What Memorial Day Teaches Us About The Nature Of Sacrifice

On Memorial Day, we remember those who fell serving our country. The ones who paid the ultimate price.

It would be utterly psychopathic on a national scale if we didn’t.

Why psychopathic?

Show us a nation that doesn’t honor those who sacrificed their lives for it, and you’ve found a nation already rotting from inside. One that has already planted the seeds of its own destruction and doesn’t know it yet. 

As George Orwell is often attributed with saying “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” 

Forget this, and we won’t have the luxury of forgetting for long. 

So we honor our fallen, for reasons the old and wise find obvious, and that the young and naive will have to learn eventually.

That’s what today is for. But it goes beyond that.

Remembering people who literally gave it all makes us think about what giving anything actually costs. And it’s never what people show you. 

The entrepreneur gets remembered for the device that saved thousands of lives. Not for the decade she spent not knowing whether she was saving anyone or going broke. 

The mother who worked two jobs so the kids never felt how close it really got. The Director who gave up months of weekends to get the project in front of the client on time and on budget.

The teenager who forfeited her entire high school social life so she could stay in, study, and eventually win a full scholarship. The program nobody will ever see fielded, led by people who spent years getting it right.

None of it makes the story. The years you don’t get back. The nights your own family looks at you like you’ve lost it. The work done for people who will never know your name, because the whole point was that you were doing it for them, not the thanks. 

The fallen understood this better than anyone alive

In a world where we can get almost anything without waiting, without sweating, without putting anything on the line, it’s worth remembering this. 

A person who never pays for anything forgets there was ever anything worth paying for.

Memorial Day is one of the last days we stop and remember people who did the opposite. Who gave the most and took the least.

A nation flourishes only as far as its people are willing to go the extra mile. 

And nobody went further than our fallen.

They stood watch over our nation. Now, we stand watch over their memory. 

God bless them all, and Happy Memorial Day.