Memorial Day 2020
Photo by Justin Casey on Unsplash
Today America celebrates Memorial Day, a day set aside to recall those who served in this nation’s wars and gave, as Abraham Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, “the last full measure of devotion”.
In a normal year, there would be parades down main streets throughout the US, backyards would be full of people waiting at grills for the next round of hamburgers or hot dogs, and people would gather at memorial parks and cemeteries to plant small flags and pray. This year, in the midst of a pandemic, the celebrations will be more muted, less public. Crowds will not gather along flag-draped streets as marching bands march past. The barbeques and gatherings will be smaller, maybe limited to just immediate family. Yet while this will make for a very different Memorial Day, perhaps it will also provide a quiet opportunity to focus on the reason for the day.
The holiday that would become Memorial Day was established in the wake of the trauma of the Civil War. To honor the many fallen soldiers of that war, Major General John A. Logan, the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, declared May 30, 1868 to be Decoration Day. People gathered at Arlington National Cemetery, only recently dedicated as a military cemetery, and decorated the graves of the Civil War dead with flowers. By the end of the nineteenth century, similar ceremonies were being held throughout the nation on each May 30. Memorial Day became an official federal holiday in 1971, when it was also set each year on the last Monday in May.
On Memorial Day, we recall all those who fell in battle for our country. We know that not all of our wars were fought for equally noble reasons. Our actions have not always lived up to our lofty rhetoric, to our ideals. But those who fell answered our nation’s call in its time of need, and lost their lives in service to a greater purpose. We should not attribute to the dead the ends of the wars in which they fought.
Instead, and especially today, we should recall the sacrifice. The sacrifice made by those who perished, certainly; but also by their parents; by spouses or partners; by brothers and sisters; by children; and by friends. The ultimate sacrifice, where there is no tomorrow, where the future is lost. Where the normal course of things reverses, and the young die, to be buried by the old.
In a nation that so cherishes freedom and individuality, there is perhaps no rite more important than the honor of sacrifice for others. We speak easily of our rights, of our demands that they be respected. Sacrifice is quieter. Some are great; but most are small, barely noticed by others. We struggle with little recognition to make a living, provide for our families, raise children, help those in need, make a difference.
I think much of the anger we see in response to measures intended to contain the pandemic comes not from a misplaced sense of freedom, but from a fear that our small sacrifices will be lost without purpose. That all we have done to build a business, to develop a trade, to make a home, to make meaning of our lives, will vanish in an economic crisis over which we have no power. We don’t want to hurt others, but we also don’t want charity, whether from government or elsewhere; we just want our sacrifices, made over the course of our lifetimes, to have meaning.
The pain of sacrifice lies, however, in what is lost. Those who fell in our nation’s wars had futures that came to naught on a muddy battlefield, in a burning ship, in an airplane shot from the skies. All that their parents had sacrificed for them was lost at the same time. As were all of those individual sacrifices made prior to that fated day. When we mourn, we mourn the lost future, but also the lost meaning of all of those sacrifices. Sometimes, we can assuage the pain with the recognition that their death was not in vain, that the fallen died for a purpose. Other times, that justification may be harder to make. But on Memorial Day, we honor the sacrifice nonetheless, for the loss is no less poignant whatever the cause may be.
As the cliché goes, freedom is not free. Each generation must pay its price anew. We should recall the sacrifices by those who came before us, who ensured that we would have the opportunity to carry on a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal. We should also recognize that not all enemies carry guns, that sacrifice, both large and small, is the price we must pay just as did prior generations.
May this year’s Memorial Day serve as a day to honor those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we may live, and to help us recommit ourselves to do the tasks we must to protect our neighbors and the strangers among us, and to build a better nation for those yet to come.