What is America on Memorial Day 2022?

Memorial Day.

It may be the unofficial start of summer with picnics and barbecues, a day of parades, and a time to place flags on the graves of those who died in war. But celebrated this year in the wake of massacres at a Buffalo supermarket and a Texas elementary school, Memorial Day seems to cry out for solemn reflection on the state of our Union.

To heed this call to reflect at this juncture in our nation’s life is to recall Memorial Day’s deep roots in the Civil War. First known as Decoration Day, it was instituted to honor those who died in our nation’s deadliest conflict. It was a time to decorate the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers with flowers, and American flags in northern states. The South observed separate Confederate memorial days, retaining Confederate symbols and erecting Confederate memorial monuments.

This war, with 1.5 million casualties that included nearly 620,000 deaths, claimed more American lives than any war in which Americans have fought. Indeed, it threatened the life of America itself.

In existence less than 90 years — the fourscore and seven years of Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address — our new nation was, in Lincoln’s words, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This civil war that engaged the nation, he said, was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Lincoln’s address marked the dedication of a cemetery at the Gettysburg battlefield for Union soldiers who had died there four months earlier. Combined Union

and Confederate casualties in that horrendous battle numbered

some 51,000, which included around 7,000 deaths, more than 3,000 on each side. The lives of these soldiers were given so that the nation might live, said Lincoln.

As we now approach 250 years of national survival, we might ask ourselves where we stand as a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality.

This week we observed the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. The world had watched in horror on that 2020 Memorial Day as a Minneapolis police officer squeezed the life, literally the last breath, from a Black man, demonstrating depraved indifference to that life. In that moment, white people, many for the first time, experienced what it means to know that Black lives matter, not just that all lives matter.

There was hope in the streets that summer of 2020. Americans called out for social justice in a multitude of gatherings. The time seemed finally ripe to address the systemic racism in our social institutions, to confront the legacy of slavery and bring us closer to the vision in which our nation was conceived.

But no.

George Floyd’s memory fades into the background, while every move toward social justice faces a rising reactionary tide that undermines liberty and equality. Rather than address institutional racism, red state after red state outlaws the very teaching of its existence.

Racist attacks are on the rise. Two weeks ago, in an explicitly racist massacre, 10 Black people were murdered in a Buffalo supermarket. The teenage murderer had learned through social media about something called the Great Replacement Theory, a perverse conspiracy theory in which Jewish-led elites are replacing white people with people of color in a white genocide. This white supremacist thinking that was evident in Charlottesville has claimed many victims including those who died at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

This theory played a role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where a Confederate flag was also evident. That there are media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Republican politicians who promote this theory is frightening enough. Scarier are those Republicans who threaten the survival of our democracy by calling the insurrectionists patriots.

Will the next would-be insurrectionists use assault weapons?

Tuesday, a teenager gunned down 19 fourth-graders and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Like the Buffalo killer, he was 18, mentally disturbed, and able to buy a weapon of war that no civilian should have.

Yes, enough is enough, we say. But then why don’t we do something about all these wrongs?

We are once again being tested. Our survival is up to us.