Please do not forget, as you go about whatever you’re doing, to pause for a respectful moment of remembrance at 1500L (whatever Local is for you). You may not recall, but the National Moment of Remembrance resolution was passed 12 years ago, asking that all Americans voluntarily (and informally) observe a moment of remembrance and respect for our fallen. A moment of silence, a moment of prayer or by listening to Taps, something to honor the lives of the men and women of our country’s military who have been killed in the nation’s service.

I grew up hearing my grandmother refer to it as Decoration Day, when you went out and put flags on the graves of all veterans in your local cemetery,though my parents and aunts and uncles called it Memorial Day. The holiday was officially proclaimed 05 May (18)68 by General John Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic in General Order No. 11, and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. It was originally to honor the dead of the Civil War, but after WWI it was changed to honor all Americans fighting in any war.

“Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from hishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.”

Do something today to honor your dead, because even if you never met them, even if you never knew any of them, they are absolutely YOUR dead.

God keep them all. May He comfort their families and their comrades and help us trust His plan that required their sparks be extinguished.

1500 Local: Don’t forget it.

Thanks to Gruntworks for the poster and Mahoney’s poem.