And now look at us.

We call ourselves the United States. We say the word like it still means something. Then we turn around and brag about how much we hate each other. Do not New York my Florida. Do not California my Texas. Whole political careers built on telling Americans that other Americans are the enemy. Governors who treat neighboring states like foreign countries. Citizens who cannot sit at the same table as their own family because of who they voted for. A country that learned absolutely nothing from burying 600,000 of its own.

The widows who started this holiday were decorating graves that existed because Americans decided their fellow Americans were beneath them. They walked through those cemeteries hoping it would be the last time this country ever did that to itself.

We are dishonoring them in real time.

Because the memorial in Memorial Day is not just the soldier. It is the idea the soldier died for. You cannot separate the two without making the whole thing a lie. They did not give their lives for nothing. They gave them for something they believed was worth the price. A country. A Constitution. A union. A promise that the people back home would hold up their end.

So the question this day actually asks is the one nobody wants to say out loud.

Are we still that country?

Are we still the republic those men and women thought they were dying to defend? Or have we become something else. Something they would not recognize. Something that makes the soldiers still serving today wonder, quietly, in the parts of themselves they do not say out loud, whether the oath they swore is to protect their families from foreign threats, or to protect them from their own government and their own neighbors.

That is not a rhetorical question. Ask the veteran waiting over nine months for care he was promised from the VA. Ask the soldier watching his neighbors, friends, their kids friends disappeared without due process. Some who even wore the uniform themselves. Ask the National Guardsman ordered into an American city against American citizens. Ask the journalist sued into bankruptcy for printing the truth. Ask the judge appointed instead of elected so the voters’ will can be quietly bypassed. Ask the family whose public records request was buried because the answers were inconvenient.

The dead at Gettysburg, at Antietam, at Shiloh, at Arlington did not bleed out so their grandchildren could live under that. They did not die so we could turn every state line into a tribal border and every American into a stranger.

Memorial Day is the bill coming due. Not on the dead. On us. They did their part. They paid in full. The only question left is whether we are still the country worth the receipt, or whether we have spent down their sacrifice and called it patriotism while we did it.

You honor the fallen by being worth what they died for. By remembering that the word United was bought with more American blood than any foreign enemy ever spilled. By refusing to let this republic be hollowed out by cowards, grifters, and men who never served a day in their lives but wear the flag like a costume while they tear the country in half for clicks.

If we are not that nation anymore, then today is not a memorial. It is an autopsy.

And the only people who can change that answer are the ones still breathing. Remember that. Memorialize that.

Respectfully,

Robert W. Burns III – Editor, The Space Coast Rocket