This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

It is the 25th of May Memorial Day.

It is a day where we remember the blood sacrifice of over one million Americans across our history,

from Lexington and Concord through today in the desert sands of Iran.

One million men and women across the centuries, across the generations.

There have only ever been 700 million Americans. Half of us who have ever lived or alive right now

today in a time of great testing for the Union, for the Republic. Nothing that is happening

is abstract. The testing is existential. The question is whether liberty will continue,

or whether a king will replace the presidents. This is the warning. Are we to kneel in fear of power, lest our lives be destroyed, ice be deployed to our cities,

and the American people who live there, those who dissent become the victims of government-sponsored murder or crimes or worse. Some will say that this is a

weekend and that this is a day that deserves remembrance stripped of any politics. But by

stripping this day of politics, it loses its meaning.

Because politics and war in the United States are not able to be separated from one another.

Because politics is the arena by which the people made a decision through their representatives to go to war

through much of our history. When Franklin Roosevelt stood before the nation and asked for a declaration

of war, he did so before a co-equal Congress, and the Congress declared war, and the nation's mothers and

fathers sent their sons and daughters to fight in it, and they died in it.

And across the world, there are American military cemeteries.

About 40% of those killed in action, their families, when given the choice, decided

that their loved one should remain buried in the soil of the nations they died to liberate. And so

across Europe, across the Pacific, there are American military cemeteries. As Colin Powell pointed out, this is the only

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