Max Cleland: “on next Monday, May 28, and acting pursuant to a joint resolution approved by the Congress back in 1950, the President…”

“on next Monday, May 28, and acting pursuant to a joint resolution approved by the Congress back in 1950, the President of the United States will issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe a day of prayer for permanent peace in remembrance of all of those brace Americans who have died in our Nation's service. That is how Memorial Day got started and is what this special day is supposed to be all about. Whenever Memorial Day comes around, I am reminded of what may well have been the first, and is still one of the finest, memorials to fallen soldiers, the Funeral Oration of the great Athenian leader Pericles, as recorded by the historian Thucydides, during the Peloponnesian War in the 5th Century BC. For this offering of their lives made in common by them all they each of them individually received that renown which never grows old, and for a sepulcher, not so much that in which their bones have been deposited, but that noblest of shrines wherein their glory is laid up to be eternally remembered upon every occasion on which deed or story shall call for its commemoration. For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.…”