A Memorial Day Reflection

My father served in the U.S. Army in Italy. My mother served as a lieutenant in the WAVES, the Navy’s women’s reserve, stationed stateside. Both came home. Memorial Day is not for them. It is for the Americans who did not return, who died defending the democracy my parents’ generation came home to build. On Memorial Day, I think of what they all fought for, in uniform abroad and in uniform at home, and of what is being taken from us now.

My parents’ generation understood something we seem to have forgotten: democracy is not inevitable. It must be defended. The least we owe the Americans who died for it is to look honestly at what they died for, and at what is being taken from us now.

Democracy is not inevitable. It must be defended.

When Franklin Roosevelt rallied Americans during World War II, he did so with a simple truth: democracy was the best possible government. And when soldiers from every background defeated fascism together, they came home believing they had secured that promise forever.

My mother-in-law Edna was eight years old when she escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and survived on the Aryan side, passing as a Polish Catholic child. At nine, she joined the Polish Home Army as a courier, becoming its youngest decorated soldier. She spent her childhood dodging bullets and watching neighbors and family disappear because a government had decided some people were less than human.

She survived the most extreme ramifications of a murderous fascist dictator. We, as Americans, promised ourselves: never again.

Yet here we are.

I don’t think most people truly understand what democracy is. It’s not just voting. It’s the rule of law. Equal protection. Due process. A free press that can criticize the powerful. An independent judiciary that answers to the Constitution, not to a president. The belief that no one is above the law and no one is beneath its protection.

Look at Russia to see what the alternative looks like. Putin’s critics fall from windows or die in prison. Journalists who ask the wrong questions disappear. Courts exist to punish enemies, not to deliver justice. Elections are theater. The wealth of the nation flows to a small circle of loyalists while ordinary citizens have no recourse, no voice, no power. The state serves the leader; the leader does not serve the state.

This is the model we are drifting toward.

Consider what has happened in just the past month. On April 29, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. In a 6-3 decision, the court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law that John Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to secure. The ruling effectively ends the federal protection against racially discriminatory voting maps. Within an hour of the decision, the Florida House passed an aggressively gerrymandered map designed to net Republicans four additional congressional seats. Other states are following. Sixty years of progress toward a multiracial democracy, struck down in a single morning.

Sixty years of progress toward a multiracial democracy, struck down in a single morning.

That is one month. The rest of the year offers more. Federal forces have occupied American cities, from Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago to deployments elsewhere, in what Human Rights Watch this spring called a “decided shift toward authoritarianism.” Women, Black Americans, and LGBTQ+ citizens have been removed from government positions and scrubbed from official records. Immigrants are detained, deported, and sent to foreign countries where they face torture. The Justice Department targets perceived enemies while loyalists receive pardons. Since September, the military has killed at least 86 people on boats in the Caribbean, people the government calls terrorists but cannot even identify, killed without arrest, without trial, without proof. Critics from former FBI Director James Comey to comedian Jimmy Kimmel have been targeted for speaking against the administration.

My mother held the rank of lieutenant in a women’s service that fought for, and won, the same pay, rank, and benefits as the men. That was a fight inside the fight. The WAVES were proof that women in uniform deserved equal standing, and the country agreed. Eighty years later, women are being pushed out of government positions and scrubbed from official records. What my mother earned for the women who came after her is being taken back.

Edna would recognize this. The sorting of people into categories. The erasure. The quiet disappearances that become loud ones. The gutting of the laws that were supposed to protect everyone. She knew that fascism never arrives all at once. It seeps in slowly, while ordinary citizens look the other way.

Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz, spent his life warning us about exactly this. “The opposite of love is not hate,” he said. “It’s indifference.” Indifference is complicity. Silence is permission.

The Americans we honor today did not die so that their grandchildren could lose the right to vote. They did not die so that federal troops could occupy American cities. They did not die so that a court could erase the Voting Rights Act with the stroke of a pen.

The Americans we honor today did not die so that their grandchildren could lose the right to vote.

Patriotic Americans like my parents would say: it’s your turn now. Stand up against tyranny. Protect what we fought for.

How? Show up. Call your representatives and demand they defend the Constitution and pass new voting rights legislation. Support independent journalism. Donate to organizations protecting civil liberties, voting rights, and immigrant rights. Run for local office. Attend school board meetings. March. Vote in every election, not just presidential ones, while voting still means something. Talk to your neighbors. Refuse to be silent when you witness injustice. Build community, because authoritarians thrive when citizens are isolated and afraid.

Most of all: do not look away. Do not tell yourself it will sort itself out. Do not wait for someone else to act.

Democracy was never given. It was won. And it can be lost.

Janet Bond Brill, PhD, is the author of Little Edna’s War, the true story of her mother-in-law’s survival of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Polish resistance, released on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2026.