Patriots’ Day Speech

On Monday, April 21st, 2025, I spoke for City Council at Medford’s annual Patriots’ Day ceremony at the Salem Street Burial Grounds. It was a short speech, and I’ll post the video at a later time. For this blog post, I’ll just share the text of that speech here.

Welcome. I was told to keep remarks under two minutes. Captain Isaac Hall, who’s buried here at Salem Street, was able to get ready for battle in just one minute, so I’ll try to keep it even briefer than that.

The Revolutionary War was fought about a hundred and thirty years after England tried, and failed, to overthrow a monarchy and replace it with something else. It failed because the English didn’t really have a strong idea of what that something else would be. The greatest accomplishment of the Founding Fathers was to develop an alternative, an experiment, a country founded not on the sanctity of a person, but on an ideal. An ideal of self-government, of individual freedoms, of liberty.

That effort succeeded not because they wrote words on a piece of paper, but because they built that ideal up in the minds of their fellow countrymen, and those countrymen, some of whom are buried here today, were willing to spill blood for that ideal. It succeeded because the same founding father who rode on horseback to meet Sarah Bradlee Fulton, just up the road, twice gave up his own supreme authority, to enforce the ideal that self-government is more important than any one person. This country, the bedrock on which it was founded, can only ever be as strong as we think it is, because otherwise our laws and our constitution are just words on paper. I hope today, these graves, of the brave soldiers who died for that ideal, can serve to reinforce that ideal in our own minds. Thank you.