In Memoriam …

If there’s ever a time people tend to dust off tradition, it’s on holidays. How we observe any particular holiday is usually something that is a long-held tradition, usually learned from childhood and our families of origin.

That includes Memorial Day.

But for this day of remembering those who have given their lives in service to their fellow countrymen, let me suggest we add into the rituals of the holiday at least two things: learn some of their names, and listen to some of their stories.

Why is this important? Let me share a couple reasons why, first this snippet from Alan Perkins:

When I consider the power of these little narratives, I’m reminded, on this Memorial Day weekend, of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a speech he gave in 1863 to dedicate a portion of that battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead. It begins: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The whole speech, from beginning to end, is only 272 words long. It took Lincoln barely two minutes to deliver.

But what most people don’t know is that Lincoln wasn’t the only speaker that day. A man named Edward Everett, who was considered to be a great orator, came before Lincoln in the program and gave an address that lasted a full two hours. It contained over fourteen thousand words, and it began like this: “Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghanies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet …”

Now, let me ask you, which of those speeches is familiar to every one of us, over a hundred years later? Lincoln’s, of course. Why? Because in just a few short sentences he captured the terrible significance of that occasion. It was not the actions of the living which would consecrate, or hallow, the ground, but the actions of those who had given their lives to defend it.

And second, Jeff Greenfield is a news correspondent for ABC News. He lives in Salisbury, Connecticut and has attended the same Memorial Day observance in his community for the last 15 years. He writes:

At 10 a.m., the parade begins moving down Main Street. It is a small parade: two vintage cars, bearing the region’s oldest war veterans; the men and women who served in the military; the Salisbury Town Band; the Scouts; the Housatonic Day Care Center; the fire trucks from the volunteer fire departments in and around the Northwest Corner. We fall in line behind the fire trucks, and follow the parade to the cemetery. There’s a hymn, and a prayer, followed by a Scout who reads the Gettysburg Address, haltingly, shyly. Then come the names of the men who died in the World Wars, in Korea, in Vietnam. A minister recites the 23rd Psalm, a bugler plays taps (with another bugler far away playing the echo), the flag is raised from half-staff, and we all walk the few steps back to the Village Center. It is as artless, as unaffected a ceremony as can be imagined. There are no speech writers, no advance men measuring the best angles for TV (there is no TV) and by the end of it I, along with many other allegedly sophisticated urban types, are in tears.

The men whose names have been read indeed gave what Lincoln called “the last, full measure of devotion” — some in wars whose purpose no one could doubt — some in wars whose purpose will never be clear, some for the folly and arrogance of the men in charge. When they fell, their deaths were a small part of a bigger story. But every Memorial Day, the lives they never got to live, and the people they left behind, are the only story that matters. That is why it matters that their names are uttered aloud before people who never knew any of them. That is why it matters that we were there this year — and will be there the next and the next and the next.

So whatever your traditions are for Memorial Day, I encourage you to learn some of the names and stories of the fallen. They matter.

Scotty