Today, on Memorial Day, we pause to honor and remember all those who gave their lives for the preservation of Freedom. These brave men and women paid the ultimate sacrifice so that our nation might endure, infused with the timeless values imparted by our forefathers—that all are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Their selfless commitment ensures that the ideals upon which this country was founded continue to guide us, and their legacy lives on in every free breath we take and every choice we make.
In Ken Burns’s The Civil War, actor Sam Waterston’s evocative recital of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address captures the profound cost of that struggle and the enduring promise of our Union. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…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.” These stirring words remind us that, though we can never truly consecrate the ground made sacred by their sacrifice, we are called to carry forward the unfinished work to which they so nobly gave their last full measure of devotion.
