From Connor of the Tuttle Twins series email newsletter today. Thought this was well said.
Memorial Day is complicated.
It’s easy to post a flag, fire up the grill, and call it a day of remembrance. It’s harder to sit with the actual weight of the lives cut short, the futures stolen, the grief that, for many, never goes away.
This day started with widows and mothers placing flowers on the graves of their dead. There were no hashtags, no sales, and no flyovers. Just loss.
Real, raw, irrevocable loss.
As I get older, I tend to think more about everything that we lose when we send a generation off to war.
The inventions that were never built, the children never born, and the families never started. The songs never written, and the wrongs never righted. How many of our sacred dead were people who might have changed the world—if only they’d lived long enough to try?
Most of them believed they were fighting for freedom. Many were brave, noble, and full of conviction. They went because they were told it was necessary, and they fought because they believed they were protecting something bigger than themselves.
That makes it even harder to swallow the hard truth that most of them died in wars that shouldn’t have been fought.
As Major General Smedley Butler famously said, “War is a racket.” And he would know—he fought in more of them than most college grads can name.
Did you know that the United States hasn’t officially declared war since World War II?
Not once. And yet, we’ve sent troops into more than 80 foreign military operations—from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Over 7,000 U.S. service members have died in post-9/11 wars alone.
More than 30,000 veterans have died by suicide in that same time.
30,000.
That number should haunt us.
It should especially haunt the politicians who send the young to die for causes they barely understand—let alone care about. Wars built on lies, ego, defense contracts, regime change, or "spreading democracy" at the point of a rifle.
John Quincy Adams had it right when he proclaimed that, “America... does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but somewhere along the way, that changed.
And we need to talk to our kids about that.
Not just about soldiers and sacrifice—but about truth. About the difference between defending liberty and enabling empire. About how patriotism doesn’t mean blind obedience, and how real strength sometimes means asking hard questions and refusing to go along.
It’s why we wrote The Tuttle Twins and the Golden Rule. We wanted to help kids understand that a foreign policy of freedom means practicing the Golden Rule politically. We wanted to introduce them to the concept of blowback, and to help them understand the revenge cycle so that they would have a better chance at someday being the architects of a freer and more peaceful future.
And it’s why we told the stories in The Tuttle Twins Guide to Courageous Heroes. Because it’s important to show kids examples of people who changed the world through peace, ideas, and moral courage—not destruction.
Because we don’t just need to remember the dead.
We need to raise the kind of children who won’t keep feeding the machine that killed them.