At an event I attended years ago one of the speakers brought out a strange looking object to pass around the tables for everyone to see. It looked like a knob or a gear shift. It turned out it was the throttle control from a Soviet-era Bomber. It’s an unfortunate irony relative to that event that we are once again confronting an international Russian threat and battling over Ukraine.

The speaker had acquired this part from a Soviet bomber following our victory in the Cold War, when the newly liberated Ukrainians were scuttling their Soviet-era bombers. They were destroying bombers designed to kill us and our children; to kill us for our belief in freedom; to kill us for believing we are not the property of a government or “society.”

Back in the days of the Cold War, Soviet bomber crews trained routinely to make them effective at flying over the Arctic to drop nuclear bombs on U.S. Cities. Cities like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

Growing up as a child, primarily in the nineteen-seventies, it was a world where an eventual nuclear war with the Soviets seemed inevitable. I recall as a nine- or ten-year-old boy envisioning hiding underneath our slate-topped pool table so the lead might intercept radioactive fallout particles.

When the throttle control finished making the rounds, it happened to end at my table. I simply laid my hand on it for a few moments and closed my eyes. A decade or more later, I still remember it clearly. Where I was sitting. The direction I was facing in the room. As the skin of my hand came in contact with its cool surface, I felt what it represented: millions of human lives hanging in the balance. It represented America standing against the barbaric plunder and mutual enslavement of socialism. It represented the triumph of a moral philosophy of individual liberty and capitalism over tyranny.

I’ll never forget how it felt. Even now it evokes strong emotion as I write this. In that simple throttle control of a scuttled Soviet bomber, I felt the importance of America, and now I feel the importance of the Memorial Day that honors those who have fallen in the fight to protect it.

Memorial Day matters because America matters.

America matters because freedom matters.

The United States is the only country ever founded based on the proper moral principle for human beings: That every individual has an inalienable right to his or her own life, a right that exists prior to and above any government or social organization. The Founders understood that without freedom human beings are reduced to being less than human. They recognized the fact each one of us has a right—and a responsibility—to pursue those things in life that we, as individuals, believe are best for ourselves in our own independent mind and judgment. They understood we are not simply cogs to be manipulated in an organic machine created by a king or a congress. That each of us is an end in and of ourselves.

In doing so they broke with the millennia of irrational dogma that supported various forms of oppression throughout human history. In the process they gave us a country worth defending.

It’s worth defending because the fundamental right of the individual to liberty, and the freedom of thought and action it represents, is the essential formula for human survival. It’s the only principle that guides human beings to a successful existence, taking us from bare survival to true flourishing. It guides us to proper peaceful and prosperous relationships based on capitalism, the moral expression of freedom in a social context.

To a virtual heaven on earth.

Memorial Day matters because protecting American Sovereignty matters. But we must remember it is the moral principle of individual liberty that gives America value. That makes it special. That makes it exceptional.

Freedom is mankind’s only hope for avoiding destruction, whether in the radioactive fires of nuclear war or some other government created catastrophe. However, that essential principle of individual liberty is still under assault today, perhaps as much within our borders as without. Let us not take its loss lightly, or those Soviet bombers will have been destroyed in vain, and the lives we honor on Memorial Day will become only a wistful memory of what we once fought for and defended but no longer possess.

Let American sovereignty continue to stand for that freedom, and let Memorial Day continue to matter as a reminder of our honored dead, and of what is important and how quickly it can be lost.