Memorial Day: More than a Party
Newsletter # 456 - May 25, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
As we celebrate this Memorial Day in the U.S., we think it is worth taking the time to think about what the day means — what we are memorializing. We live in Boulder, Colorado (USA). Every year on the Memorial Day holiday, our city runs the "Bolder Boulder," one of the biggest 10K road races in the country, usually with over 50,000 runners. The race is a party too — with food, music, dancers, water slides — entertainment, the organizers promise, "around every corner."
Finishers and their families and friends assemble in the University of Colorado football stadium, where again there is more music, more food, and more fun. There are also short speeches, recognizing local veterans from long-ago wars. Over the years, the Bolder Boulder website says "we have honored Gold Star Families, Tuskegee Airmen, the 10th Mountain Division, Navajo Code Talkers, Special Forces and Medal of Honor recipients, among others." A 21-gun salute is carried out by the University of Colorado ROTC members. "Taps" is played. There is a thrilling (quick and loud) flyover by military fighters, and skydivers land in the stadium carrying the flags of each military branch (having jumped out of much slower planes). The speeches talk about sacrifice and honor. The Bolder Boulder website says "This ceremony gives our community the opportunity to pay our respects by honoring the men and women who have fought to protect our country and made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom." With as many as 70,000 spectators, this has become one of the nation's largest Memorial Day events.
These commemorations are, of course, most likely to be meaningful to those who have served (or are currently serving) in the military and their families — a group largely composed of those who do not receive college degrees (and who are, therefore, poorly represented in Boulder's college town population).
It is not surprising, therefore, that Boulder views Memorial Day primarily as festive holiday that marks the beginning of summer in a town that is noted for its athleticism. Apart from the relatively modest observations mentioned above, it is not a sober time for reflection on the causes and consequences of war.
Another reason why Boulderites (and so many others) have trouble taking Memorial Day as seriously as we should is that we collectively have deeply mixed feelings about recent wars and US involvement in those wars. While there is broad support for honoring the sacrifices made during World War II and, to a lesser extent, the Korean War, we are much more conflicted about how we should think about the United States' role is more recent conflicts (including, especially, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the highly controversial war now being waged against Iran).
This is, in part, a positive development. As a society, we are recognizing that patriotic images of war as a simple battle between good and evil do not adequately reflect war's harsh realities (including the fact that the US does not always act in honorable ways). One result of this recognition has been the emergence of a conflict and peacebuilding field, devoted to combining theory and practice in ways that reduce the incidence and severity of violent conflict, while promoting a more just society.
Within this field, as there is a temptation to conclude that anything and everything associated with the military (and especially with the US and other Western "colonial" militaries) is bad. If we could just defund these militaries, it is assumed, the world would be a much better place. While there are certainly plenty of horror stories that support this view, we think that it is mistaken. Peacebuilding efforts can only succeed in a climate of physical security. Societies that lack the ability to deter aggression expose themselves to attack from those who are willing to use the most ruthless and brutal forms of violence or, in today's world, highly sophisticated and effective hybrid warfare tactics.
We need to recognize that national defense and peacebuilding are mutually interdependent components of the larger effort to prevent the need for future Memorial Days. In the United States, we have been phenomenally lucky to have a military that sees itself as subservient to civilian political commanders and focused solely on defending the United States, its allies, and its interests.
Still, under its civilian political leadership, our military has done lots of things that are easy to criticize. And, like any large organization, it has lots of internal failings that, given the lethality of its mission, often produce tragic consequences. Still, we are vastly better off than people who live in societies where the military has turned its power on its own citizenry in ways that make it virtually impossible for citizens to escape the most terrible forms of oppression and tyranny. We shudder to think what the world would be like, had Western democracies not been able to successfully defend themselves from history's long march of aggressive authoritarian regimes.
So, we don't have a problem acknowledging the role that the military has played in protecting the rights, freedoms, and material prosperity that we so cherish. We also recognize that, when problems arise, the problem most frequently lies with the civilian political leaders that we, as citizens, put into office. If we don't like the orders that these leaders have been given, it is our responsibility to use our ultimately decisive influence to change those leaders — and hence, those orders. This, of course, also requires defending democratic norms and institutions that give us those powers. — norms and institutions that are now, obviously, under attack.
The words we wrote on this blog two years ago also noted that those of us in the conflict and peacebuilding fields often see the military as antithetical to the goals of peacebuilding. But then, as now, we said that is a mistake. We noted then that
this event (and countless similar holidays held in other countries around the world) should be a time to reflect on the successes and failures of efforts to make and keep the peace, while also defending fundamental human rights and freedoms against the forces of tyranny and oppression. It should be a time to remember that each one of the events being memorialized today represents the failure to resolve a conflict nonviolently. We should embrace this holiday as an occasion to recommit ourselves to the goal of eliminating the kind of events that will later be seen as deserving of remembrance on future Memorial Days.
We should also recognize the common cause that exists between the efforts of our field and the efforts of others who have committed themselves to preventing such future tragedies. We should do this with a sense of deep humility and explicit recognition that we do not have close to all the answers, and we have much to learn from people who approach efforts to prevent war from other perspectives, including military perspectives.
The problem is not (as some assert) that insufficient numbers of people have listened to the advice of the peacebuilders or that our "marketing" hasn't been good enough. Rather, the problem is that insufficient numbers of people find our advice persuasive enough to gamble their lives on its effectiveness. The truth is that we have yet to build a compelling track record of past success. We need to continue to work to find better ways of dealing with the problems of scale, complexity, and intractability that lie at the core of so many violent conflicts.
While this has always been important, it is seeming especially so now, when conflicts are spiraling out of control in so many different parts of the world simultaneously, and when widespread hyper-polarization is tearing apart so many democratic societies. On October 6, 2023, few people in Israel or Gaza had any idea about the catastrophe that was about to befall them. Though Russia had been saber-rattling for awhile, few people in Russia or Ukraine probably knew what was about to befall them in February 2022. Are we about to witness similar catastrophes in Sudan? Taiwan? South Korea? Europe? The U.S.?
In the two years since this was written, the situation, of course, has continued to deteriorate. The end of the war in Ukraine is nowhere in sight. The attacks of October 7 have metastasized into a widening series of wars that now threaten critical foundations of the global economy. Even more worrying is the long series of articles posted on our weekly Links Newsletters highlighting many ways in which the danger of large-scale violence and war is increasing.
Peacebuilders (using that term broadly to include anyone who works for peace, whether they call themselves "peacebuilders" or not) must greatly accelerate their efforts to bring peace to the warring regions and conflict transformation, reconciliation, and violence prevention to places that are teetering, including the U.S.
Earlier, we went on to say:
This means that we have to work together to find better answers to a lot of very difficult questions. For example, we need to do a much better job of figuring out how to defuse the hyper-polarized conflict between the right and the left in the U.S. — a conflict that is leading to open talk of a U.S. civil war and more immediate claims of authoritarian power.
We also need to figure out how to defuse the new Cold War that is emerging between Western democracies and Russia and China (as well as more minor, but still dangerous, powers like Iran and North Korea). We are already engaged in a wide range of serious "gray zone" skirmishes that involve most everything short of large-scale "kinetic" violence, plus a rapidly accelerating arms race focused on assembling a terrifying array of new 21st-century weapons.
In addition, we need to figure out how to better respond to threats like Hamas — a belligerent that has no interest in making peace because war is their raison d'être. It is the only way of life they know, and it brings them honor and purpose in life, while at the same time bringing death, destruction, and despair to so many others, including many "on their own side."
In short, the relative peace and calm which many of us still cling to is not something that we should take for granted. If we don't take today's threats much more seriously, we could easily unleash more of the kinds of tragedies that memorial days around the world urge us to never forget.
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Lead Graphic Credit: Arlington National Cemetery: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spring_Time_at_Arlington_National_Cemetery,_Arlington,_Virginia_on_March_12,_2024_-_19.jpg; By: Arlington National Cemetery; Permission: Public Domain; Date Acquired: May 25, 2024.
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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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