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Memorial Day Where America Was Born
By Don Feder - May 28, 2019

On Memorial Day weekend, you can usually find me at the Concord battlefield – the place where America was born.

Why there on April 19, 1775 and not in Philadelphia in 1776, when the Second Continental Congress adopted the document declaring our independence, or in the same city in 1787, when the U.S. Constitution was drafted?

Because however noble, inspiring and enduring they are, words are just words unless backed up with iron and steel.

A year before the Declaration of Independence was adopted, a group of colonial m*****amen stood up to what was then the greatest army in the world and fired the first shots of the American Revolution. Lexington was a slaughter, like the French Army going into battle. The 700 British troops that marched out of Boston fired on 77 m*****amen who were making a token show of force, k*****g 8 and wounding 9, without a shot fired on our side.

Concord was different. At the North Bridge, hundreds of m*****amen fired on a force of Redcoats. Eventually, 2,000 men the British call peasants harassed His Majesty’s forces (including a relief column) all the way back to Boston and besieged the city. Concord is where our nation really started.

Of course, there’s more to America’s story than soldiers The epic includes pioneers and settlers, legislators and statesmen, presidents and poets, inventors and innovators, scientists and philanthropists, businessmen and scholars. But all of this counts for nothing unless there are men with guns guarding the liberty of the men and women with plows and test tubes, pens and gavels in their hands.

Which is why there’s a day memorializing the men who fought and fell for America, and not the legion of others. There is no Scientists Day, or Businessmen’s Day or Late Night Comedian’s Day, or Lying Journalists Day, or Conniving Congressmen’s Day – only Memorial Day.

Starting with the “embattled farmers” firing on the best professional army in the world, the tale wends its way through Gettysburg and the Argonne, D-Day and Iwo Jima, Chosin and Khe Sanh, Desert Storm and the War on Terrorism. On this day, we honor them all.

But it all started in Concord on a sunny April morning 244 years ago.