Memorial Day 2025: What they died for then is still worth the fight now

I hate to say it, but we Americans aren’t very good at holidays, at least the meaningful ones. Those holidays with cute little symbols that can be turned into emoticons — candy hearts, turkeys, firecrackers, jack-o’-lanterns — those we’re good at. But the solemn ones, the ones that call for quiet reflection and ambivalent conversations, well, we Americans are not big on introspection. We’d rather just grill meat and drink beer.

America has completely lost the thread, for instance, when it comes to Labor Day. It’s always been an awkward fit in a land of robber barons and corporate maximalism, but now it’s little more than a marker for the end of summer. What could be a meaningful moment to reexamine economic fairness in our country has devolved into a hollow space on the calendar for a day off. 

Our relationship to the broader meanings of holidays is often reflected in the uniforms of Major League Baseball players. On Mother’s Day, the league, in full pandering mode, outfits its ballplayers in pink. On July Fourth, it’s stars and stripes forever. But on Labor Day, it’s just the regular uniforms. They don’t even bother. When it comes to holidays and annual observances, if you can’t infantalize it with cheesy visuals or tropes, it ceases to exist.

Monday is Memorial Day, perhaps the most fraught and difficult holiday on the calendar. Much like Labor Day, the deeper resonance of Memorial Day is hard to square with the impulse to party and chill, and the habit of avoiding any of the moral quandaries of being an American. In recent years, pedantic twerps like me have had to remind people that Memorial Day is not about the reflexive celebration of all things military, which America is quite good at. It’s no fun to see a friend post on social media a heartfelt tribute to an uncle who served honorably and is now living in well-earned retirement in Arizona, only to break out an “Um, actually, that’s not what Memorial Day is about.”

(A hopeful case is, again, MLB uniforms. Just a few years ago, baseball marked Memorial Day in typically patronizing excess, with camo caps and jerseys, turning it into yet another celebration of Uncle Sam’s military might. But somewhere along the line, a more tasteful  ethic prevailed and a small red poppy patch was added to the regular uniform with the words “Lest We Forget.”)

Memorial Day is, of course, about those who never came back, those who died in combat, in uniform. Like most people these days, I’ve been lucky enough to have never lost a loved one or family member in wartime, and fervently hope that luck holds out the rest of my days. But as a journalist, I have met with people who have lost loved ones in combat.

Years ago, I spent some time with the families of two young men in Santa Cruz County who died while serving in the military, and ever since then, I’ve always made a point of remembering their names on Memorial Day. 

They were Joey Spence, and Morgen Jacobs.

Joey, a Marine and a Scotts Valley native, was serving in the Iraq War, and was just nine days away from the end of his tour of duty when he died in a helicopter crash, leaving behind a young wife and a 4-month-old daughter.

Morgen, also serving in Iraq, was only 20 years old, just two years out of Soquel High School, when he was killed by an explosive device. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

When it comes to Americans dying in war, we tend to quickly slide into uncomfortable places, either to justify their sacrifice or, even more painfully, to face that such a loss can’t be justified. It calls up deep-seated notions of military service, America’s place as the policeman of the world, the political folly and moral failures of war. But Memorial Day doesn’t really require you to sink into that quicksand. It only asks us to remember. 

So every year, I take a moment to think of these two guys, both strangers to me. I make myself remember their names and the circumstances of their service. I remember how haunted and lost Morgen’s dad was in the years after losing his son, how for years he would see an image of the boy on his bike or in the ocean boogie-boarding. 

I find these memories useful precisely because I didn’t come from a military family, and don’t necessarily understand what it takes to risk that kind of sacrifice. It makes me ponder words like “honor” and “duty,” foundational to military service, but increasingly foreign concepts in our tawdry and grotesque political culture. And it leads me to trace how I am living in honor in my decidedly non-military life. 

Maybe all we owe those who’ve died in uniform is to remember them, to say their names, look at their faces, keep them alive in the minds of those who knew them. But maybe we owe them something more than that, too. Maybe we owe them the rigorous and painful process of figuring out how their sacrifice relates to our lives today.

What did Joey Spence and Morgen Jacobs die for? Maybe only they knew what they were fighting for. But, in a time when the American experiment — a constitutional republic with no king or emperor — is in grave danger, the accumulated weight of the sacrifice of all those who have died in service lands in the laps of us, the living. 

This specific Memorial Day should be a galvanizing moment to pick up the fight to preserve American values – democracy, rule of law, due process, constitutional rights – that they died fighting for. We’re the lucky ones. We don’t have to pay that ultimate price, but the stakes are just as high.

Memorial Day is not about tragic events that happened long ago and far away. It’s about remembering not only the names of the dead, but what exactly they gave their lives for. It’s about recognizing the much less extreme sacrifices the rest of us should make to maintain our democratic ideals. It means we can’t allow the country’s democratic values to be destroyed just for our own sake, but for their sakes too. 

And that they don’t make an emoticon for that. 

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