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To honor my Father in Law who landed on Easy Red in the first wave and survived, I repost my 2022 Memorial day post. Thank you dad for your service to our family and our country.
Memorial Day is supposed to be sacred. In our family, it is. I have spent years trying to teach my children what this day means and why it matters. Some days I think I’ve succeeded. Other days I suspect they’re simply humoring me as I climb onto one of my patriotic soapboxes. But whether they fully appreciate it or not, I believe understanding Memorial Day is essential to understanding America itself.
Over the years, I’ve watched an anti-American sentiment creep insidiously through our culture. It rarely arrives waving a foreign flag. Instead, it presents itself as enlightened, compassionate, or even patriotic. It claims to seek justice while dismissing the very principles that made America the freest and most prosperous nation in history.
What concerns me most is that many Americans now enjoy the blessings purchased by generations of sacrifice without understanding the cost.
The men who fought at Gettysburg, stormed Normandy, climbed the slopes of Iwo Jima, froze in Korea, and served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not perfect. But they shared a belief that America was worth defending. They understood that freedom required sacrifice and that the Constitution was worth preserving.
Today, many citizens know little of that history. Civics education has largely disappeared. The Constitution is discussed less as the foundation of our Republic and more as an inconvenience standing in the way of political goals. Too many Americans can recite partisan slogans but cannot explain the separation of powers, federalism, or why the Founders intentionally limited government authority.
Even among our elected officials, there are times when it seems constitutional principles are viewed as obstacles rather than safeguards. The Republic survives only when its citizens and leaders understand both the freedoms and the limits established by our founding documents.
My greatest fear is not an invasion from abroad. America has faced foreign enemies before. My concern is the enemy within: an ideology that rejects the principles on which the nation was built while claiming the moral authority to replace them. Whether it calls itself socialism, Marxism, collectivism, or something else entirely, the common thread is the belief that individual liberty and constitutional limits should give way to centralized power.
History has shown repeatedly where those ideas lead.
Memorial Day should remind us that the United States was not handed to us. It was purchased with blood. Every white cross in a military cemetery represents a story unfinished, a family forever changed, and a sacrifice made on behalf of people the fallen would never meet.
Those Americans did not die for a political party. They died for a nation. They died for the Constitution. They died for the belief that future generations would inherit a country that remained free.
The best way to honor them is not simply to remember their sacrifice, but to defend the principles for which they sacrificed. If we lose those principles, if we forget our history, and if we stop teaching our children why America is worth preserving, then we risk losing the Republic from within.
Memorial Day is more than remembrance.
It is a warning.
And it is a call to remember who we are.
