I read an editorial in the Denver Post today that the "real message" of Memorial Day, the day when we honor our fallen warriors, is a cautionary one, how we must strive to not send our men and women into foreign wars, how we must focus on energy independence, how we should be riding our bicycles to work, and on and on.Bullshit.
There are 364 other days in the year for us to think about such things. Today a grateful nation pauses to honor it's fallen and those who serve. We do so with the full knowledge that war is horrible state of affairs, but not the most horrible state of affairs. We have only to glance around the world today, or study even the briefest of histories, to understand why we fight and why we honor those who fought in our name.
And as we honor our heroes, it is always tempered by the knowledge that a day will come when we must again say to the best of us, "We need you to go to a place called Khe Sanh, a place called the Chosin Reservoir, a place called Omaha Beach, a place called Iwo Jima, a place called the Western Front, San Juan Hill, Round Top...a place called Thermopylae..."
And they will go, and we will honor them above all others. And not just on one day in May.
About Memorial Day...
ReplyDeleteFrom my Little Red Book I picked up at a small engineering school near C-Springs ;-)
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill