Today is Memorial Day. It grew out of Decoration Day, which developed into a reconciliation memorial in the late 19th century to honor the fallen soldiers in the Civil War.
Decoration Day started in the South as Confederate Heroes Day and Confederate Decoration Day, but it almost immediately caught on in the North — one can hardly get more Yankee than the Danbury, Connecticut, avant-garde composer Charles Ives (1874-1954), whoseDecoration Day (1915-1920) tone poem (he later placed it in his Holidays Symphony as the second movement) is one of the great American orchestral classics (or so I’m told).
By 1890, every Union state had adopted a Memorial Day of some kind, under different names, not always celebrated on the date first promoted in the North, May 30. The two world wars shifted the emphasis even further to a national commemoration, and, in 1968, Congress changed the day of its observance to the last Monday in May; in 1971, Congress standardized the name as “Memorial Day.”
In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 pm. According to Statista, there have been 1,304,705 military fatalities in America’s wars. These ultimate sacrifices warrant a special day of remembrance dedicated solely to them.
Don’t we owe them our freedom? I certainly believe we owe it to the fallen to keep that freedom alive.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One reply on “In Memory of the Fallen”
Since the end of World War II, the US has engaged in a series of military adventures which, with few-if-any exceptions, have plainly not achieved their supposèd objectives. We must infer that our leaders are blithering incompetents, or have different objectives.
What the wars of the US have generally done, from the very start, is to expand the power of the federal state. At some point, that became the principal objective of these wars, and we’ve slipt into a period in which supposèd purposes need not be met. President Obama even demonstrated that the US could start new wars shortly even as one unpopular war had ended and another was still being waged.
I’m sure that many of the soldiers who died in these wars wanted to defend our freedom, and that many were sure that they were doing just that. But we need to take a cold, hard look at why they died.