Memorial Day 2025
I always return to Memorial Day not only as a moment of remembrance, but as a reminder of responsibility. If you've read my earlier reflections on the quiet lessons of cemeteries, the fraying threads of our civic fabric, or the unfinished work we inherit as citizens, you know I believe history isn't just something we study; it's something we carry. Memorial Day forces me to stop scrolling and actually think. Not just about the dead, but about what I'm doing with what they left me. Am I building something worth their sacrifice? When I vote, when I speak up, when I choose how to spend an ordinary Tuesday - am I honoring what they died for, or am I just coasting?
There is a quiet place in the heart of Philadelphia, bracketed by trees and hemmed in by the rhythm of the city. Washington Square was once a burial ground, then a grazing field, later a parade ground, ultimately holding, beneath its grass, the remains of thousands of unnamed soldiers who fought for the fragile, radical idea of American independence.
No headstones. No names. Just grass and the weight of knowing they're down there.
The flame flickers above them, and carved into stone are words that won't leave me alone:
"Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness."
That line has settled in my head this year. It feels like a whisper from the past, growing louder as the headlines grow noisier.
These men died in obscurity, in suffering, in the confusion and chaos of a war that had not yet produced a nation. They died not for a flag or a president or a party, but for an idea, half-born, fragile, and still unproven: that people could govern themselves.
They did not live to see if it would work. They gave their lives for a future they could not claim, only imagine.
We are that future.
And the question we must ask this Memorial Day is not merely, "Do we remember them?" but rather, "Are we worthy of them?"
Because freedom's light still burns, but it flickers.
In recent months, I've felt it dim in the distance, dulled by cynicism, selfishness, and a national attention span grown brittle. We argue more than we understand. We scroll more than we serve. We mock before we mourn. I'm as guilty as anyone. I check my phone for election updates the way I used to check baseball scores. We treat politics like some kind of reality show, who's winning, who's losing, who said what stupid thing today. My dad does it, my neighbors do it, I do it. But when I stood in that square, looking at that flame, it hit me: those guys didn't bleed out in some field so we could turn their gift into cable news drama. They died for something more challenging and less exciting: the daily grind of citizens actually governing themselves.
History doesn't just happen; we write it, one vote, one conversation, one choice at a time. It is written by hands like ours, in ballot booths and classrooms, in boardrooms and around kitchen tables. The soldiers in Washington Square died without knowing who would take up the work. That task was left to us.
George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, reminded the country:
“The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and success.”
It was true then. It remains true now.
This Memorial Day, we are called not only to decorate graves, but to defend ideals. To honor the dead not just with flags and flowers, but with action, with civic learning, civil dialogue, and a renewed belief that our shared work is still unfinished and still worth doing.
Because if freedom is a light, then we must be its keepers.
And if others have died in darkness to bring us this light, let us not extinguish it with our indifference. Let us carry it forward, however imperfectly, however urgently, so that future generations might look back and say:
They remembered.
They were worthy.
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