Memorial Day

As we observe Memorial Day 2005, here's an excerpt from the Memorial Day address which I delivered at the community observance in New Albin, Iowa, three years ago on Memorial Day 2002:

Memorial Day eventually became a day to remember solders who had died in all of America's wars, from the American Revolution onward. Our ancestors came to this land in search of liberty— the liberty to worship God according to the leadings of their conscience, the liberty to live as free citizens. But as President Thomas Jefferson once put it, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." I wonder whether, in the closing years of the twentieth century, many of us perhaps came to take that liberty for granted. God has smiled on our land. We live in liberty. We live in plenty. And in the closing years of the twentieth century, it seemed that our lives would go along like that forever.

True, on Memorial Day we remembered those who had fallen in World War II, fighting to preserve civilization and freedom against Hitler and Hirohito. But the Axis was smashed, and Nazism was relegated to the history books.

And on Memorial Day we commemorated those who had fallen in Korea and Vietnam, fighting to hold the line against Communism. The Marxist vision of the future was a vision of a world without God, a world without individual freedom, a world where everything is subordinated to the dictatorship of the proletariat... But then, in a turn of events we had not foreseen, Communism collapsed under its own dead weight, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union went out of business. Marxism ended up in the dustbin of history.

And so, in those closing years of the twentieth century, perhaps we came to take our liberty for granted, forgetting that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Then came the events of September 11. I'm sure each of us will never forget where we were, when we heard the terrible news on September 11, 2001. Just as those of us who are older will never forget where we were when we heard the news on November 22, 1963, or on December 7, 1941.

We heard the terrible news of passenger jets hijacked by terrorists. Two jets, smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A jet, smashed right into the Pentagon. Another jet, crashed in a field in Pennsylvania— as we later learned, its own passengers heroically sacrificed themselves so that the jet would not strike its intended target in Washington.

We thought, it can't happen here. But it did. For the first time in living memory— for the first time since the Civil War— acts of war directed against these United States, taking place right here on the American mainland. Thousands of innocent Americans, murdered in cold blood on American soil, by Muslim terrorists whose avowed goal is to destroy our country and our way of life.

Whoever would have imagined, on Memorial Day only one year ago, that within the year we would find ourselves living once again in a world where America is at war to defend that "tree of liberty [which] must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants"?

"With the blood of patriots"— that means our military, in Afghanistan and other far flung corners of the earth. "With the blood of patriots"— that means New York City police and firemen. "With the blood of patriots"— that means ordinary Americans like Todd Beamer who said, "Are you guys ready? Let's roll!", before he and other passengers went forward to take on the terrorists on United Airlines Flight 93 which went down in Pennsylvania.

"With the blood of patriots!"

In 1865, with the end of the Civil War in sight, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address in Washington. His words seem strangely to bear on the world in which we find ourselves living, post-September 11:

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

Lincoln went on to speak of how, four years earlier, at the time of his first inaugural address, insurgent agents were in the city of Washington, "seeking to destroy it without war— seeking to dissolve the Union." One nation, divided into two factions: "one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."

That is the world in which we find ourselves living today. "They would make war rather than let this nation survive; and we would accept war rather than let it perish." And on September 11, the war came.

But you may also remember how Lincoln's Second Inaugural closes. You've heard these words, even if maybe you didn't know where they came from, and they too bear on our situation today:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and for his orphan— to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.