Longtime Gazette writer Orlan Love presents Memorial Day speech

This Memorial Day will be the 15th year Orlan Love has delivered a speech at the Quasqueton Cemetery.

While his hometown has a population of a scant 550, it's long on history. It was founded in 1842 - almost two decades before the start of the Civil War. The remains of more than 200 military veterans repose in the cemetery, the final resting place for 66 Civil War veterans.

Love, a Navy veteran, retired in 2016 after 25 years as a reporter for The Gazette, but still writes an Outdoors column for the newspaper. Here is the speech he'll make this Memorial Day.

By Orlan Love

As the great poet Kris Kristofferson wrote in 'Me and Bobby McGee:” 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

That does describe one kind of freedom - the mental freedom one could have practiced under the pharaohs of Egypt, the slave masters of the American South, the Nazis, the commissars of the Soviet Union or the mullahs of Iran.

Most of us, at one time or another, have experienced that type of freedom. While it can be temporarily exhilarating, it is not the kind of freedom our Founding Fathers envisioned when they rebelled against the tyranny of kings or the kind of freedom we come here today to celebrate.

The founders, in their Declaration of Independence, proclaimed as self-evident truth that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The founders, however, failed to codify that self-evident truth, leaving it to their descendants four score and several years later to make bloody amends.

Last fall my wife, Corinne, and I, on one of our seven-day, 10-state rolling quarrels (otherwise known as a vacation), toured the battlefield at Gettysburg.

Disagreements over where to eat and sleep and which road to take dissolved in the solemn solitude of the site of the titanic clash that marked the turning point in the most cataclysmic event ever to hit our community, our state and our country.

Thanks to our teachers and historians, we all know what happened there.

Eighty thousand rebels under the theretofore nearly infallible leadership of Gen. Robert E. Lee, buoyed by resounding triumphs at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, marched into Pennsylvania, seeking a victory on Yankee soil that would weaken Northern will to fight and elicit the support of European nations.

Instead they met a determined, well-trained and well-commanded Union army motivated to preserve the union that guaranteed their freedom.

When the smoke cleared at the end of the third day, more than 51,000 Americans had been killed, wounded or captured, the Army of Northern Virginia was in full retreat and the myth of the superior Southern soldier had been shattered. Though nearly another two years passed before Gen. U.S. Grant checkmated Lee at Appomattox, the outcome of the war no longer was in doubt.

As chilling and sobering as it was to walk the once blood-soaked soil of Little Round Top and the stone fence where Pickett's charge faltered, it was even more so to stand upon Cemetery Ridge, where President Lincoln, four and a half months later, delivered a 10-sentence commemoration of the fallen at the dedication of the national cemetery.

In a speech that could be contained in a dozen tweets, Lincoln reframed the Civil War as not just a struggle to save the Union but as a vehicle to live up to the founders' assertion that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with unalienable rights.

Lincoln's conclusion, delivered just two minutes after his opening, calls for 'a new birth of freedom” to ensure 'government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

It's hard to believe that, 200 years into the Age of Enlightenment, half this country was willing to go to war to preserve a system in which landed gentry could own people and treat them like livestock - or worse.

The pioneers who settled our communities in the decades after statehood knew better than that. Lured by good, cheap land, they came here to exercise their freedom to build by the sweat of their brows better lives for them, their families and their descendants.

When that freedom was threatened, they rallied in overwhelming numbers to its defense; first, to preserve the Union that guaranteed their freedom; and later, after the Emancipation Proclamation, to extend that freedom to all by ending slavery.

Of Iowa's 675,000 residents in 1860, 76,242 - 11.3 percent - fought in the War of the Rebellion. No other state - North or South - had a higher percentage of its male population between the ages of 15 and 40 engaged in the fight. Of those, 13,001 died of wounds or disease and another 8,500 were injured - a casualty rate of 28.2 percent.

There are those who would call what we do here this morning chauvinism; those who would say we wrap ourselves in flags and sing praises to our country and its military in an illogical and intemperate distortion of patriotism.

In the more than 60 years that I have been coming to this cemetery on Memorial Day, I've never gotten even a whiff of that.

Yes, flags wave. Yes, a band plays the national anthem. Yes, children pledge allegiance to the flag, place fresh flowers at the base of the Civil War monument and recite from memory 'In Flanders Field.”

Yes, an American Legion member intones the names of the more than 200 military veterans reposing in this cemetery, three-fourths of whom fought either to save the Union and end slavery or to halt the tyranny of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Yes, a Legion honor guard fires a salute to them. And yes, the Rev. Kevin Jennings (the toughest act for a speaker to follow) invokes God's blessing on the proceedings and on the nation and His peace for the honored veterans.

They are our sons, brothers, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. They are the protectors of the First Amendment rights - to speak, pray and assemble - that we exercise here today.

They are our heroes. Long may we gather here to honor their memory.