Greetings to you all on this Memorial Day. It is painful, I know, to observe this day according to its true meaning (and not just as the start of summer) because of the men and women still dying in Iraq and because there is no end in sight. I want to share with you an article called, "Honor the Fallen, Not the War" by James Carroll. Here's how it ends:
This Memorial Day, especially, we yearn to honor the more than 2,700 US soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is the proper way to remember them? Even in condemning what made it necessary, can we not acknowledge the selflessness of their sacrifice? At Troy, soldiers were roused to battle by the promise that their exploits would be sung of far into the future. Is it a betrayal of our soldiers that we no longer want to sing? Does it mean they died "in vain" if we insist that no one else should die?
Perhaps on Memorial Day we can also remember alternative hopes. Not soft-headedness, but tough-minded measures required to build a different world.
What if we invested as much in preventing war as in the fighting of it? (What, say, would the Middle East be if the billions spent in Iraq had funded instead a new Palestinian economy?) Changes in the way we memorialize the past make possible changes in the way we envision the future. But here, too, it is the sacrifice of soldiers that makes possible such change. Indeed, it begins with them. The fallen heroes remind us with their lives that war must stop.
And yet how can Mr. Carroll write "that war must stop?" How can he have any hope that it will? I don't think it will stop. And yet those of us who believe in peace must bear witness to that belief as best we can.
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