On Memorial Day, let us remember the fallen as Lincoln did

Memorial Day’s name seems a bit ambiguous compared with its more precise object. To memorialize means to preserve the memory of or to commemorate. We do that with all sorts of persons and events. The monuments and statues around Washington, D.C., and across the country memorialize. Funerals do so as well for the dearly departed. Nearly any holiday, sacred or secular, calls on us to reverently recall.

On Memorial Day, though, we do not set aside a time generically for remembering, leaving the who or what to the decision of the observer. Instead, Memorial Day honors those who died while serving in the United States military. It asks us to stop and remember the soldiers who perished serving their fellow human beings and American citizens in the line of duty.

We can find no better model for such memorializing than President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” That famous man’s famous speech will turn 160 later this year. He gave it to dedicate a cemetery for those who had fallen at the pivotal Civil War battle of Gettysburg. In it, we find the words to express our own remembrance.

First, Lincoln articulated the cause for which these men died. He opened by describing America as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War was waged over whether a country “so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”