Memorial Day? What does it mean to you?

 HISTORY: Memorial Day began after the American Civil War, when communities across the divided nation started holding “Decoration Day” ceremonies to honor soldiers who had died in battle by decorating their graves with flowers and flags. One of the earliest large observances took place in 1868, organized by the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans organization. Over time, the remembrance expanded beyond Civil War casualties to honor all American military personnel who died in service to the nation. In 1971, Memorial Day became an official federal holiday observed on the last Monday in May — intended not as a celebration of war, but as a solemn reminder of sacrifice, grief, duty, and the unfinished responsibility of the living to build a nation worthy of those who gave their lives for it. Memorial Day ultimately asks a moral question: what kind of country are we becoming, and are we honoring the dead merely with ceremonies, or with the character of the society we leave behind?

 

NOW:  What profoundly troubles me this Memorial Day is not a lack of patriotism, but the opposite, polarized patriotism and a form nationalism that holds people in other nations to be of less value or evil. I love the ideals expressed in the our Declaration of Independence.  FYI:  That is not its original title...and it was never officially changed.  It's originally "The unanimous Declaration of thirteen united States of America".  We got lazy and shortened it. Unfortunately, it was given the word "Independence" that Albert Einstein called a "delusion".  Its a mental construct that only exists in our minds and words.  Then, when we engineer our vital governing systems (the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter) on this delusion within our irreversible interdependent universe, there should be no confusion or disbelief on why they don't work as intended.  Read the Preamble to both and the intentions expressed clearly within each.  None can be achieved without a united global effort.  And nearly every problem we face now is because of our steadfast belief they can work, but we have resisted adapting them to real life conditions.  Both have within them the capacity to be adapted.  But human mind's persist in not transforming them to achieve and sustain the health, freedoms, rights, and security that every sane person wants and needs to survive, thrive, and someday flourish and prosper for generations that follow.  

Our stewardship of our nations and our planets ecosystems have so far failed.  The foundation is simple.  All people are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights.  And the only legitimate reason for government to exist, according to Loch and Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, is to protect people's "freedom and security".  

So I am profoundly disappointed and now ashamed at what our American experiment has become. "Truths" no longer held as "self-evident" by nearly half of US voters.  This Truth decaying is killing us.  Meanwhile, political tribes are so divided violence it drives violence, polarized media ecosystems, religious extremism, and raw greed by the wealthiest and most powerful, that is tearing apart any shared sense of reality. 

Many claim faith while ignoring compassion, justice, humility, or stewardship of our planet's resources. Too many celebrate wealth without asking what obligations come with privilege. Meanwhile veterans who sacrificed their bodies, minds, and futures are too often discarded once the uniforms come off, while the families of the dead are handed flags and speeches instead of enduring support and national gratitude worthy of the cost they paid. And for what? Our government is nearly $40 trillion in debt while infrastructure crumbles, schools fail too many children, hospitals bankrupt families, and legal and political systems become increasingly distorted by money, power, anger, and spectacle. We blame guns, politicians, corporations, immigrants, or one another. But never ourselves. "We the People" are the deeper problem.  Our selfish and divisive cultural illness: a society that increasingly worships comfort, consumption, outrage, tribal identity, and personal success more than sacrifice, virtue, wisdom, responsibility, or care for future generations.

We've forgotten that happiness is not something automatically owed to us. It is something discovered through service to causes larger than ourselves — our communities, our children, our common vulnerability, the natural world that sustains us, and the generations yet unborn. 

Memorial Day should remind us of that reality. I encourage people to watch Hacksaw Ridge and Saving Private Ryan — not as war entertainment, but as reflections on courage, sacrifice, duty, and the terrible cost of human conflict. 

Both portray extraordinary service above self and how a nation can still recognize the value of a single human life amid industrial-scale violence. But as we honor military sacrifice, we too often ignore the quieter massive tragedies around the world where thousands of children die daily from preventable hunger, malnutrition, and infectious disease from affordable solutions, while ignoring the costs to ourselves because of this, in both blood and treasure. 

Most of us waste enormous time, wealth, and attention while entire populations struggle for basic survival. That moral contradiction should haunt us in our so called 'developed and civilized' world. 

THE FUTURE?  But now, humanity stands at the threshold of something even more dangerous: AGI.  Artificial General Intelligence being urgently developed inside a competitive global system driven by profit, military advantage, and national rivalry instead of a wise search for solutions. 

This is not another Y2K-style technical inconvenience. It is potentially civilizational. Once intelligence surpasses our ability to understand or control it, human beings may become as irrelevant to advanced systems as ants are to a highway project. The danger is not that machines become evil in a human sense, but that human values become unnecessary to systems pursuing objectives we barely comprehend. 

Solving a problem would require something we currently lack: a civilization mature enough to place wisdom above competition, restraint above domination, and long-term survival above short-term gain. This would require cultures grounded less in endless consumption and more in "the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” referenced in the 1776 Declaration — humility, reciprocity, stewardship, truth, and the Golden Rule. Our planet is a rare and fragile home in a vast universe. Whether humanity deserves to survive here may ultimately depend on whether we can rediscover not merely intelligence, but moral maturity and the wisdom to do what is entirely possible with the resources and the tools we have always had.