We do not think enough in the U.S. about the meaning behind our holidays. We also don’t think enough about the larger cultural implications of how we mark or celebrate those holidays.
Christmas, as a Christian holy day, is problematic for a country that has codified into its DNA the separation of church and state. We spend little time thinking about the fact that Columbus didn’t actually discover America, nor did he even reach what we think of as the U.S. on his first voyage. Our Independence from the British isn’t as simple as red, white, and blue bunting, hot dogs, and fourth of July parade would have us believe. These things worry me less than the disturbing trend, going on a decade old now, to make every holiday and every sporting event honor “our veterans and those currently serving in the military” as the announcer so intoned at a recent major league baseball game I attended.
The original marking of “Decoration Day” began sometime in the 1860s as towns, both Northern and Southern, needed a day to honor their dead in a time when dying in battle and so far from home wasn’t seen as honorable but as undignified and disrespectful to the life that came before it says historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust in her new book The Republic of Suffering. Read an excerpt as published in “Parade” on Sunday, May 26, 2013.
In that same issue of “Parade” Faust responds to questions about the origins of Memorial Day saying,
…so a day for memorial was meant to restore the dignity of those lives, underscore the contributions that had been made, and in some way ratify how important the courage and sacrifice had been. It was an important part of the nation’s mourning.
“How important the courage and sacrifice had been” becomes an interesting question when you’re talking not about a war that divided brother from brother, sister from cousin, and took the lives of three quarters of a million people, 2.5% of the entire country’s population at the time. It becomes a quandary when you’re talking about a war in which the stakes are esoteric foreign policy concepts or a war where the moral justification is built on lies, damn lies, and mendacity.
How do you honor the sacrifice of those if the choice had been yours would not have been asked to sacrifice at all? It’s a hard question for which I have no answer.
What I do know is that everything in my country’s culture can not be about that military orientation. Why are we thanking our veterans and active duty service members at every major sporting event? Why, twelve years along, are we still subjected to God Bless America every time we turn around? Why can we not grasp the idea that if we really thought about our war machine we might use it more sparingly and with better sense?
Argue all you like about how the military may be the only viable career for a poor kid, the one shot at gainful employment and maybe a college degree for so many, but you’ll be arguing systemic semantics in the face of the fact that the U.S. military has for the bulk of my lifetime been an all volunteer force. It is a job. It’s a nasty, dirty, ugly, sometimes soul crushing, and sometimes unfortunately necessary job, but it is a job freely chosen by those who do it.
Are we doing to start having a moment of silence at every sporting even for the garbage men, without whom modern cities would resemble a Victorian chamber pot in under 30 days? What about the nurses and nurses aides to deal every day with the sick and the dying, often providing comfort when none is otherwise available? Firemen, who in the face of all logic run toward the burning building instead of away from it? Teachers, who are asked to do so much more than teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?
Where does it end? Why can’t we value people for their actual contributions instead of undervaluing so many and over valuing some?
My friend Joe, who is a veteran and a very smart guy, likes to remind people on Memorial Day you should honor a veteran who can not appreciate your respect in return and on Veterans’ Day you should honor one who can.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the U.S. and I’m willing to bet 90% of the people who bother to mark the day as anything more than a long weekend or a Monday off work don’t have the faintest clue about the holiday’s origins. The sad and dangerous part is these are the same people who will stand for God Bless America, who will get teary eyed when asked to take a moment of silence to honor our veterans and active duty service members.
They will do it unthinkingly which is an even graver error than having to do it at all.
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