It’s worth asking, this Memorial Day, whether the rest of us would be willing to follow Kennedy’s path. It’s not just that the percentage of Americans who consider themselves patriotic has dropped so dramatically. It’s also that, according to a 2022 Quinnipiac poll, only 55 percent of Americans say they would stay and fight if the U.S. were invaded. The rest, presumably, would flee. In a recent speech (reprinted in The Free Press), Douglas Murray said this was because a lot of young Americans have been “told from the cradle that their country was rotten from birth and had nothing going for it other than slavery, colonialism, and everything else.”

My own view is that the culprit is more likely to be the disintegration of the country’s social cohesion that has taken place since the Vietnam War, combined with the selfish, “I’ve got mine” ethos that now reigns. Regardless, the fact that so many Americans can’t envision themselves fighting for their country the way Ukrainians are fighting, the way Israelis are fighting, the way the Taiwanese would fight if they had to, is a harsh truth to contemplate this Memorial Day.

And all the more reason to be thankful for people like Kennedy Sanders. And also like 20-year-old Jared Schmitz, one of the 13 soldiers killed in late August 2021 when suicide bombs were set off outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as tens of thousands of Afghans attempted to flee their country before the Taliban took over.