Greetings,
At one time — long ago, it seems — Memorial Day could
almost slip past without notice. That
is, we had the cook-outs and parties, but other than a few veterans and one or
two of us crazy people there was little attention paid to the reason for the
day. But not in recent years. The memorial observances we make are too
fresh, drawn from too sudden a memory to have lost any of their solemnity. Unfortunately, a side effect of this new
found interest in genuine Memorial Day observances, is that the day becomes
political. Thus the arguments over
President Obama’s decision to observe the day in Chicago, rather than lead the
observance at the Unknown Tombs in Arlington National Cemetery.
Today is a good day to ask just how far back we
choose to remember. The last of the
veterans of World War I are all but gone, and the veterans of World War II are
fast going. Vietnam may still seem current in the American political
conversation, if only as an undertone, but it is some 35 years since we left
that country and almost 50 years since we first entered it. The wars in Bosnia, the first Gulf War, and now in Iraq, Afghanistan, have brought us a sad supply of coffins and
disabled individuals, as well as survivors who are struggling with many
depressions and traumas. We also have
families who are disrupted as a key member of the family is serving, or has
come home to no job and a host of problems.
Now Memorial Day is an opportunity to reprise any
number of military memories, as well as to make new ones. But it is also an opportunity to remember
that though warfare is a separate strain of history running through the life of
most nations, in this nation it has always been contained by our essentially
civilian purposes. The test of every military venture must be the highest
principles of the ventures that have come before, right back to the American
Revolution. That includes the
reintegration of the soldiers who have done the fighting. Some, like the
American lives lost in Iraq, come home to be buried on native soil. Most come home to take up the tasks they left
behind, to join us side by side in looking ahead to the future.
For many years as we fed the homeless I saw the
identical bronze plaques on either side of the entrance of the Veterans
Administration with their quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural
Address, “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow,
and his orphan,” The tragic irony of so many veterans
sleeping on the street at that building is almost more than one can bear.
In 2003 an article in The New York Times commented on the first Memorial Day after the
real beginning of the war in Iraq: “Once more old soldiers — including the youngest of
old soldiers — will gather with the rest of us this Memorial Day to pay homage
to their comrades. But they gather as
civilians, as citizens, no matter how much their experience of war sets them
apart from those of us who have never gone to war.
“Most
days it seems as though we live in the slipstream of the present and that
history belongs just where we find it, in the past. But Memorial Day is a time
for remembering that history endows the present. It seems strange, some years,
to stand in patient memory at the brink of summer, when the weather, the month,
the impetus of our calendar is urging us to get busy living before summer
erodes. But that patience is always rewarded. We connect too often with the
pattern of American history on a note that is shallow and unreflective. Today
we acknowledge the depth of this nation's history, how rich and sustaining its
best moments have been. Above all, we recall the lives that have been given
willingly to make our history what it is.”
In 2012 we are continuing to be
grieved by the sacrificial deaths of our nation’s finest, and to see the
suffering of our “wounded warriors” whose lives have been disrupted forever by
their injuries. They deserve, and need,
so much more than a Purple Heart and the limited resources we offer them. I believe Abraham Lincoln weeps at our
failure to heed his words, our failure truly “care for him [and her] who shall
have borne the battle and for his [her] widow [widower] and his [her] orphans.”
Yours & His,
DED
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