War is one of humanity’s oldest and most appalling tragedies — a horrifying, ancient ritual too often mistaken for a pageant of glory and heroism.
Yes, there are heroes of the greatest kind who emerge during war, men and women who deserve our praise and respect. But we shouldn’t forget war’s cruel reality: It is a grinding engine of destruction, pain, and suffering. As Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman observed, “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
So, when we gather on Memorial Day, we must speak clearly about who and what we’re honoring. This isn’t a celebration of war. It’s a solemn time to mourn and remember those we’ve lost. And to truly honor their memory, we must confront the full weight of war. We’re remembering lives that had barely begun — many just teenagers — yet they carried an unimaginable burden.
Honoring them means rejecting cheap political gestures that use soldiers’ lives as props. It means resisting the urge to romanticize war as redemptive or inevitable, and recognizing it for what it is: a failure of diplomacy, imagination, and leadership — a terrible mess placed on the shoulders of the young, brave, and duty-bound.
Memorial Day is sacred, but not because war is sacred — because life is. The names etched into monuments from sea to shining sea represent lives cut short, futures erased, loved ones who never came home.
We owe them more than parades, salutes, and hawkish platitudes. Memorial Day demands reflection with purpose; it demands that we carry the memories of the fallen not just in ceremony, but in the choices we make as a community and a nation.
Our gratitude must lead to efforts for peace, compassion for one another, and a deeper understanding of what we lost — and what we owe to veterans. That’s how we make remembrance more than ritual. Maybe that’s also how we make peace a reality.