My brother-in-law sent me an E-mail in respect to Memorial Day. It is a far cry from the politicking my town’s annual Memorial Day remembrance turned into: a political fear mongering event.
Good Morning James,
Today I honor you. You and your family have been fighting a war without end for many years now. that war is against sorrow. We consider this day a memorial to our soldiers and sailors and airmen who have died in the service of our nation. Instead it is a day when I shed a tear about all of the things that never happened.
I think of a young boy [reference to me] who grew up without a father to teach him how to throw a baseball. I think of a young wife [reference to my Navy veteran mother] who lost her first love, and a daughter [reference to my Army veteran sister] who never had a dad try to braid her hair.
I think of families who forever had their futures changed and who always have an empty place at their dinner table. Holidays are always bittersweet for these veterans of sorrow. The pain is always there, but scar tissue grows around the injury in their souls and allows them to move onward with their disrupted lives, though in the quiet hours of the night, each of these family members has to deal with the unanswered questions of what could have, and what should have been.
When your father’s plane went down, I know his last thoughts were of you and your mom and sister. His sacrifice for our nation cannot be compensated, what he lost is all that a man can hold dear, his life and all that he loved. And each of you, his family also gave our nation something immeasurable in that moment, you lost a piece of yourself and the universe changed as so many possible futures were lost.
I am honored and privileged to know and love you, and to have you as a part of my family.
That still has me fighting back tears two days after I received it, when I recount it here.
I was disappointed to say the least in the remembrance held Sunday here, a completely different take on Memorial Day. I certainly would not have given the speech the keynote speaker gave.
Relatively recently, a Navy officer from the county seat retired from the service, and returned home. He’s turned into something of a celebrity, asked to speak at local engagements. (The last I am aware of was last Veterans Day where he spoke at the high school.) He knows who I am, having met me before when my family was awarded its Gold Star Family pins forty-five years late, and in events we have both attended since.
I spent the morning Saturday helping to decorate the graves of the fallen and veterans who have passed away. There are people in our little village cemetery, both men and women, who have served in every war from the Civil War onward. Seeing the little flags across the side of Rose Hill, it is apparent that a much larger percentage of people in this area have been in the military than the average for the nation.
Sunday morning was the remembrance service. I do not attend for the religious aspect of it, nor because I am a village trustee (city councilmember). I attend to show respect for those who have gone before me, some serving in the military and going on to other things, and others who gave the full measure of their devotion in combat.
Many veterans were in attendance, some sporting ball caps with various military commands emblazoned on them, others driving trucks (there are more trucks than people around here) with disabled veterans tags, &c. I sported a USS Saratoga (CV-60) shirt (my last ship) and a Gold Star Family Pin (along with the Gold Star Family plates on my car).
Traditionally, the women of my town organise the decoration of the cemetery and arrange the remembrance event. They allow me to help decorate the cemetery and strip it after Memorial Day, as my own father, who perished in the Vietnam War when I was seven years old, is buried in Massachusetts 1,500 miles away. The event generally turns out the whole village, plus many people from out-of-town and state who have family buried in Broadwater. (For a brief time, our town population triples.) The event was covered by a photographer from the local newspaper.
The event started with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by an invocation delivered by the pastor of the Lutheran church here in town. The Sons of the American Legion offered a gun volley, followed by a local resident playing Taps on the bugle.
Then, the keynote speaker gave his address. I was standing directly in front of him as he gave it. He knew I was there.
He started with the murky history of the origins of Memorial Day, detailing how various towns around the country claim to have invented it. He gave the story of the town in Pennsylvania where he went to college and its own claim to the holiday. He then went on to cite how the holiday was popularised; pretty much standard stuff.
And then, in a departure from anything I would consider decent and honourable, he launched into a diatribe of conservative fear mongering. Without so much as trying to hide his dogwhistle (I hate liberals), he in rapid succession claimed:
There are those within the nation who would take away our freedom of the press.
Some people are trying to force “unnatural, un-Biblical relationships” like same-sex marriage and transgendered bathrooms on people against their will.
Some people are out to destroy the II Amendment and take away your right to bear arms.
Muslims are terrorists out to kill us all and take away our freedoms.
He then wound up and the event was closed.
As he went on his diatribe, I was forcing down the gorge, and doing my level best to keep from exploding in the middle of his speech. I wanted mightily to call him out as a bigot and fear monger in front of the whole crowd.
However, he would go to his home in the county seat, I live here. An explosion of righteous rage would neither add to the solemnity of an occasion he chose to politicise, nor would it help me retain my village board seat.
Instead, I went to all the participants (the Legionnaires, the sound engineer, the man who played Taps, the women who organised the event) and thanked them for participating. I pointedly ignored the speaker (as I walked right by him).
My response might have been:
Who is trying to take away freedom of the press?
Your arguments against “unnatural, un-Biblical relationships” are the same arguments used by racists in the South when I went to a segregated elementary school. They were wrong and so are you.
Muslims have proudly and distinctly served in every combat the USA engaged in since the Revolutionary War. In my nearly two decades in the US Navy, I served with a number of Muslims (including a Syrian refugee of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War) who were unquestioningly loyal to the United States and its ideal of Freedom of Religion.
Liberals don’t want to take your guns, thank you very much. We have our own. A communist might consider redistributing guns from those who have many to those who have none, though (from each according to his ability, &c)
I was infuriated, and spent an hour or so after everyone left, with just my wife and a few straggling mourners, going through cemetery to ponder on the real meaning of Memorial Day: Whether our nation entered a combat for good reasons or bad, those in our little cemetery answered the call of duty, and some gave the full measure of their devotion. There will be a time (far in the future I hope) that my own spot on Rose Hill will sport a little fluttering flag as well, but I, as those who went before me, represent the real Home of the Brave, not the fear I heard from the podium yesterday morning.