How to Commemorate Memorial Day

Memorial Day is the beginning of summer, we’re told. For many friends, it is the end of an exhausting legislative session. But its real meaning is far deeper and more precious to all of us.

[A soldier of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment places flags on headstones ahead of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery on May 26. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters, via the Washington Post)]

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Sunday, May 28, 2023

         Memorial Day has been celebrated in some form or fashion for over 150 years. It started after the Civil War as a way to remember the soldiers who had perished, originally by decorating their gravesites with flowers. For a while, there were different but complementary commemorations in Northern and Southern states, but by 1890 every state had made it a holiday. In 1968, Congress standardized the holiday as “Memorial Day” and moved its observance to the last Monday in May.

         As opposed to Veterans Day, which is celebrated November 11, or Armed Forces Day, which is celebrated om the third Saturday in May, Memorial Day honors those who have fallen in battle. Memorial Day was thus to have a somber and respectful tone. By the 1880s, the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ fraternal organization, was providing handbooks to local chapters for commemorating the day. The handbooks counseled decorating the graves of the fallen, followed by “a simple and subdued graveyard service involving prayers, short patriotic speeches, and music ... and at the end perhaps a rifle salute.” A later version of the handbook, addressing the practicalities, encouraged family members to "exercise great care" in keeping the veterans sober.

         Memorial Day began as a commemoration of the lives sacrificed in the Civil War, but it has expanded to honor all those who have given their lives in service to this country, in whatever time and place and circumstance they have been called upon to do so. About 1.1 million lives have been lost in battle, and except for the Civil War, mostly not on American soil.

         It has become fashionable to criticize some of the wars we have fought, and the political leaders whose hubris and poor judgment got and kept us in them. Much of that is well-deserved. But the councils of the mighty did not really matter to Army Doctor Mary Edwards Walker, or Navy Lieutenant JG Weedon Osborne, or Marine Gunnery Sergeant John Canley, or Air Force Captain Lance Sijan, or Coast Guard Signalman First Class Douglas Munro. They were not fighting a great geopolitical chess game, or for booty, or to enslave others. They were doing their duty as they saw their duty fit to be done.

(Mary Edwards Walker, Weedon Osborne, and John Canley)

(Lance Sijan, Douglas Munro)

         Walker was a woman. Canley was Black. Sijan was a Serbian whose father had immigrated to the U.S. Back home, they did not necessarily enjoy all the so-called “blessings of liberty.” They were fighting for an ideal, not a lived experience.

         Our battles in all those other places around the globe were not to conquer those lands, but to advance the freedom and self-determination of the people of those lands, however imperfectly we conceived or executed that. And we did that because it protected our freedom and self-determination, and honored our founding ideals.

         That’s why, for me, the most magnificent expression of the meaning of Memorial Day is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which gave a new context and meaning to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A nation “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A war to test whether “any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” An “unfinished work,” a “great task remaining before us.” “A new birth of freedom,” so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

         Lincoln stood on a battlefield where 51,000 people had died in three days, and from that blood and carnage and stench (the deceased, hastily covered over in the July heat, had not all been reburied when the cemetery was dedicated that November) summoned a new meaning for the battle – “that these dead shall not have died in vain” – and a new purpose for the country going forward.

         I encourage you to celebrate Memorial Day, in the spirit of honoring those who have given “the last full measure of devotion” to their country, by reading the Gettysburg Address for yourself. 

         Better still, read it out loud. See if you can get through it without your voice breaking. I know I can’t.

         Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

         Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

         But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

         It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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         Update on Paxton Impeachment … If you’re one of the six people on Earth who do not know, the Texas House of Representatives impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday afternoon. The vote was 121-23, with two members present/not voting.

         Paxton has been temporarily suspended from his duties pending a trial in the Senate, probably in late June or early July. First Assistant AG Brent Webster has stepped up as caretaker of the agency, although Governor Greg Abbott (a former AG himself) has the option to designate someone to run the agency during the pendency of Paxton’s trial.

         I will have much more to say about this in a post on Tuesday. Have a good weekend!