Memorial Day, 2025

Arguably the first Memorial Day celebration was held 160 ½ years ago, in a field in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The country is again in danger from within – will it survive?

Welcome to a special Memorial Day edition of Life Its Ownself. If you like what you read, please 1) hit the Like button at the bottom of this installment, 2) subscribe to this newsletter, and 3) invite your best friends to read and subscribe. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

But first, your moment of Zen … President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. He is seated, hatless, below and to the right of the flag.

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Saturday, May 24, 2025

Quote of the Day:

" If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Speech, 1838

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History does not record whether there was a mattress sale at the time of the first Memorial Day, in November of 1864. It does record that President Abraham Lincoln, in the shortest speech on a day given to oratory, described a new vision and purpose for America.

The Declaration of Independence had been written by white men, for white men. The Civil War had been fought to eliminate the moral scourge of slavery and bring African-Americans within the scope of the Declaration’s promises. Still to come would be full citizenship for women and for other groups whose full participation in American political and social life were not even contemplated by the Founders.

And now we face an existential crisis as a nation: whether we will continue on the path of greater vigor, inclusion and participation, or whether we will backtrack on the promises of the last 160 years.

Consider: On this Memorial Day, our Department of Defense is actively removing the contributions of black, brown, Asian, female and LGBTQIA people from its official history. On this Memorial Day, our Congress is shredding the safety net, consigning millions of Americans to poverty and uncertainty in a land of plenty. On this Memorial Day, our president is actively undermining our role in the world, threatening the financial, political and military stability of the postwar global order that is America’s greatest claim to leadership.

And so, it is altogether fitting and proper that we remind ourselves of the promise of the Gettysburg Address: that the “Blessings of Liberty” promised in the Constitution are intended for all Americans.

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 battlefield 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.