Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on public and private matters that force thinking and response. Today we target: Distinction.

  • Memorial Day upon us, and those just passed, any common memories, to share, to honor, this month of May 2023?
  • Were the official May, Memorial Days honoring line of duty deaths of fire fighters and police distinctive enough to merit memory and honor?
  • In the sharing category, does it matter why my granduncle Art Borling, with his ever present smile, handed out Black Jack gum to the family kids?
  • Do the memories of the man and the smile linger along with that distinctive, Adam’s licorice taste, the first flavored gum in America (1861)?
  • Do memories linger only if they are distinctive?
  • Are distinctive instruction or personal experience required?
  • When “Uncle Art’s” grandson, Pastor Don Borling, All Saints Lutheran Church, Orland Park, IL offers invocation tomorrow under the Chicago, watchful, bronzed eye of Black Jack, what distinction matters?
  • Astride trusted, horse “Slasher” with leg raised (meaning?), does Black Jack Logan, Major General John A. Logan, provide distinctive, Grant Park presence for Memorial Day commemoration in Chicago?
  • Created by celebrated sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and inaugurated in 1897 with a quarter million people in attendance, why should this place and this name “Logan” be so distinctive?
  • Are Black Jack’ s (a nickname given by his troops) Civil War, military exploits and pre and post war, vastly different political orientations and practice determinant enough, distinctive enough?
  • Is it truly because he was a man transformed, and with friends, Lincoln and Grant, helped transform the nation?
  • And so tomorrow, Memorial Day, as the nation pays homage to our war dead, will we also remember that General Logan, Black Jack Logan, Commander of The Grand Army of the Republic, created Memorial /Decoration Day in 1868, three years after the end our civil war?
  • Is there a lesson for today that, within a year, then President Grant, at Arlington, conducted Memorial Day Ceremonies making sure that flowers were strewn on Union and Confederate graves?
  • Why do we create monuments and memorials? Are they meant to be distinctive, hence lodged, with meaning, in memory ?
  • Must “worthy” be added to the evaluation of being distinctive while “perfect” can be eliminated unless you are a first stone thrower?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours.