Regular readers of this space know that each year since the
Free State Foundation's founding in 2006, I have written a special Memorial Day
message. Over the years, I've been gratified to receive many positive responses.
But occasionally I am asked "Why?" As in, why does the leader of a
think tank largely, but not exclusively, focused on communications and Internet
policy from a free market, property rights, and rule of law perspective take time
to write and distribute a Memorial Day message?
Good question, with an easy answer: Because as important as I
know market-oriented communications policy and protection of property rights
are, I also know there are more important things.
Remembering, with proper reverence, those soldiers, sailors,
airmen, and marines who have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect our
freedoms is one of those things. So, if one more message, or one with a
different emphasis, helps us – including me – to make sure to take time to remember,
I happily take pen to paper (so to speak).
That said, having written six Memorial Day messages, I admit
it gets more difficult each year to present a new or distinctive one. (This is
true for Independence Day and Thanksgiving Day too!) It's not that there are
not still wars being waged in faraway places with fresh sacrifices by our brave
soldiers. Rather, it is that the meaning of Memorial Day is surely timeless and
unchanging in the sense that memory, remembrance, and honor, properly accorded,
are timeless and unchanging.
In reading over the past messages, I still find the words of
Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,
delivered in a Memorial Day address in 1884 in Keane, New Hampshire,
particularly stirring, and, ultimately, uplifting:
"Such hearts--ah me, how
many!--were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this
day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the
symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the
silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering
under the apple trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with
sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a
soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public
honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march--honor and grief
from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our
generation pass away.
But grief is not the
end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the
forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for
us, and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they
lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life
and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers
and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring,
hope, and will."
And, of course, Lincoln's words spoken on the hallowed
grounds of Gettysburg are always fitting for Memorial Day.
"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."
Here at the Free State Foundation,
we believe that free market, limited government, and rule of law principles are
foundational prerequisites to maintaining the freedom of which Lincoln spoke
and for which so many of our countrymen have paid with their lives.As we remember those who have paid the ultimate price, and those who continue to serve, best wishes to you for a safe and contemplative Memorial Day!
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