"To keep in memory the debt that we owe them."
The above is just one of the descriptions of Memorial Day that I read....this from the 1860s as the observance was first known as....Decoration Day.
"We shall not sleep, though poppies grow....In Flanders fields." That is the end of the short poem by John McCrae....that became popular during World War I. The meaning....concerning the poppies....is that even the drowsiness brought on by the flowers would not let the buried dead sleep without remembrance.
We had to memorize the Gettysburg Address in the fifth grade. That would to me have been in in 1960/61. President Lincoln....(I can hardly pronounce or think the names....President Lincon or President Kennedy or President Reagan....(there are many others)....without a rush of adrenalin)....Abraham Lincon gave that beautiful speech on November 19, 1863....100 years and three days before President Kennedy's life was taken.
I tried to recite the Gettysburg Address just now from memory....and was pleased with how much of it remains in my memory....including this from President Lincoln....who also had his life taken...."and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
My father is buried in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetary. When I visit his grave I walk over to Section 59....to the gravesite of that brave navy diver Robert Stethem....who was tortured and killed.....his body then thrown on the tarmac....this in 1985....from a plane hijacked by Hezbollah terrorists.
"The debt that we owe them!" We are in arrears right now. They sacrificed to keep something that we let slip away....not greatness....it was much more valuable than mere greatness. It was not family....for there were single service personnel without family. It was ultimately not even for country. They sacrificed....for others....in the place of others.....black-white-brown-yellow...others....this political persuasion-that political persuasion....others. We need to pay back that debt....to remember them....from the Medal of Honor winner....to the remains in the grave with no name....and under the tiny marker in some nondescript rural cemetery....to the blue ocean that received the bodies....to the bodies never found in Korea and Vietnam.
