Memorial Day Fatigue

I have just returned from the Province III meeting in Martinsburg, West Virginia--a regional caucus for the Episcopal Church. Partly out of respect for the theme, "Ministering on the Home front" (that's why I was there), we made note of those who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan during the prior week. Province III should be admired for emphasizing such an important aspect of national life.

Yet that special prayer effort conveyed something worrisome and it looms over Memorial Day. Don't get me wrong the good people in charge of the liturgy were earnest enough but we all participate in a cultural absentmindedness about this conflict. It causes us to clutch and make such death acknowledgements into an exceptional occasion.

Is there an unsaid inner reckoning when comparing the great wars with these lesser conflicts? Weren't the ideals the same now as for World War II? Were these near-time deaths less nobly sacrificed? You'd think so given the casual way we treat the current tally. One wonders--in the midst of such societal uncertainty-- why we have any business sending anyone to war.

In his book, "The Assassin's Gate, America in Iraq," George Packer writes of an America that thinks of itself as the model for the world and emblematic of this is the decisive victory over the former Soviet Union through such values as "freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." Packer continues, "America was right by virtue of being America."

Crassly and basically, then, it is this insistence on our ideals--projected by military might--which yields this weekly crop of death. Believe it or not that's not the real outrage because however fascinated our leaders are with technological firepower we still enlist innocent blood to stand in the ranks, man the barricades, and, if need be pull the triggers. No, the tragedy is that despite truly heroic service the newest names read on Memorial Day are ones who have lost contact with the country they served. Their nation has abandoned them; there will be more thought of going to the mall than of the sacrifices in Iraq this weekend.

Memorial Days, now, are not only testimonies to their brave service they have become statements that we were not vigilant and resourceful enough in the export of our values and thus avoid putting them in harm's way in the first place. +gep