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Our other national holidays would have no meaning if it were not for the sacrifices we honor on Memorial Day. Supreme sacrifices should be remembered with comparable dignity. Memorial Day is such a celebration. But it is much more than waving flags and hearing speeches. The Fourth of July celebrates our independence. Thanksgiving expresses gratitude for our blessings. Veterans’ Day honors those who served. But Memorial Day honors those who gave their lives to preserve that independence and those blessings. The parades, picnics and the arrival of summer take nothing away from the solemnity of this very special day for all patriots. Memorial Day combines the meaning of every other national holiday. It represents, perhaps better than the other holidays, why so many sons and daughters of other lands have dreamed of being Americans.
Memorial Day touches, like no other national holiday the hearts and memories of every American who loves his country. Every parade and every picnic is graced by the felt presence, however unseen, of the sons and daughters who loved their country enough to give up their lives for it.
America will not be outdone in honoring those who paid the ultimate price to purchase the freedoms other nations envy. No other nation has sacrificed so much of its human treasure and the blood of its young to purchase not only its freedom, but that of other nations. No other nation has so many heroes buried in so many cemeteries in so many foreign lands. Foe after foe have thought Americans were too soft to fight and too selfish to sacrifice their lives. More than a million heroes have proven them wrong.
For whatever the war or conflict, the remembrance of those who have sacrificed all is a common thread binding our past with the present and our present with our future. It gives us reason and a sense of purpose in living up to the great and glorious history that we have inherited, and a sense of mission in seeing that past sacrifices were not made in vain.
As we gather to remember the true meaning of Memorial Day, we remember not only the heroes of the past, those who battled the evils of their times – totalitarianism and communism – but the heroes of the present who fell fighting the latest form of tyranny, the tyranny of terrorism.
I urge you to join me in observing Memorial Day and every day with gratitude and reverence for the past, and with hope and optimism for the future.
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