Today is Memorial Day a day that we remember that the cost of freedom is high, the cost of war is perennial pain and loss very little gain and joy. We celebrate victories but still mourn the losses. I recall my dad thinking about his buddies who never came back from storming the beeches of Normandy. He was in the third wave while friends were in the first wave all died. We welcome soldiers home from war. Some soldiers never come home.
Memorial Day is not a victory parade it is an "honoring of the losses and pain of war". A remembrance that there is a price tag for freedom.
Memorial Day began in response to the Civil War that ravaged our nation. Abraham Lincoln said it was the worst of times and the best of times for the nation. In his second Inaugural Address he stated:.
With malice toward none, with charity (love) for ALL, with firmness in the right as God gives us to know the right,
let us strive to finish the work that we are in
To bind up the nations wounds,
to care for him (them) who shall have born the battle and
for his (their) widows and orphans (victims and villains)
to do all which may achieve and cherish
a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and all nations.
The first Memorial Day was crafted for the reconciliation and healing of the breech and betrayals of war.
Today in honor of my father and all those who fought and survived and others who died in World War II, in honor of all those men and women who have died in any war, fighting for any nation, we honor their loss. In honor of all those who are fighting and who have recently died and their "widows and orphans", we remember.
Today we commit to do "all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and all nations of earth".
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