Today is Memorial Day in the US, the official holiday for remembering the men and women killed in our various wars. It’s also the traditional start of the summer season, which means that it’s always an odd collision of the solemn and the raucous. Growing up, there was always a parade in town, which started downtown and made its way to the cemetery for an official ceremony and wreath-laying by the chaplain of the American Legion. He could never quite keep the words straight (“These flowers may wither, but the spirit of which they are a symbol will endure forever”), but he came close enough, then the Legion would fire three rounds of blanks, and a couple of buglers would play “Taps.”<\/p>\n
And then there would be a mad swarm of ten-year-old boys trying to grab the shell casings from the blanks, and then barbeque.<\/p>\n
Another part of the annual ceremony was the reading of the Gettysburg Address by a high school student:<\/p>\n
\nFourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It’s a fantastic speech, whatever the people of the time may have thought, and powerful even read haltingly by somebody who’s not thinking about the words. And it remains the second-best statement by a President ever carved in marble in DC.<\/p>\n
(It’s somewhat less wonderful as a PowerPoint presentation<\/a>, but I’m obliged to either post that link, or get it six times in the comments…)<\/p>\n
Sadly, Union is on a trimester calendar, so this is just another Monday as far as the college is concerned. The only real acknowledgment of the holiday is an Admissions event for high-school juniors looking to get a head start on next year’s college search. So, I’ll be at work today, teaching first-years about inductance, and trying to convince the next generation of students to come here. <\/p>\n
But it’s still worth taking a moment to read over Lincoln’s words, and offer some small tribute to those who have served and died. We owe them a lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is Memorial Day in the US, the official holiday for remembering the men and women killed in our various wars. It’s also the traditional start of the summer season, which means that it’s always an odd collision of the solemn and the raucous. Growing up, there was always a parade in town, which started… Continue reading Memorial Day<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}