Presidents’ Day, Stewardship, and the Drift from Civic Ritual in a Culture of Extraction

“When we allow markets to dictate the rhythm of our remembrance, belonging thins. Stewardship begins when we choose meaning over convenience.” - Mary Coughlin

When I was a child, we celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday and Washington’s Birthday separately. Two days. Two stories. Two invitations to reflect on character, restraint, courage, and the fragile experiment called democracy. Over time, those observances were consolidated into Presidents’ Day, a long weekend now more associated with sales than civic memory.

I don’t say that cynically. I say it curiously. Because holidays reveal what a culture chooses to honor. And I find myself wondering what we honor now.

The Drift

The consolidation of Lincoln’s and Washington’s birthdays was practical, I guess; a standardized calendar, a predictable long weekend, on the surface makes sense. But over time, something subtle shifted. The stories grew quieter. The civic reflection thinner. The marketing louder.

It may seem small. But small shifts in ritual often signal larger shifts in rhythm. And rhythm regulates culture. We have not drifted away from complexity, our history has always been complex. But we may have drifted from restraint.

Washington warned against factionalism and the corrosion of public trust. He relinquished power voluntarily. Lincoln held the Union together through civil war and called the nation toward “a new birth of freedom.” Neither man was perfect. Both were deeply entangled in the contradictions of a young nation including the reality of slavery and racial injustice that shaped its foundation.

Extraction has never been evenly distributed in this country. It has always fallen disproportionately along lines of race and power, from enslaved labor to stolen land to environmental inequities that persist today. So stewardship, if it means anything now, must include reckoning as well as reverence.

Both Washington and Lincoln, in different ways, wrestled with responsibility to something larger than themselves. Stewardship of land. Stewardship of union. Stewardship of future generations.

Ritual, Belonging, and What Regulates a Culture

Ritual is not decorative. It regulates. It orients us in time. It anchors shared identity. It reminds us who we are.

When civic holidays are tethered to story, they strengthen collective coherence. They reinforce values. They regulate a culture around virtue rather than velocity. But when those same days become primarily economic pauses optimized for commerce and convenience something subtle shifts.

Markets begin to set the rhythm. And markets tell a story:

• Produce more.

• Consume more.

• Compete more.

• Optimize time.

Markets are not inherently wrong. They can serve human flourishing. But when market logic becomes the dominant cultural drumbeat, it begins to shape identity. If belonging becomes tethered to consumption rather than contribution…. If value becomes measured by accumulation rather than stewardship… Then our nervous systems organize around scarcity instead of responsibility. And scarcity is destabilizing. A dysregulated culture consumes now. A regulated culture stewards forward.

This is ecological. Relational. Human.

Forests regenerate in rhythm. Oceans balance in cycles. Healthy systems do not extract beyond repair. When we drift from ritual into relentless optimization, we drift from belonging into performance. And when belonging thins, polarization rises. Anxiety rises. Spectacle replaces substance.

It is all connected.

Extraction as a Cultural Habit

When ritual weakens and markets set the dominant rhythm, extraction does not remain abstract. It becomes embodied in how we relate to one another and to the earth itself. The same culture that normalizes spectacle over stewardship in leadership can normalize depletion over regeneration in ecosystems. So when we speak of stewardship now, we are not speaking of sentimentality. We are speaking of repair.

Recently, I have been listening to Diana Beresford-Kroeger speak about forests, about the chemistry of trees and the intelligence of ecosystems that evolve over centuries. Her work widens the lens beyond quarterly earnings and electoral cycles into generational time.

And from that vantage point, our economic habits look startlingly small. Markets move in quarters.
Forests move in generations. When systems are dysregulated, short-term gain overrides long-term responsibility. But healthy ecosystems (and that includes us) teach something different: regeneration requires rhythm, balance, humility.

A culture rooted in belonging does not hoard. A culture rooted in stewardship does not devour its own future.

The Current Moment

We are living in a political era that has intensified many of these dynamics. The coarsening of discourse. The elevation of spectacle over substance. The blurring of truth and performance. Regardless of political affiliation, something feels frayed.

Democracy depends not only on laws but on norms of restraint, humility, shared responsibility. The planet depends not only on innovation but on reverence: an understanding that we are participants in an ecosystem, not masters over it.

When leadership drifts from stewardship, both democracy and ecology strain. And yet. History shows that periods of excess often precede recalibration. Collapse is not guaranteed renewal. But it is often a mirror.

A Moment of Choosing

Presidents’ Day, at its best, is not about nostalgia. It is about responsibility.

We do not honor leaders by flattening them into sales events. We honor them by practicing the virtues they struggled toward, imperfectly, but earnestly:

• Restraint.

• Courage.

• Moral imagination.

• Stewardship.

We are not passive observers of this chapter. We are participants in it. We are the ancestors of the future. The question is not whether our history was ever pure, it absolutely wasn’t. The question is whether we will mature.

Will we continue to extract? Or will we learn to steward?

Will power remain spectacle? Or become service?

Will we continue to treat land and labor as expendable — or learn again how to steward what sustains us?

Steady your nervous system. Reclaim your rituals. Choose stewardship in small, concrete ways.
Plant something. Read something aloud. Gather. Teach the story behind the date.

Grounded does not mean passive. Grounded means rooted. And rooted systems grow differently.

Perhaps remembering is the beginning of stewardship.

Take care and care well, Mary