Memorial Day is all about remembering those who died in service to our country—those who gave their lives so that others could live. While we honor the fallen on Memorial Day, its true purpose is for we the living, to remember their sacrifice and become better for it. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. explained in 1884:
But although desire cannot be imparted by argument, it can be by contagion. Feeling begets feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. We can hardly share the emotions that make this day to us the most sacred day of the year, and embody them in ceremonial pomp, without in some degree imparting them to those who come after us. I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.
Two hundred and fifty years is not a long time in the grand scheme of things. Holmes himself was born at a time when veterans of the War for Independence were still alive. He later fought in the Civil War, where he was wounded three times. Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Holmes served until age 90 before passing away in 1935. There are still living Americans who were children during Holmes’ tenure on the Court, though their numbers dwindle every day.
If it was important in Holmes’ time to set aside a day filled with pomp and ceremony to remember our honored dead, it is even more important now, in a world dominated by technology that offers ephemeral experiences to feed short attention spans.
The further we drift from our history, and the more the experience of war is removed from the average person, the more imperative it becomes to put aside our daily distractions and meditate on what their sacrifice really means. It is in the death of our heroes that we find meaning for our own lives, as Holmes captured more than a century ago:
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.
Those of us who never wore the uniform, served in combat, or faced death must learn secondhand from those who did. That is the ultimate purpose of Memorial Day—to remind those of us who live in safety and relative naivete not only what our liberty cost, but also that life is, as Holmes said, a “profound and passionate thing” not to be taken lightly.
They died so that we might live. Let us not take that gift for granted.
Feature image from the Eagle Field of Honor.
About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
