For Memorial Day, the Deseret News Opinion Board writes: "Memorial Day demands a certain measure of devotion: a duty to honor those who offered their lives in exchange for our own ease and prosperity. To treat it only as the unofficial first day of summer seems profane.
"As we have noted before, former President James Garfield — who would end up as the second president to be killed by an assassin — may have delivered the most appropriate remarks for this day when he said he was 'oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion.'
"Then a member of Congress, he was speaking at Arlington Cemetery outside Washington on May 30, 1868, at a time when the day to remember the nation’s fallen was called Decoration Day.
“'If silence is ever golden,' he added, 'it must be here, beside the graves of 15,000 men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung.'"
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