By popular demand, here's a post on Memorial Day:
1. Throughout human history, some people have been fortunate enough to live their entire lives in relative peace, dealing with the ups and downs of everyday life until, hopefully at a ripe old age, they pass away, with a legacy behind them and only God knows what ahead of them. These lives were filled with securing food and shelter and what luxuries fortune alloted them; filled with celebrating births, unions, and seasonal holidays; and in between filled with fighting disease, acts of nature, injuries and perhaps their spouses or in-laws, but nothing more widespread than that.
2. But those in group 1 are the rare few. Most other humans are at some point in their lives touched by war. The fortunate among them only hear of the horrors of the front line, but few escape knowing someone, even if only by their name, who died in such conflicts. And usually war makes them re-evaluate the ups and downs of everyday life and reconsider the choices they make.
3. Still others come face to face with the horrors of war and live to remind us of the rapes, the torture, the maimings, the bombings, the degredations, and the fear. These people carry those memories the rest of their lives. Some adjust and go on to realize triumphs. Others never quite get over their experiences, moving among us as enduring symbols of those horrors.
4. And, of course, there are those who come face to face with the horrors and don't live to tell of it. Some of those people are soldiers. It's they whom we honor with Memorial Day. It's an honorable tradition, respecting those who have made the greatest sacrifice for their country. Those who have put on a uniform and marched into battle so that most of us can remain in group 2 and apsire to see our posterity live in group 1. On Memorial Day we pause to reflect. The President places a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. We have parades. We wave to or salute the members of the armed services we encounter in the streets or buy them a drink if we meet them in a bar.
All of this serves us well. But I wish we did all that AND honored the dead in a more lasting way. I'd rather we make Memorial Day also a nationwide opportunity to reconsider the choices we make. In addition to the soldiers, I wish we honored the civilians in group 4 and those in group 3. I wish we would also focus on the horrors of war, not just the sanitized pomp and ceremony.
We celebrated Memorial Day in my house by watching "Sometimes in April." (h/t crionna). There it was in two hours of gut-wrenching drama--a depiction of war and its consequences for everyone involved: the soldiers, the politicians, the church, the civilians, the victims, the victimizers, the outside world, and the nation's own future. My partner's first reaction when the film was over, thinking of how his own country is perched on a similar precipice to the one Rwanda sat on in 1994, was to insist that school children the world over should be forced to watch this film. People should be forced to face the horrors of war before their ambitious, heartless, power-grubbing politicians lead them there under the guise of nationalism or religion or whatever. In short, Memorial Day would honor the dead best by striving to increase the numbers of our soliders (not to mention our civilians) counted among the fortunate few in group 1.
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