Memorial Day

I passed a green-covered hillside today, bedecked with flowers and flags and crowds of people walking slowly among the carefully-polished stones which were arranged in haphazard patterns throughout the field. There were old people and young people and people in uniform and people in summer clothes; there were people using walkers and there were infants in strollers and there were young couples with toddlers in hand and there were middle-aged people who looked as though they'd been punched in the stomach.

I was coming home from the store, a great big warehouse store where there is more merchandise than I can ever imagine using, things that were invented by people who had the freedom to think for themselves, to come up with ideas, and to make something from those ideas, and make a living with those ideas; these things have enabled me to live a comfortable life where it is even possible for me to take for granted all the wonderful things that are available for me to buy.

But I won't.

Because over on that hillside are the stones with the names of the people who were willing to go to foreign lands and fight against other people who wanted to take those opportunities away from us, people who don't believe that it is right for men to choose their own destinies. Many of those people were young people, just a little older than my own children, and they might not have even understood the full ramifications of their decision, nor fully agreed with all the opinions of the people who sent them to those places far away.

But they went.

They may have imagined, as I would, that those kinds of things never happen to me, they always happen to somebody else. They may have imagined that it would all end and they'd come back home and have some great stories to tell their friends, their spouse, their children; but then one day Something Happened, and they came face-to-face with the fact that they would not be coming home to share those stories, and instead other people would be telling stories about them, how brave they were, how noble they were, how loved they were. Only they didn't really want to be the subject of stories, they just wanted to finish the job they'd been asked to do and go home, to be with the ones they loved, to continue living in the great country that had given them so much, and where there were still so many opportunities to be more.

But they died.

Now the families and the friends walk silently through the field looking down at the stones and reading the names and calculating the years and muttering about how young they were; or they try to remember the last time they saw their loved one alive, and are grieved to realize that the memories are getting fuzzy, and the faces are starting to become indistinct in their mind, and they have to look at the photographs more often to truly remember. And they feel the hurt that everyone feels when the realization strikes home that these memorials are not really for the dead, but for the living; it is the living who mourn, who cry, who feel an unquenchable loss, who must set aside a day to walk these narrow rows in the field and read the names and remember the faces; because we must be reminded of these things, of these people, of these sacrifices, of these duties we all share, because were it not for the people whose names are inscribed on the stones on this hillside, we would not be able to get in our cars and drive to a store and find all manner of interesting things to make our lives better, buy it, take it home, and share it with our loved ones, enjoying the freedom and prosperity that is known by no other country in the world the way it is known in ours.

And when we or our children finally forget those people, when we in our ignorance take for granted the sacrifice which has been made in our behalf, our freedom and prosperity will disappear.

So let us not forget.

Let us remember.