Memorial Day is always so complicated for me. I both love, respect, and miss the family I have (and lost) who have served. I also can see, as a firsthand, how their sacrifices led to a better world for the future of their children, and, in turn me, the children of their children.
I can also attest that the world I lived in, which was riotous and confusing compared to the world they came from, as well as how I was shaped by that world (ending up very very far from where they were, on almost every major axiom aside, perhaps from ethics and belief in the core tenets of democracy) led to great divides. My grandmother’s lasting legacy was showing me how love can supersede even the diametric opposition of viewpoints.
As a parent, I am left with this pit of anger and grief. I don’t believe the world my children will inherit and inhabit will be better off than mine, which seemed unlikely two decades ago, but almost a certainty now.
The republic’s founding covenant—life purchased through voluntary sacrifice for collective liberty—faces systematic dissolution through institutional capture and societal atomization. Memorial Day’s commemorative function exposes this degradation: the dead secured constitutional governance while contemporary power structures operate through regulatory complexity, financial extraction, and democratic theater.
The American Dream’s death manifests in structural terms: median wage stagnation against asset inflation, regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship, and credentialing systems that substitute institutional loyalty for productive capacity. These mechanisms concentrate wealth while distributing debt, creating permanent economic subjugation disguised as meritocracy.
Technological capability now exists to eliminate material scarcity through automation, distributed manufacturing, and information systems. However, implementation requires constitutional restoration and economic restructuring away from rent-seeking toward value creation. Current institutions profit from artificial scarcity and will resist technological disruption of their revenue models.
The pathway forward demands jurisprudential enforcement of constitutional constraints alongside popular recognition that individual prosperity depends on collective institutional health. This requires abandoning the false choice between capitalism and socialism for a third path: constitutional republicanism with technological abundance, and universal rights and privileges for all the citizenry. This is not a failing, it is an aspiration, and, frankly, should be the lowest bar.
The critical transition involves citizens understanding that their individual economic security depends on dismantling systems designed to extract value from productive activity. Technology becomes liberating only when deployed within governance structures that prevent its capture by existing power concentrations.
The fallen died for constitutional principles that can still govern technological implementation. Their sacrifice becomes meaningful through institutional restoration, not merely through memorial observance.
Can enough of the populace get through the “me” generation thinking to change it?
This is why I never sleep anymore.
