May 29, 2007
Wishful Thinking
I am a naval aviator veteran of WW II, and I’m lucky that I never got shot at (but once when we forgot to turn on our bomber’s IFF system), and that I never shot at anybody else. I never joined the American Legion or the VFW when it was all over. I’m an also-ran in Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation. The only veterans’ parades I ever marched in were playing trumpet in my high school bands for WW I vets. I enjoyed the full and considerable benefits of the GI Bill, and I’m mighty grateful for that.
I just recently learned that Memorial Day got started in the South as a thanksgiving for Yankee soldiers who died to end slavery. I’ve no brief with Memorial Day. I think it’s a splendid idea, we displayed our flag, but I do not otherwise especially celebrate it.
The lives given to make it possible are legion and precious and altogether worth celebrating, but the wars that took them are not. I wish we would not call the monuments “war memorials,” but “peace memorials,” instead.
I’m reminded every evening on the news that we haven’t really learned much about Memorial Day and the irony that we don’t really “support our troops.” I wish we would not define peace in terms of war, but war in terms of peace. I wish we would not define peace as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice, distributive justice, not retributive justice.
And I’m not so naive not to know it will take a lot more than wishful thinking to make all this so.
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