Celebrate Memorial Day––with Gratitude

I don’t have a problem with people enjoying themselves on Memorial Day …

Life is busy and fast these days, and it’s important to take time to enjoy friends and family. You shouldn’t feel guilty when you fire up the grill or head for the beach.

You should also feel gratitude for the people who made it possible for us to enjoy ourselves this weekend––those who gave their lives so we could enjoy ours in relative safety and security.

We should all also remember the origins of Memorial Day. It has become a time to remember all who have fallen in war, but it started specifically to honor those who sacrificed their lives to preserve the Union and end slavery.

Sadly, we’ve all but forgotten what these people fought for. Our nation is divided in many ways––by ideology, by race and by senseless violence.

It’s time to come together again. It’s time to renew the ideal that we are much stronger as a Union.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes gave his first iconic Memorial Day speech in 1884, he was talking about soldiers from opposite sides of America’s Civil War coming together in respect and brotherhood. I think his words have an important lesson for all of us today …

So far as this last is concerned, to be sure, there is no trouble. The soldiers who were doing their best to kill one another felt less of personal hostility, I am very certain, than some who were not imperiled by their mutual endeavors. I have heard more than one of those who had been gallant and distinguished officers on the Confederate side say that they had had no such feeling. I know that I and those whom I knew best had not. We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win; we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluble; we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief. The experience of battle soon taught its lesson even to those who came into the field more bitterly disposed.

You could not stand up day after day in those indecisive contests where overwhelming victory was impossible because neither side would run as they ought when beaten, without getting at least something of the same brotherhood for the enemy that the north pole of a magnet has for the south–each working in an opposite sense to the other, but each unable to get along without the other. As it was then , it is now. The soldiers of the war need no explanations; they can join in commemorating a soldier’s death with feelings not different in kind, whether he fell toward them or by their side.

Let’s enjoy our Memorial Day. Let’s also be grateful for those who made it possible.

Oliver Wendell Holmes gave another iconic Memorial Day address at Harvard University in 1895. Here is a short video highlighting his closing remarks: