The Soldier’s Rough Charity

Written by Anthony Esolen

I have been used to calling the national holiday we celebrated yesterday–most of us as a Monday off, and a good time for gardening or cookouts–“Oblivion Day,” when we Americans all forget the men (and now some women too) who have died in our wars, to establish our nation in freedom and to keep that nation free. When I was a child, it seemed that every little town expressed our pride in parades. My little town did. My cousins and I would get up early in the morning to follow the men in uniform up to the Protestant cemetery on the hilltop, where we heard them fire a twenty-one gun salute, followed by a bugler playing Taps.