May 29—Memorial Day is not about choosing between celebrating a day off to eat hog dogs or feeling sad for a moment about those who gave their lives for a cause. Abraham Lincoln, in his First Inaugural address, best captured how memorial days for those who fought for the country actually works, even as the country faced the outbreak of civil war: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”