Fairlee 4th of July Soldiers’ Monument & Flagpole Ceremony Speech

I gave the following remarks on July 4, 2026 in Fairlee, VT during the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the Soldiers’ Monument and Flagpole Ceremony:

Good afternoon, Fairlee.

This is the first time I’ve had the honor of standing here at your soldier’s ceremony, and I don’t take that lightly. I represent this town, and I’ve watched for years how Fairlee does the Fourth of July right. You don’t just celebrate it. You show up for it. You put out the flags, you line the streets, you bring your kids down to the lake and your grandparents down to this ceremony, because you understand something a lot of places have forgotten: that freedom isn’t just an idea, it’s a practice. It’s something a community does together, year after year.

This year that practice means something extra. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people signed their names to a piece of paper and staked everything on the idea that people have the right to govern themselves. They didn’t know if it would work. They didn’t know if the country would survive its first year, let alone two hundred and fifty of them. What they left us wasn’t a finished product. It was an assignment. Every generation since has had to pick it back up and ask: are we living up to it? Are we making it more true?

That question falls hardest, and most honorably, on the people we’re here to honor today. Our veterans didn’t get to read about freedom in a book and call it done. They put their bodies between this country and the people who wanted to take it apart. Some of you served in Europe and the Pacific. Some in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some in various other capacities all over the world. Different locations, different decades, different reasons you were called, but the same choice underneath it: you said yes when your country asked something hard of you. You left home. Some of you left friends over there who never came home, and you carry them with you still. We owe you more than a ceremony, but today, we say thank you. Fairlee remembers. Fairlee is grateful. Fairlee will not let what you did be forgotten.

This is a moment in our country when a lot of people are worried about the state of our democracy. I hear it from neighbors at the store, from folks at town meeting, from people who stop me on the street. That worry is not weakness. It’s not cynicism. It’s actually a sign that people still care what happens to this country. The opposite of that worry isn’t comfort. The opposite of it is checking out, and that is the one thing we cannot afford to do.

Here’s what I believe, and I believe it because I’ve watched this town prove it true: democracy doesn’t run on a handful of people in Montpelier or Washington. It runs on people like you. It runs on whether you show up to town meeting, whether you write the letter, whether you run for the school board, whether you vote in the primary as well as November, whether you look out for your neighbor whose politics might be different than yours but whose kid goes to the same school as yours. Every single one of those small acts is how a democracy stays alive. None of it is somebody else’s job. All of it is ours.

So my hope for Fairlee, on this Fourth of July, in this 250th year, is this. That we take the same spirit that gets this whole town out here every year, rain or shine, and we point it at the work in front of us. Not with despair. With the kind of hope that has muscle in it. Our veterans didn’t serve so we could sit this out. They served so we’d have the right to stay in the fight for this country, peacefully, stubbornly, together.

Fairlee has always known how to do that. I may be new to standing at this podium, but I am not new to this town, and I know exactly what you’re made of. Let’s take that same spirit and carry it into the next two hundred and fifty years.

Thank you, and thank you to every veteran here today. This town is better because of you.