Outside of the men and women who served in my generation and the families that had to experience what it’s like to watch someone they love leave for a country that means nothing to you and possibly never return from, we’ve had it relatively easy. We didn’t have to ration. We don’t expect to see a military official in a car bearing the worst news possible cruising by our door.

Memorial Day is one of those days meant to keep that appreciation alive and the gratefulness we have for these people continuing on long after they fell in the name of their fellow countrymen, but that appreciation is tempered with ignorance for my generation and younger.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a bad thing. The fact that my generation is mostly free of this kind of hardship is a testament to the generations who fought and died for the dream of peace and prosperity for their families and those who would come after. It makes those who die while serving today all the more tragic, as this wasn’t what our fathers and grandfathers who fought and bled together had wanted for their descendants.

It’s a thought that should make you appreciate those who sacrificed it all even more. They didn’t just salute their commanding officer and charge into the mouth of death for a flag and an idea. It was an element of their reasoning, but in the end, what they really did it for was you. Such was the ferocity that came from that love that it’s made many a foreign power think twice when confronting the country that gives birth to these kinds of men.

But being so far removed has made it easy to prey on the ignorance of the young.

Hitler is long dead but his villainy lives on like a boogie man that the left loves to threaten people with when someone disagrees with them. The fight to resist a very real dictatorship that wants to treat some groups and races as lesser was won in European and Pacific theaters but that valor and glory is now being claimed by radical activists attempting to force themselves into every aspect of people’s lives, including their children’s.

Ironically, the very people who wear the accomplishments of better men like a mask hate these better men. They want to replace them on the dais and proclaim that they’re the actual heroes while they spit at and mock the people who died to give them their freedom.

The single day that is given to the United State soldiers is soon replaced by “Pride Month.” There will be parades, speeches, virtue signaling, and celebrations for people whose only real accomplishment is having sex with someone with the same plumbing as them or claiming they’re a gender they’re clearly not. The same corporations that either gave no notice to our veterans who fought for the freedom and rights of our countrymen will change their logos to rainbow-colored versions and proclaim from the rooftops that they’re all on board for the fight for equality.

For a month they will highlight the “heroes” of the movement while they ignore some of the worst crimes this modern parts of this movement allow. They’ll talk as if those in the LGBT community are victims of oppression and hate even as the entire country bends over backward to support their cause.

All of it so that when you think of heroism, sacrifice, and valor, you think of people who largely don’t deserve it.

(READ: Transgender People Are Not Under Threat and Their Movement Is the Height of Narcissism)

They’ll do all this while veterans struggle to get basic, competent medical care, and as too many find themselves homeless, alone, and hated by the very people they helped keep free and safe.

Memorial Day might just be a day but keeping it alive and understood is keeping the idea of this country in focus while so many outside forces try to shift that focus onto them. So few can claim that they laid down their lives so that everyone else could live a better one, and by everyone else I mean everyone else. Not just a small group of people.

God bless those who served in our military and died for me and mine.