Rumors of War on Memorial Day

It's a beautiful Memorial Day here in New Jersey, exactly what you would ask for. As always, this holiday meant to commemorate the dead of American wars has been used for anything but. People online turn it into Second Veterans Day and Second Armed Forces Day where they talk about the troops or their uncle's service in Vietnam but not about the fallen. Americans don't like to think much about death, nor about the human consequences of war.

I remember the shock I felt as a child when I found out that my piano teacher's first husband died in the Battle of Okinawa. To me World War II was one of the "good wars," unlike Vietnam, whose horrors were dominating movie screens at the time. I had never really thought about how the "good" wars demand that the lives of young people whose lives have barely begun be sacrificed.

I think about this a lot, since wars like Vietnam and Iraq demanded this sacrifice, but completely unnecessarily. The last time I saw the Vietnam memorial in DC was about seven years ago, and my eyes were filled with tears of rage. Being confronted by that list of people who lost their lives for a lie was almost too much to take.

Instead of giving us pause, Memorial Day becomes yet another day to wave the flag. The subtext beneath all the local hometown parades is purely nationalistic, pretty much indistinguishable from the Fourth of July. We are a nation conditioned to war.

I was born in 1975, a few months after the fall of Saigon. The United States did not wage a full-scale war until the Gulf War in 1991, when I was fifteen. Opposition to new wars was pretty broad during my childhood. When Congress forbade Reagan from intervening in Nicaragua, that was a popular position. My students were born after 9/11, and so the United States has been at war for their entire lives, with no end in sight and very little concerted opposition to future wars.

This day, which should be for national reflection on the lives our nation has sacrificed for good causes and bad, is the ultimate symbol of our war mongering ways. We wave the flag, grill burgers, and watch the jet flyovers with no thought to the black soldier massacred at Fort Pillow, the doughboy blown apart by a trench mortar, or the sailor drowned in the waters of Pearl Harbor.

And so rumors of war fly again. Our nation rattles the saber with Iran and starts talking about the Monroe Doctrine in Venezuela. It may be there or someone else, but I would bet anything that soon enough there will be more American names added to the "roll of honor" on ground where their blood has yet to be spilled. The way we celebrate Memorial Day is all the proof I need.