone.  One thing that he taught me, and I try to live out every single day is to think when you wake up in the morning, ‘What good can I do today?’ And when you go to bed, What good have I done?’”

This kind of thinking is one of the many reasons we recognize Chris Kasperski as a Man of Value.