Memorial Day message should never get old – The Vicksburg Post

Monday is Memorial Day, and as always, most of us will be trying to find a balance between enjoying a day off with family and remembering the solemn reason for this holiday: to honor the brave men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. .

I know this is not the first time you have read this column. It has been written thousands of times, year after year, to remind us not to get lost in meals, beach days, and other vacation fun without remembering the staggering loss that made vacation a necessity in our country.

I could throw statistics and figures at you, and of course it goes a long way to illustrate my point that Memorial Day was necessitated by a heartbreaking amount of American blood shed all over the world. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story, nor does my own past experience. The loss of a soldier is not unlike cancer, in that it affects each of us – directly or indirectly. However, unlike loss due to illness, the loss of these American soldiers is not something we simply mourn; it’s something we also celebrate with, at least for me, a respect for something I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand.

Every year as Memorial Day approaches, we see the slogans, for lack of a better term. “Everyone gave some. Some gave it their all,” for example, flood our social media feeds and there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. For me, however, I always think of the Bible verse John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” »

If you really think about it, about what that actually means, it’s a simple statement that carries incredible weight. Knowing what you are doing may be your last act on this earth and doing it anyway is an act of courage that I may never fully understand unless one of my children is in danger. I pray I never understand it. Add to that the fact that these soldiers were not just giving their lives for their friends, but for an entire country of people, most of whom they had never met. Even more astonishing, these men and women – many of whom were undoubtedly still children themselves – made these sacrifices for an ideal; they did it to preserve this great experiment we call America that was started hundreds of years ago by other men and women sacrificing everything for what they believed.

Even in 1776, they knew that what they were doing would not be enough to preserve what they were creating. They knew it would require an endless defense against tyranny, here and abroad.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a complete idealist. I know there are problems. I know. But we’re not here to talk about all the things that went wrong today. Instead, we are here to honor the lives lost in the pursuit of what is absolutely right. Even when we do a terrible job of representing it to the world, I still think most Americans believe in what this country stands for; in the ideals that we all grew up being taught. Sometimes it’s easy to look around our often divided and perpetually polarized country and wonder where it all went wrong. But, as has been emphasized time and time again, we would not have the freedom to discuss all of this without the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform.

Then yes. I give you yet another Memorial Day reminder not to forget Why you can enjoy your vacation by having fun on Monday. But, given what we have lost for needing a Memorial Day, I think the message bears repeating.

Blake Bell is the general manager and editor-in-chief of the Vicksburg Post. He can be reached at [email protected].