What does Memorial Day mean?
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Image from website of the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance.
Last year on Memorial Day, I posted the following piece on the topic. I agree with the posting as much today as last year.
Intervening since the 2007 Memorial Day was my father’s fiftieth West Point reunion yesterday, which I attended with my wife and boy. Unlike the forty-fifth reunion, this time I was checked for my identification twice, and told (not asked) to pop open my trunk; were I there for any other reason, I would have opted to leave rather than to experience such an invasion of my privacy.
In one of the buildings, I saw a poster with Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, proclaiming something along the lines of: "We don’t just teach military history here , but have taught many who have made such history." I hope no pride was intended here about Robert E. Lee.
Around one hundred of my father’s over five hundred classmates have died; some through their military assignments — numerous went to Vietnam, for instance – and others not. Without exception, my father’s classmates have seemed to be decent people. However, that does not diminish my following views:
Today is Memorial Day, which is a holiday for memorializing America’s soldiers who died in wars. However, the bigger focus of the holiday seems to be long weekend vacations, parades, and retail sales.
I have said plenty about the military. Mainly, I believe the United States needs an effective military. However, I also believe that the military-industrial-government complex is dangerously overgrown; that the United States has been too trigger-happy with the military and that effective diplomacy needs to be given more opportunity; and that violence begets violence, and, even though I am…