So Easily Forgotten

Memorial Day, like so many of our national U.S. holidays, seems to have morphed into just another weekend only weakly linked to the commemoration of the events which originally gave them life.

This weekend fits that category very well. I’m just like many of you in the sense that I can find it easy to forget what it is that this nation is really celebrating in the next couple of days: the enormous sacrifice which American servicemen and women have made to secure the peace not only for ourselves, but for other nations as well. Not to mention the debt of fidelity which we owe them.

We need something to jolt us back to the reality that our freedom was won not only with the blood of our best men and women, but that it remains a fragile condition not to be taken for granted. In my case, that “something” is the memory of my own three brothers who served, as well as the visual reminders that I experience each time that I visit the war memorials in Washington, D.C.

In particular, the photo that I snapped last year while visiting the Korean War Memorial highlights an aphorism which we could well engrave in our hearts, as well as in our minds: “Freedom is not Free.”


Photo Note:  A wall at the Korean War Memorial, Washington, D.C.: A reminder of a plain truth so often minimized and sometimes forgotten. (by Dick Bergeron)