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, especially, asks us to slow down and shoulder that burden. It’s not only about honoring the fallen, but about asking what we owe them—what kind of country we are building in their absence, and whether we are prepared to defend the ideals they died for with our words, our votes, and our daily lives.
There is a quiet place in the heart of Philadelphia, bracketed by trees and hemmed in by the rhythm of the city. Washington Square—once a burial ground, then a grazing field, later a parade ground—holds beneath its grass the remains of thousands of unnamed soldiers who fought for the fragile, radical idea of American independence.
They lie there still, without headstones, without certainty, but not without honor.
Their tomb is marked by a flame and a carved warning, both solemn and illuminating:
"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. And too often, we confuse personal grievance with public virtue.
We’ve come to treat democracy as a spectator sport. We tally wins and losses like baseball box scores, forgetting that self-government was never meant to be a game—let alone a blood sport.
But history doesn’t unfold by accident. 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.
So 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.
