Both the dead whom we honor today and the living. The best way, far better than a day of flags and barbecues and parades and watching sports, a “holiday” merchandizing opportunity and other such activities: always spend your vote in the cause of liberty. Work to advance candidates who are committed to protecting REAL human rights (not the phony “rights” so loudly shouted by the left nowadays) and REAL, responsible liberty (not the licentiousness and freedom to steal from others promoted by the left nowadays).
Exercise your citizenship for the good of your grandchildren and great grandchildren and generations yet undreamed of, instead of simply for the short term benefit of self-annointed “elites” and the Balkanized special interest groups they milk for power. Then, live your life as a FREE citizen, unshackled from the tyranny of the State while upholding your genuine duties as a citizen.
THAT’S the best way to honor those who have died to purchase your liberties and protect your human rights.
“other such activities”: There’s nothing wrong with flying flags, parades and barbecues and buying and selling stuff and suchlike. In fact, all those things can be outgrowths of free citizens simply living their lives as they see fit, without imposing themselves on others. But those things aren’t in and of themselves worthy expressions of honoring those who have given their lives to defend our liberties, our rights.
Phony “rights”: see this article at LewRockwell.Com for a starting place. It’s a list of the fake “rights” Franklin Roosevelt promoted that have been expanded into the current litany of the left.
“genuine duties”: defend your own rights and honor the rights of others (“Your rights end where my nose begins” and vice versa), and require government to do the same and no more. What are some of those legitimate rights we have a duty to defend and to require our government to defend? A good place to start:
Life
Liberty
The pursuit of happiness
But when one considers a “pursuit of happiness” as denoted by the Declaration of Independence one really ought to ask what that phrase meant to those who signed their names affirming that right. That’s an easy task, since the discussions of that document are themselves well-documented. The “happiness” considered a right to pursue included, but was not limited to another word that was considered for inclusion: property. The right to own and control the use of one’s own private property was included in the Founders’ thinking in “happiness”. Don’t take my word for it. Do your own homework.
Then, among other rights “reserved to the people”, we have some denoted by the Bill of Rights such as the right to free exercise of religion, the right to criticize the government, in speech and print, seeking a redress of grievances, the right of self-defense (and self-defense against government tyranny at that), the right to tell government trolls to f* off at one’s door, if they lack a duly executed search or arrest warrant, etc.
Defense of these liberties and basic human rights is ultimately the responsibility of citizens under our formal polity. REQUIRING of our governments (local, state, federal) that they uphold these rights and enforce these liberties against the outlaws (including those “feddle gummint bureaucraps” and “law enfArcement ossifers” and politicians *gag-spew* who manufacture tyrannical laws and regulations that subvert the law of the land purely for their own benefit) is a major part of our duties as citizens, and absent honest attempts to fulfill these duties, any “honor” we pay those who died in defense of these rights and liberties is hypocritical at best.
Just sayin’. Of course, Moina Michaels said it better back not long after WWI:
We Shall Keep the Faith
by Moina Michael, November 1918
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
I’ll not explain the “Flanders Fields” reference. If you’re not already well familiar with the John McCrae poem, then shame on you.
