miscellany
on memorial…
and for now, a rest to remember those who have fought, withering aimlessly or with cause, lost in strategy or whimsy, guts or glory — for you i take a break wishing you hope and safety. i excuse our naivety and selfishness — us “patriots”. i hope for a time of peace and a time when we will all be free. i hope for a time when we will do more than just a yellow magnetic ribbon. a time when we will fight for peace and honor the living.
May 30th, 2006 at 9: 45 pm
What a classy Memorial Day post, John.
It’s important to look past naivety and selfishness insofar as the guilt they inspire can stand in the way of insight. But I’m afraid to use the word “excuse”, since it’s too easily interpreted as a dismissal. I understand you’re not tossing up your hands out of nihilism or laziness - but the simple act of being patriotic is just too easy, too infiltrating and too seductive for me to adopt the caution in your tone.
The day needs a name change. This modern world does not need the huffy piety, empty reverence for sacrifices or symbolic gestures. Those do a disservice to the people who came before us, the people we are now, and the people who will come after us.
The fact that there is such a holiday highlights a supreme failure of leadership and the dire need for a new way of existing as individual countries on a single planet. The parades, the flag-waving, the gaseous thank-yous to soldiers past and present don’t matter when young people are being used as pawns - underpaid, under-equipped, over-worked and then abandoned to shrinking Veterans’ budgets. Any commemoration that ignores this deserves none of my attention.
People have lost their lives for their leaders’ egos, greed and inadequacy. We’re told it’s for freedom. The reminder is nothing but a bromide to make the tragedy more palatable to the weakest of us, to offer unambitious intellects a way around the complicated truth, to keep the rest of us in line.
So…spend the day floundering in ridiculous piety while spouting isolated snippets of history, or mark the day as one of quiet, careful protest, a protest that says to our Veterans I will not salute a country that continues to need people to sacrifice in the same way you have.