The Day for Memories

I'd wish you a happy holiday, but there are 651,031 reasons not to. WRITTEN & ANIMATED by PETER MOORE

THIS MEMORIAL-DAY MORNING I TEXTED my niece’s husband. He served as a member of the U.S. special forces. I wanted to let him know I was thinking of him, and all of the comrades he lost during his service to our nation. He wrote back that today, he honored 190 people who served with him, and never returned home. When he married my niece, they followed tradition, and set a table with a single, empty chair in the banquet hall, to honor those who wouldn’t make it to the ceremony that day. I remain haunted by that empty place setting. We might have set 651,031 of them, to occupy their true space in the history of our nation, and in the hearts of the people they left behind.

My flag is at half staff outside my home. It is quite literally the least I can do.

“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.”

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863