☕️ IN MEMORIAM ☙ DAY, May 27, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

In which we celebrate the ultimate devotion of our fallen dead and reflect on its lessons for us, the living.

🇺🇸🇺🇸 MEMORIAL DAY COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🇺🇸

It feels downright awkward to wish people a ‘happy’ Memorial Day even though, from a Christian perspective, celebrating death is happy; we believe the Apostle Paul when he promised us that, absent from the body, together with the Lord.

Since the ‘holiday’ (if you can call it that) marks a day of remembrance to honor fallen Americans who died fighting for our country, it naturally emerged years after America’s founding and its first wars. The first Memorial Day — at that time called “Decoration Day,” since the graves of fallen heroes were decorated with flowers — bloomed in May, 1865, in the days after the Civil War’s end.

On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina — where the war began — nearly 10,000 freed slaves and Union soldiers gathered to honor fallen American soldiers. They sang hymns, gave readings, and scattered flowers on the graves of fallen Union soldiers. Three years later, in May 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of a large group of Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance. General Logan picked May 30th because it wasn't the anniversary of any noteworthy Civil War battle. On Decoration Day, as he labeled it, Americans should lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead, “whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

(Only much later, in 1968, Congress passed the blandly named Uniform Monday Holiday Act, officially cementing the last Monday in May as Memorial Day, and giving federal employees a three-day weekend.)

But in 1863 — five years before the first Decoration Day — Lincoln delivered his iconic Gettysburg Address. The story goes that, at the last minute, he scribbled it out on a cocktail napkin on the train headed for Gettysburg. Which only proves that some people do work best under pressure.

Democrats, of course, brayed like donkeys at Lincoln’s now historic Address. They thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard. The Democrat-leaning Chicago Times dismissed the most-memorized speech in history as “silly, flat and dish-watery.” A local Democrat paper in Philly waxed metaphorical, defaming Lincoln’s soaring rhetoric as “a perfect squirrel track of thought.”

Lincoln — the newly formed Republican party’s very first president — never caught a break from Democrats, who attacked his every word like a swarm of angry bees, and things only got worse for Republican presidents from there. You see where we are now. Today’s Dems would’ve indicted Lincoln for failing to report his train ticket as a campaign expense or something.

But the Address endured, became immortal, and outlived all his critics. It’s a good thing, too, since Lincoln’s speech could just as well have been written for us the living in the equally extraordinary year 2024, Anno Domini. In particular, the second half of President Lincoln’s short speech seems aimed right at us, reminding us that the honored dead made their ultimate sacrifices for a reason.

Our heroic dead expect that we, the living, will keep fighting to the last man and woman. In Lincoln’s own words:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather 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.

Ours is not a war fought with cannons and musket balls. Our generation’s war is a mental, emotional, and cultural war, a war waged in secret and in lies, a war with needles and mysterious snake oil payloads, a mendacious war waged against truth, thoughts and feelings.

Keep fighting! Fight for the dead. Fight for the living. Fight for those not yet born. Fight and never stop fighting, until we have achieved a new birth of freedom in America.

That’s why, after all, I shall wish you a ‘Happy Memorial Day.’ We are all joyful warriors and loyal stewards of the great blessing of freedom bestowed upon our Great Nation by the Creator of the Universe.

Be of good cheer, and Happy Memorial Day!

Enjoy a patriotic day of remembrance, and then get back here tomorrow morning for a terrific C&C-style essential roundup of all the news fit to report and make fun of.

We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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