We celebrate our fallen dead with barbecues and sales here in the United States. Sometimes there are parades and ceremonies, but often it’s just chicken, burgers, and the best prices of the year.It may be appropriate, though, that our observance marks what’s valuable to us as a nation. Gathering to eat with family and friends–that’s well and good; the endless pressure of consumerism–maybe not so much.
Is this what those who died for our country gave their lives for? Shouldn’t it have been for higher ideals? Freedom, democracy, the overthrowing of oppressors?
Maybe that is what they died for and we have simply forgotten. Maybe freedom includes the right to shop and barbecue. Or perhaps we balk at thinking about the bigger concepts, about what freedom and democracy really mean, about how each term has multiple, complex meanings. What looks like freedom to one person could be oppression to another. Were all our wars just? Were all our actions in them justified? Did our fallen die in vain?
No matter the answers, though, we should still honor today all those who died. Whatever the reasons, they sacrificed themselves, and such an offering should not go unnoticed. There are those we knew personally and whose loss is most keenly felt; there are also hosts of others, unknown by us and some unknown by any, whose loss we can never fully sense or measure. Sorting out the whys and wherefores can wait as we simply mourn.
Tomorrow, though, let us renew our dedication to promoting peace, so that no child again knows the loss of a parent in war, and no parent that of a child. This will require greater attention to the tricky concepts of freedom and oppression; to the small inequalities that can fester and lead to bigger conflicts; and to thoughtful, reasoned, informed diplomacy. Is that possible in this era? I have my doubts, but I also know that in order to truly honor our dead, we have to try.