Be forewarned: my mood is foul today. The likelihood of finding something uplifting here approaches zero.
Every year at the end of May, Americans are called to remember those who have fallen in battle in defense of our Union, now our nation. Whether we venture to cemeteries and plant flags or simply pause to recall the sacrifices of our own dear ones and countless strangers, it is proper we observe the brutal price paid for what has been handed us.
Today, I can’t help wonder if they wasted their gift.
The Executive Branch is headed by a cabal in thrall to a foreign power, one which wishes us no good. The Legislature is little more than an auction house, where the commonweal is bartered for trappings of privilege. Actual governance is more and more carried out by “the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations” decried by the author of our founding manifesto.
And, if polls are any gauge, that is just dandy with a quarter of our countrymen. We are “great again.”
We’ve never been perfect and seldom great. To list the instances when we failed our ideals would fill a library.
But, in my lifetime, we seemed to be getting better at keeping promises, living up to the impossible standards. We repealed laws that codified inequality, even if it remained in much of ground reality. We owned up to some of our grievous errors, even offered inadequate but meaningful reparation for those wronged. We collectively owned the old and the sick and the hungry and the unfairly treated.
We tried, however pathetically, to live and govern as if our ideals were actual, achievable goals. At least it seemed so for a while.
Today, I don’t feel confident they are. Today, I think the forces of greed and ignorance and petty cruelty may be too strong to permit the realization of equality and justice of which our founders dreamed.
I shall remember today, and honor. But with the hope that death truly is the last word, and that those I remember and honor are not looking down on us and what we’ve made of their gift.
I’m sorry if I’ve brought too dark a cloud to your remembrance of those fallen. But I believe honesty is the least we owe them.
