The Mansion on the Hill – Memorial Day

There's a mansion on the hill / Psychedelic music fills the air / Peace and love live there still / In that mansion on the hill.

There’s a moment of reckoning in Neil Young’s Mansion on the Hill — a melodic feedback loop of a song, half dream, half memory — when the chords move from minor to major and the chorus kicks:

There's a mansion on the hill / Psychedelic music fills the air / Peace and love live there still / In that mansion on the hill.

It’s a haunting image — not of utopia, but of a fragile, flickering idea — a democratic nation. A democracy is an argument that's never settled, it's work that is never done, always just beyond reach, always needing another voice, another hand, another memory to keep it standing.

The “mansion on a hill” is a turn on an old phrase with deep democratic roots. First invoked in America by Puritan John Winthrop in 1630 and later echoed by presidents from Kennedy to Reagan, it described a society that others could look up to — not for its wealth, but for its example. A nation whose moral light shone outward. In Neil Young’s version, the image is more fragile, more personal — a fading echo of peace, freedom, and purpose, still alive somewhere but under threat, as if we must strain to hear the music that once filled the air.

This is what Memorial Day — it was originally called Decoration Day to remember Civil War losses — is for. And this is why Canadians, too, should care.

We are not being asked to charge cannon lines, fight our own families, or climb muddy banks under fire. We’re being asked to remember. To encourage and support the still-new and rare idea of nations organized in some democratic fashion. Surely among the great ideas in the history of society.

Frederick Douglass said it plainly in 1871: they died not for geography or glory, but for the "hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world." It was an idea still in its infancy — radical, untested, and very much in doubt.

That idea still is. Democracy is not the default. It is not common. It is not stable. It is not, contrary to popular belief, a system that runs on autopilot.

It runs on remembrance. On faith. On sacrifice. And, at times, on the courage to call out the peddlers of division and doubt who now sit comfortably inside the gates — those who enjoy the freedoms of the “golden circle” while undermining its very foundations, not out of principle, but for personal gain.

Ya, I'm looking at you Mr. Trump, Premier of Alberta, and every Bloc MP smugly about to take someone else's seat in the House of Commons. And all those calling themselves conservatives who are nothing of the kind — more seditionists and self-aggrandizers.

The struggle for democracy — meaningful, participatory, accountable democracy — is the defining project of our age. And the United States, for all its flaws, remains the Northstar in that journey. Not because it is perfect, but because it keeps trying in the face of every conceivable objection and test.

Canada, too, is a chapter in that global story. Our own soldiers died in far-flung fields for the same cause. We, too, built our national identity on the bones of those who believed freedom was worth fighting for — not just at Vimy and the rest, it's easily felt that the current generation is as ready as any to fight, but the modern war is more likely to be of words and intellect, misinformation and memes — that is, in its own way, so much more difficult.

So on this American holiday, Canadians should stand beside our neighbours not in blind allegiance but in shared purpose in a national project for the ages. Not to glorify war, but to remember what it was for.

Encouragement and support, appreciation for what has gone before, and enthusiastic hope for an even better future is what is being asked of us.

I do appreciate in bitter and sour times, when it's difficult to know who and what to believe, it's easier to withdraw than to try and argue. But all you have to do is hold in your heart the idea of prosperous democratic nations in a peaceful world. It is still the purest and best idea.

Citizenship is a responsibility. The “mansion on the hill” will not stand by itself.

"For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going."

John Winthrop, 1630

Ya, that's a young Roger Miller and Willie Nelson in the photo, apropos of nothing except being on the list of things that wouldn't exist without the idea of prosperous democratic nations in a peaceful world.