Since last November like many people, I've been processing through a lot of what our country is about and what we stand for and searching for truth. What is true about what I believe and what is not? Today is the day that we remember and honor, with broken hearts, those who died in service to our country. From the Revolutionary War to today's War on Terror, we have sacrificed the human treasure in our country for what we aver is a higher ideal - the fight for and the preservation of freedom.
This sacrifice means there are babies who will never know their fathers, children who will grow up without a mother or a father, and parents who will ache with the loss of their sons and daughters for the remainder of their own lives. This sacrifice means thousands of men and women won't be there to raise their children or care for their elderly parents. This sacrifice means that the men and women who gave up their lives will no longer contribute to our greater society. They won't cure cancer, they won't come up with a solution to climate change, they won't solve the next economic crisis, they won't teach in our schools or police our streets or run for elected office. Many of them have been cut down too young to have had a chance to leave a mark in this world other than the sacrifice of their life in a war.
In the last Harry Potter book, Dumbledore tells Harry,
"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living and, above all, those who live without love. By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present."
The older I get the more I feel the loss of this treasure and the toll it takes on all of us. Not just the sudden loss of a life, but the fact that we're honoring men and women who died because of a failure on the part of the living. War is the worst of human nature and we are way too eager to engage in it. We're not just asking for the sacrifice of your life, we're asking you to take lives as well. We're asking you to take part in something that kills the human soul. Perhaps we have no choice but to go to war, but we should never forget the totality of the cost to one and all.
The United States has been at war for nearly my entire lifetime. I was born in 1965 and a quick query on the internet reveals that we've lost more than 66,000 US Soldiers since then. The bulk of those deaths occurred in Vietnam, but the numbers for Iraq and Afghanistan are each already in the thousands. We no longer see the black bags lined up on the tarmac awaiting the last ride home with the bodies of our lost treasure resting silently inside. The American public doesn't actually like war and we don't like the consequences of war and so our government hides from us the awful truth and instead glorifies the battle and the pageantry and our weaponry. We see the soldier standing with the weapon heading in to battle, not lying torn to shreds on the ground, limbs missing and covered in blood in the aftermath.
It's not just soldiers who give up their lives in war, but civilians as well and yet we rarely if ever acknowledge their sacrifice as anything other than acceptable losses. The numbers of civilian casualties may number equally or higher to the number of soldiers lost, but their number also includes children from infants to teenagers. They will never grow up to become educated adults, have children of their own or provide solutions to finding peace in our time. They are the world's lost treasure. In recent years the United States has bombed a hospital in Afghanistan, slaughtered a wedding party in Yemen and killed an 8 year old girl in a drone strike.
We also ask for the sacrifice of the planet we live on. We have allowed poisonous chemicals like Agent Orange to rain down on our soldiers, on the local populace and on the land they occupy impacting generations to come, not to mention what we do to the wildlife. Soldiers bond with domestic animals (both dogs and cats) while they're serving their country and some try to bring them home and some leave those animals to fend for themselves once they're gone.
Nothing and no one is safe in the theater of war. Yet we sing songs about going off to war to kick some butt as if at the end we'll all just come back to the bar for a cold one and have a laugh. War is death. There is nothing to celebrate about war except when it ends and we can begin to pick up the pieces of our lives.
So on this Memorial Day we should gather and quietly honor those who have been lost to war, and we should remember not just the soldier, but all of the losses embodied therein and wonder what our future might have been if only.....Then we should demand to know why some wars are still being fought these many years later and how much more earthly treasure we can stand to lose.
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