Memorial Day

The dead don’t speak. That’s the thing. You can line the highways with flags, lay wreaths, let the bugle cry through the smoke of barbecue pits—but the dead, they just lie there. Quiet. Not for God, not for country. Just still. And all the talk in the world won’t raise them.

But I hear something.

I hear something when I read about the men who died in the Civil War…for union or for the right to own a person. I hear something when I hover over the “Memorial Day Sale” button, wondering when we decided that sacrifice was a coupon code. I hear something when I look at this country and feel, for the first time, like maybe we’ve lost what they died for.

They’re not talking. But they’re watching.

Memorial Day, we call it. But memory is a dangerous thing. It’s not clean. It doesn’t sit neatly between parades and softball games. Memory stinks of blood and betrayal and the kind of silence that follows a scream. We bury it because it’s easier to wave a flag than to carry the weight of what we’ve done—and what we’ve let happen.

Now we live in the Age of Trump, a carnival of noise and grievance. A nation swollen with pride and starved for truth. The president marks the day not with prayer or silence, but with all-caps rage on a glowing screen. Patriotism is for sale, and soldiers are for show. The dead? They’re brought up only when it helps someone win. But you won’t hear them in the noise. You’ve got to leave the city. Walk the empty rows of a cemetery. You’ve got to go to the dark places where memory still lives.

Memorial Day shouldn’t be easy. It should hurt. It should feel like Good Friday—like something holy was broken and we’re the ones holding the hammer. It should make us look in the mirror and ask what we worship, and whether we’ve traded the cross for a flag, or the truth for comfort.

Because the Bible doesn’t promise that nations endure. It promises that every kingdom will fall but one. It says the dead in Christ will rise—but it doesn’t say the rest of us won’t be judged for what we forget, for what we refuse to see.

In this America—this loud, frightened place that Trump is carving out of our fear—we have a choice. We can gorge ourselves on distraction. Or we can stand still. We can walk out into the quiet, feel the weight of all those gone, and remember what it means to be human. To be saved. To be accountable.

The dead don’t need us. But we need them.

To remember not just that they died—but why. And what we’ve become since. And maybe, if we still believe in resurrection, to start again.