Memorial Day was born from the ashes of the Civil War — a conflict in which Americans, for the first and only time on such a scale, took up arms against one another.
Great piece. One of the reasons I've always been excited about things like national service — as you and I have discussed extensively — is precisely because it achieves the kind of binding, and instills the habits of character, you talk about here. The only thing that can counteract the deleterious forces of digital division is something that gets Americans together side-by-side working in common purpose.
Thanks, John. We have a Civil War connection in our family, too. We visited the grave of
Clinton Gardner, a sailor on a Union gunboat on the Mississippi river, in Liberty, Indiana. Your piece also reminded me of one of the many great quotes of Lincoln. In one of his first recorded speeches, to the "Young Men's Lyceum", a debating society (the 1830s equivalent of the Joe Rogan experience, you might call it), he noted the breakdown in the rule of law as typified by mob attacks on free blacks and abolitionists. As is often true with Lincoln, his words are so relevant to today. He noted that our country would likely never be conquered by foreign invaders, and that the greatest fear was self-destruction. As a nation of free people, he wrote: "we must live through all time, or die by suicide".
Great piece. One of the reasons I've always been excited about things like national service — as you and I have discussed extensively — is precisely because it achieves the kind of binding, and instills the habits of character, you talk about here. The only thing that can counteract the deleterious forces of digital division is something that gets Americans together side-by-side working in common purpose.
Thanks, John. We have a Civil War connection in our family, too. We visited the grave of
Clinton Gardner, a sailor on a Union gunboat on the Mississippi river, in Liberty, Indiana. Your piece also reminded me of one of the many great quotes of Lincoln. In one of his first recorded speeches, to the "Young Men's Lyceum", a debating society (the 1830s equivalent of the Joe Rogan experience, you might call it), he noted the breakdown in the rule of law as typified by mob attacks on free blacks and abolitionists. As is often true with Lincoln, his words are so relevant to today. He noted that our country would likely never be conquered by foreign invaders, and that the greatest fear was self-destruction. As a nation of free people, he wrote: "we must live through all time, or die by suicide".
Thanks John for the powerful reminder of who we are innately and what we need to do to survive.