This Memorial Day, keep in mind the sacrifices made for your freedoms, writes Laurie Roberts.

Today, we interrupt our ongoing national fistfight over whether wearing a mask is the mark of a good citizen or a chump.

Over whether Donald Trump or China is to blame for the heavy loss of life and the change to all our lives since the novel coronavirus came to our shores.

It is, instead, a good day instead to think about freedom, not just what it means for us but what it requires of us. About gratitude.

It’s easy to forget the fallen, the men and women who fought and died in mostly distant places to keep us safe and secure our way of life. Easy to focus on our own considerable worries right now, when that way of life has been so suddenly and dramatically upended.

We have become a country that is and must be, for now, socially distant and so there will be no big public gatherings to honor America’s war dead on this Memorial Day.

But never should we become emotionally distant from the sacrifice made by the more than 1 million men and women who served and fought and bled and then died for America.

On Bunker Hill, at Bull Run, in Belleau Wood.

On a bloody beach called Omaha and in an icy forest in Belgium on a hardwon hunk of rock known as Iwo Jima, where brave men paid with their blood to raise our flag.

At Chosin Reservoir and on Hamburger Hill, where heroes fought to their last breath against overwhelming odds.

In Tikrit and Fallujah and Sangin and Kandahar.

Remember their sacrifice. Remember people like Army Pvt. Kelly D. Youngblood, 19, of Mesa, and Marine Staff Sgt. Jason D. Whitehouse, 27, of Phoenix, and Army Spc. Justin Onwordi, of Chandler, who immigrated to the United States from Nigeria. He was 28 when he was killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in Baghdad in 2004. His son, Jonathan, was just 26 days old.

“He died,” his brother, Uzor, would later say, “because he believed in what he was doing, because he wanted to change lives.”

Remember Navy Hospitalman Chadwick T. Kenyon, 20, of Tucson, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Timothy L. Bowles, 24, of Tucson and Army Pfc Seferino J. Rey

It’s easy to forget the fallen, the men and women who fought and died.

na, 20, of Phoenix, killed by a roadside bomb in Taji, Iraq in 2005. Reyna, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, had a 4-year-old daughter, Savannah, and a son, Aquilino, just a year old.

“He would do anything for anybody,” his wife, Jennifer, would later say.

Remember Marine Lance Cpl Budd M. Cote, 21, of Marana, and Arizona Army National Guard Sgt. Elijah Tai Wah Wong, 42, of Mesa, and Army Sgt. Frank M. Sandoval, 27, of Yuma, who enlisted after terrorists attacked us on 9/11. Sandoval was on his second tour in Iraq and was badly wounded when his unit was attacked in Tikrit 2005. He died of those injuries two years later. He had a wife, Michelle, and a 5-year-old daughter named Joelena.

“All he wanted to do,” his father Ricky would later say. “was serve his country and make the world better.”

As you go about your business today, chafing under our current restrictions on this three-day weekend or lamenting your inability to throw a barbecue or just generally wondering how much more we will have to endure, stop.

Take just a moment to remember the men and women from every generation who went to war and never returned. Remember, too, their families who could teach us all a thing or two about sacrifice.

For them, every day is Memorial Day.