An Opthēan Homily for Memorial Day May 27, 2025
Memorial Day in America is solemn. It is quiet. It is wrapped in flags and folded into silence.
But silence can be dangerous. Silence can become complicity. And not all remembrance is sacred.
They tell us that this day is for "honoring the fallen." But who counts as fallen? And who decides which deaths matter?
Across the country, we will see wreaths laid, salutes rendered, and bugles played. But we will not see the faces of children killed by American-made bombs in Gaza. We will not hear the names of villages razed in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. We will not see Libya.
That’s because Memorial Day is not really about grief. It is about allegiance. It is not a sacred act of mourning—it is a civil liturgy of control.
And perhaps worst of all, it tells a lie: It implies that America's wars have been valiant and honorable. That we were the good guys. That our dead died for “freedom.”
But history says otherwise. These wars were not good versus evil. They were not holy struggles or moral campaigns. They were contests of power, exploitation, and control—often waged in the name of democracy but fueled by economic and geopolitical self-interest.
We must say this clearly: The United States has never been a neutral or benevolent actor in the world. It has invaded, occupied, and annihilated. It has overthrown democracies and propped up dictatorships. And today, it bankrolls Israel’s destruction of Gaza—not out of love for the Jewish people, but to maintain a proxy stronghold in the Middle East.
Israel is not acting alone. It is the sharp end of America’s imperial spear. And every bomb that falls on Rafah, every child buried beneath rubble, carries the mark: Made in the USA.
So what, then, should Memorial Day mean?
In Opthē, we believe remembrance must be whole or it is not sacred. We cannot mourn only “our” dead and ignore those we have killed. We cannot drape ourselves in grief while denying others' grief.
True mourning requires truth. And the truth is this: American power has been used, again and again, to destroy lives in the name of ideals it does not uphold.
So on this day, we do not light candles, only for soldiers in uniform. We light them for the unarmed. For the displaced. For the forgotten.
We light them for those whose deaths do not fit into the patriotic narrative— and for the sacred grief we are told we must not feel.
Because grief, to be sacred, must be whole. And remembrance, to be real, must be just.