It’s Memorial Day in America. A day marked for those who died in service to their nation.

With its origins traceable to the end of the American Civil War, Memorial Day itself will doubtless find itself the subject of attack in years to come. Some race-grifting professor will ludicrously allege it has its roots in the celebration of slavery. The media will parrot the claims. A left-wing politician will call for a commission to explore its heritage and how it may offend those who insist America owes them – not a ticket back “home” – but a free meal ticket for generations to come. Invariably, said commission will recommend marking the end of Memorial Day, or rolling it into a pointlessly vague “Commemoration of All Suffering” or similar.

That is why it is important to become even more muscular in our marking of this day. It is, in fact, imperative to wear Memorial Day on our lapels, if not on our sleeves. This website fully supports the reintroduction of the wearing of the poppy—an originally American idea whose traditions have continued in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and some parts of Europe but somehow died off on these shores.

Indeed, it was a professor, Moina Michael – a distant relative of Francis ‘Swamp Fox’ Marion – who came up with the idea of commemorating the glorious dead by wearing a symbol of the Flanders Fields in which so many lost their lives during the Great War. Michael had helped Americans escape Europe after 1914, and it is fitting that her ancestor, the Swamp Fox, was one of the most frustrating soldiers the British ever encountered during America’s War of Independence. So much so that Mel Gibson’s character in The Patriot was, in part, based on Marion himself.

Michael wrote in 1918:

Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.

We cherish, too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.

While poppies are scarcely widespread in the U.S. today, the American Legion carries them on its website, and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., even has a Poppy Wall up for the weekend this year. For Americans, Memorial Day is the day to wear them, while overseas, Remembrance Day (November 11) is deemed the appropriate time.

So, especially with so many of our friends and countrymen lost in the fruitless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as intermittent battles in other theaters – some necessary, others wholly not – there can be no better time to breathe life into a real American-made tradition.