Memorial Day
Peter Collier, author of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, talks about Memorial Day in 2007:
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors…
We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys’ adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we’ve heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we’re uncertain about what we celebrate. We’re the land of the free for one reason only: We’re also the home of the brave.
There are a lot of people in America who have come to believe that the time for these old virtues to be cherished and emulated broadly in society has passed for good. Man’s history shows otherwise. Whole societies around the world raise children to worship foul deeds. Some rise up to fight such wickedness. New wars are born. Other socieites, with uncertain regimes, expand seriously their warmaking capabilities. When and to what purpose will they be used?
In the ebb and flow of honoring our men and women who have given up all their tomorrows, we are perhaps at something of an ebb, since Memorial Day itself has taken on political overtones in the MSM, and perhaps among some politicians. History teaches us that, in all likelihood, it will not always be so.
May 28th, 2007 at 10:28 am
I know that for lots of people the American participation in the Normandy assault is the only detail of the Second World War that has any clarity, but the epitaph quoted in part has nothing at all to with either Normandy or ANY American war. It was written in 1916, to honour British soldiers who fought the hun while Americans were too proud to.
http://www.burmastar.org.uk/epitaph.htm
May 28th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Any civilization that thinks that the principles that made it possible are out of fashion will soon find it is no longer a civilization.