Let's Have a Different Memorial Day This Year

Growing up in my family we often visited the graves of our relatives and ancestors on Memorial Day weekend. The holiday was just as much about our personal need to pay respect to the dead we knew as it was a time to remember fallen soldiers from America's wars. I still can remember looking at the German inscriptions on the grave of my great-great-grandmother, coming face to face with a heritage that had been drained from my family's life through assimilation by the time I was born. This practice by my family is certainly not the norm.

In America's public life the holiday is either the unofficial start of the summer, or in recent years has become Veterans Day II and Armed Forces Day II rolled together, the remembrance of death forgotten in favor of jingoism. This year, in the midst of 100,000 covid deaths, I think we should celebrate the holiday differently.

There's been a lot of talk, especially from the president, about how fighting the disease is some kind of "war." However, the dead have gone unmourned, including health care workers sent out to face the disease without proper supplies. The president and so many others have failed to mourn these dead, as many as fell in all of America's wars since World War II, because they would rather dodge responsibility and pretend that this isn't a big deal.

Because of the restrictions forced by the virus, these dead died mostly alone without proper funerals. For those reasons, it is especially important that the dead be properly remembered. I propose that Memorial Day this year be a national day of mourning and remembrance for the dead of this virus. The dead soldiers of America's wars are certainly in no danger of being forgotten. 

The vast majority of people in this country are in favor of social distancing, but the ingrates who break it get all of the press coverage. Our national leadership directly undermines any sense of shared civic responsibility, even though it is something that we are all living out on a daily basis when we elect to stay quarantined. The president won't do anything to mourn the dead, but WE can.

So tomorrow on Memorial Day I plan to wear all black and to set time aside to mourn and remember the dead. I will give myself a moment of silence at 3:11, since it was on March 11th that the enormity of the situation sank in for me. I'll listen to Barber's Adagio and Albinoni's Adagio and cry for awhile. 

You might think this is silly, that my lone action is pretty meaningless. Well to quote one of my favorite lines from the Dada art movement, it is meaningless, just like everything else. In this cruel world ruled by capricious fate we can only make it bearable by being in solidarity with our fellow human beings. This Memorial Day, let's not forget to do that. 

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.

Memorial Day Thoughts

Will the sacrifice of the 54th Massachusetts have been in vain?

No one I know who has seen combat has much good to say about war. A Desert Storm vet friend said on Facebook today that he hopes war ends so that we won't need any more days of remembrance. My World War II vet grandfather told my cousin to not sign up for the military because they would throw his life away without a second thought.

Sometimes wars are regrettably necessary. Sometimes they are the most disgusting thing perpetuated by humanity. When I went to the Vietnam Memorial in DC I felt nothing but pure rage. None of the people named on that wall needed to die in that stupid conflict.

Even when wars are necessary, the sacrifice involved should give us pause. Today I am feeling especially sad. I am thinking of the African American soldiers who saved the Union in the Civil War and died for a country that still refuses to treat their descendants as equals. I am thinking of the thousands of immigrants who died for a country that now treats immigrants with contempt. I am thinking of the soldiers of all backgrounds who died to defeat Nazism in World War II. The country they died for now has a leader who is beloved by Nazis, and who has called them "very fine people."

Those dead should not have died in vain. To quote Lincoln at Gettysburg, our nation needs a new birth of freedom. I am beginning to think that the stakes are almost as high now as in 1863.

Keep The Civil War In Memorial Day

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument is rotting while Jefferson Davis' statues gleam across the South

Memorial Day is the one national holiday this country has connected to its most consequential event, the Civil War. You wouldn't know that, however, since it has been turned into a day to kick off summer, or has been co-opted as a day to express loyalty to veterans and the military. I don't want to be the pedant who has to say this, but I will: Memorial Day has NOTHING to do with veterans or people currently serving in the armed forces. It is a day to honor the dead of America's wars.

The Civil War, which took the lives of 2% of the entire country's population, required some kind of way to make sense of such immense loss. Already right after the war in May of 1865 freedmen and freedwomen in Charleston, South Carolina, honored the Union dead as a way to acknowledge the sacrifice that they had made for their freedom. While Memorial Day would not exist in an official capacity until 1868, the early, unofficial celebrations like the one in Charlestown demonstrated the desire to commemorate the dead.

It is time that we do more to acknowledge the memory of the Civil War from the viewpoint of the Union. While I whole-heartedly support the removal of Confederate monuments, that necessary work does not build up a positive counter-narrative. The Civil War monuments in the North have languished. Just go check out the graffitied and decrepit Soldiers and Sailors Monument in the Upper West Side of New York. That needs to change.

We need to remember the immense sacrifice necessary to end slavery and reunite the country. We need to remember the heroic deeds of slaves, who were the primary actors in the story of their emancipation. We need to stop seeing the Civil War through the frame of "brother against brother" and (even worse) "tragedy." And I think we should also use this day also to remember Reconstruction, and those who perished trying to improve the lives of African Americans. We need to remember that much struggle still needs to happen.

I think Lincoln's words in Gettysburg are still unequaled, and should be the basis of our commemorations on Memorial Day.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Why Memorial Day Has Lost Its Meaning

This Memorial Day I have noticed the culmination of a recent trend whereby the holiday has ceased to be a day for memorialization.  No, I am not scolding folks who have barbecues and ride their jet skis today, but rather the transformation of a holiday intended to mourn to the dead into a day to fetishize the American military.  For example, I am currently watching the Cubs-White Sox game, where both teams are wearing uniforms that incorporate military camouflage.  If they were truly into the spirit of the day, they would be wearing black armbands.  On Facebook and Twitter, all kinds of people are praising the veterans in their families and the armed forces in general, not those felled by bullets, lost at sea, or blown to bits by artillery shells.

That's all well and good for Veteran's Day, but is not consistent with the true meaning of Memorial Day.  It is a holiday with its origins in the aftermath of the Civil War, a war that killed over 600,000 people, about two percent of the American population at the time.  Such a war today would leave six million dead, a number that seems beyond comprehension.  Memorial Day is a day for the dead, not for the living, yet that meaning seems utterly lost.

The reasons are awfully clear.  Death is the ultimate cost of war, and in our nation's seemingly never-ending War on Terror, the powers that be would rather not have the public contemplate the human consequences of maintaing the American empire.  Instead, they would have us issue forth empty gestures of praise for the men and women in uniform, all while they continue to die and be maimed on distance battlefields for little evident purpose.  Case in point, plenty of people will fill their Facebook feeds with pious words for veterans, but don't seem to know or care about the appalling negligence returning soldiers have endured from the VA.  Those folks will keep putting the yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and put the reality of war and its consequences out of their mind.  Our politicians will outdo themselves with flattery for soldiers, then keep sending them to die for a mistake.

Next year, I hope we can embrace the true meaning of Memorial Day, and think long and hard about whether the ultimate sacrifices that we offer so much lip service to were really and truly worth it.