Since the Declaration of Independence was signed, more than a million men and women have died fighting for the creation and then the defense of the United States. On Memorial Day, we take a moment as a nation to honor the sacrifices of those men and women.
The day was observed in 1868 to honor Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. The holiday was then known as “Decoration Day,” but Congress changed the name in 1968 and moved it to the last Monday in May. When the public holiday began, communities across the country gathered and walked to cemeteries where they placed flags on the graves of those who died fighting for America. Memorial Day parades today are extensions of that tradition.
Most holidays feel the same, no matter who is in the White House. However, patriotic holidays such as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day can be different. It matters that President Donald Trump has a strong, instinctive, and laudable prejudice in favor of the country he leads. Trump believes the U.S. is the best country on Earth and that it has been a force for good, even if not for perfection, throughout history, including with its many military actions abroad, where hundreds of thousands of men have lost their lives.
Trump has said, sometimes controversially, that not every military endeavor the U.S. undertakes is wise or just. But he and most ordinary people do not conclude from its faults that the U.S. is an immoral country or that its men who died in battle did so in vain. When a president orders a soldier into battle, it is his duty to go. That is what makes a soldier. His sacrifice, and the sacrifice of women who have more recently joined the armed forces, is part of what makes this country great.
Trump has honored the memory of the dead. He has done this partly by ridding the Pentagon of divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, many of which included training that falsely taught members of the armed forces that the U.S. is a racist and oppressive nation. He increased defense spending by over $200 billion in his first four years in office, and his most recent spending bill boosts money for Pentagon spending by another $150 billion.
Trump is also committed to a foreign policy that is intended to ensure fewer American men and women are asked to make the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. Trump wants to avoid putting troops in harm’s way unnecessarily, and he has prioritized deterring China from aggression that would lead to many lives lost on both sides.
Unsurprisingly, one result of honoring the U.S. military by restoring the warrior ethos and deliberately avoiding conflicts deemed not in the national interest is that enlistment in the armed forces has jumped to its highest level in 30 years. Young men and women want to serve a country led by a president who thinks the nation is great. They trust this administration not to treat their lives frivolously.
Five years before the first Memorial Day was celebrated, former President Abraham Lincoln established a Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, noting that, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
Lincoln was wrong, for what he said is remembered in the country’s civic culture and literally carved into the stone of its memorials. He continued, “It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is 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.”
This Memorial Day, let us all absorb Lincoln’s words, cherish them, be guided by them, and act upon them.