Memorial Day: Was the Dotted Line Worth the Flag-Draped Box?
By T. from the Substack THIS WILL HOLD
A veteran reckons with sacrifice, the lie of the republic, and what we owe the dead when the country they died for isn’t what they believed.
May 25, 2026
I signed on the dotted line for an idea. Not a flag, not a general, not a policy—an idea. That America was something worth defending. That the republic was real. That the people who sent us had, at minimum, the same stake in the outcome that we did. I was wrong. Not about everything. But about enough that it changes the shape of the thing retroactively, the way a lie changes the meaning of everything said around it.
This Memorial Day I find myself doing something I was never supposed to do: tallying the ledger. Not out of bitterness—but because the dead deserve an honest accounting more than they deserve a ceremony.
Years ago, I remember overhearing a group of teenage girls talking about Memorial Day. They were trying to work out what it meant, or was actually for. After a few guesses, one of them shrugged and said, “I think it’s to remind us to shop.” She wasn’t being flip. She was pattern-matching against the evidence available to her: the sales, the mattress commercials, the long weekend.
Her friends nodded enthusiastically in agreement.
At the time, I thought: our educational system is failing these girls. And it was. But not by accident.
We all understood education as the great equalizer. A necessary rung on the ladder of climbing out of whatever our circumstances were and into the American dream.
The Republicans did too.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan came into office promising to eliminate the Department of Education entirely. He didn’t manage that, but he did what damage he could—systematically defunding public education while simultaneously building out the most expensive military apparatus in human history.
He also exploded the cost of higher education and began the dismantling of federal student aid, shifting grants to loans and setting in motion the machinery that would turn higher education from a public good into a debt sentence.
The result, over decades, was precisely what you’d engineer if you were trying to build a pipeline: gutted schools in poor communities, a college degree priced out of reach, vanishing opportunities, and a recruiter in the hallway offering the only ladder left in the building.
The military didn’t just benefit from this. It was the point.
