Today is Memorial Day, May 27, 2024, 162 days before the next American presidential election.

This is the warning.

This is Arlington House.

It sits on a hill opposite the Potomac River, looking towards the United

States Capitol with the Washington Monument in the middle facing the Lincoln Memorial. This was Robert

Lee's home. In this home, he resigned his commission in the United States Army and became the

commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. This property was

confiscated by the government of the United States, and as the butcher's bill for the horror of the

war of secession, the American Army buried its dead on Lee's property. And today, that property is America's most hallowed grounds, Arlington National Cemetery.

There, in front of every gravesite, is a small American flag, put there to remember the sacrifices

and the service. Such it is so at American cemeteries all over the world. General Colin Powell

famously commented that when the American army came to Europe, it did not come to occupy, and it did not

come to subjugate, but rather to liberate. And the only land that the United States ever asked for

was simply enough to bury its dead. These sacred spaces, these slivers of United States territory

thought the world, including at Normandy, France, the cemetery in Colville-Sumere, above Omaha Beach.

Here, 38 pairs of brothers are buried next to one another.

Father and a son, almost 10,000 graves. Every headstone faces west, back across the Atlantic Ocean, back towards American shores that they left, that they died fighting in a faraway land to protect.

They died for a concept for liberty, freedom, human dignity. They died to free the enslaved and oppressed peoples of Europe.

The American soldier has fought for freedom all across the world, sometimes in wars that should

not have been fought, were fought for misguided purposes, ideological purposes, unnecessary purposes.

Generation was sent to fight in the Vietnam War, when the politicians knew the war could not be won,

that there was no hope of victory. Yet that does not render the service less meaningful or honorable or noble,

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