More on Memorial Day

I pick up where I left off.

I must confess, Memorial Day is one of those holidays which concern me—not because I object to the premise. Vets and our fallen deserve all the thanks and glory we can give them.

Rather I am concerned because those who most publicly and noisily celebrate (or denigrate) the holiday seem to do so for their own quite narrow ends, with the Vets themselves being left behind somehow in all the sound and fury.

I think this is true for both the political Right and the political Left. I find them both quite equally guilty.

Let me begin with the Left first. People on that side of the public debate tend to us Memorial Day to disparage War in general. ("What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.")

And that is good and fine. I agree. War is a waste, and evil. But, two things: first, in the process of disparaging war sometimes…sometimes… some members of the Left find themselves disparaging those men and women who have fought in themit In their dialogues there is expressed or implied the idea that soldiers are at best fools, and at worse imperialists and brutes, and either way not worth our sympathy or our support.

The second error of the Left is, I think, more humane, more subtle, but more dangerous. It is that War is not only inevitably wrong but easily avoided. They say that any war, any confrontation, can be escaped if only you make Nice-Nice. If only you are willing to negotiate, to seek compromise… if only you are intelligent enough to sidestep the oncoming truck…then bloodshed simply will not happen.

Ah, but there's the rub. That isn't the case. I don't care how intelligent you, how un-aggressive, how reasonable, how "un-testosteronal," how much on the side of the Angels…eventually you will encounter someone who isn't. Eventually, you will meet someone who simply wants to kill you, or harm your children, or enslave you, and nothing you can do will change their mind. Hitler was not going to learn to love Jews. Stalin would not have seen the error of his ways. European imperialists and slave traders were not going to abandon their wealth for Christian principles. Genghis Khan and his successors were not going to become gentle pastoralists in a day. (In case you're interested, the Khans' mostly unprovoked wars seem to have killed so many people that the world actually grew cooler, as the amount of CO2 in the air was reduced. Fewer people breathing, you see. Plus the fact that farmlands were being abandoned to trees and other carbon sinks.)

In such situations, violence is perfectly justified. It may, indeed, be the only moral course of action, if the alternative is the destruction or degradation of those near and dear to you. It may not be wholesale battle, with armies and warships. It may be a quiet assassination rather than a noisy artillery barrage, but it will be violence all the same.

That the Left does not understand this, is …troubling. And it explains much of why it was that on 9-11, even as the dead fell in rubble to the streets of New York, there were many of the Educated and the Elite who could think of nothing more to say than that "We brought it on ourselves."

Many among them are saying it sill.

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The Right…

It is worse than the Left. Far worse.

The Right claims to honor the Fallen. To thank the Vet.

But have how you ever noticed how often there is an ulterior motive in what's said? How often the oh-so-pious platitude is accompanied by other things? By a subtext? By the implication that if you support the Vet, if you stand with her or him, then you must also support future wars?

The logic is bizarre, but you hear it time and time again. It is overt, it is covert, it is whispered or shouted from rooftops…but it is there. If you "stand with the Vets, with our boys (and, oh, yes, girls)," then you must also support the War. Any war. Any war on offer. Any war at any time.

It is all the more remarkable because the same people who say these things are so often (albeit not always, but often) the first to vote the cutbacks in services for vets, or their families…the first to cry boondoggle and pork…the last to notice that the men and women they claim to honor are sick, or homeless, or dying in the street…

There is something horrible about that. Something unforgivable.

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I am appalled by this nation's treatment of its veterans. I am appalled by the numbers—the soaring number of veterans who commit suicide; who suffer from debilitating or deadly diseases that experts pompously announce do not, in fact, exist and therefore do not need to be treated at public expense ("Gulf War Syndrome" was just the first of many); whose lives and families collapse …

I read the other day that there are now more homeless female vets with their children on the street than at any other time in our history.

I find that fact uniquely horrible. There should not be any homeless vets, period. And there should certainly be no homeless mothers who have served in uniform.


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Oh, an aside…regarding my concern for homeless female vets? I'm told by Those Who Know Best and Are Politically Correct that I've just committed an act of "Positive Sexism." It is, they explain, an act of "Micro-Aggression" which "Denies the Empowerment of Others."

I do not care. That any mother should be without a place for her children to rest their heads is intolerable. That the mother in question should also be a vet makes it all the more terrible.

And those Who Know Best? The Politically Correct?

They can jolly well go suck an egg.

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Then there is the current VA crisis.

But, then, perhaps the less said about that the better.

It is too horrible.

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I don't quite know how to end this piece. I've worked at it for a couple of days now. Nothing seems quite right. Nothing seems appropriate.

So, I suppose, I can do no more than default to the same sort of platitudes that I decry in others.

So… like it or not, war exists and always will, regardless of who might be in charge…or how benign that leadership might be. (Even the Second Coming, if you believe in that, is predicated on war.)

And, therefore, like it or not, we will always have among us those who must go to war. Who will die there. Who will suffer and be wounded in body, mind, and soul.

It will be, therefore, always incumbent upon us as a society to respect and care or those who fight for us…to heal their wounds, if possible, and to honor their memories if not.

For us to either proclaim them fools and "imperialists," or to make grand show of our love for them while in fact simply exploiting them for our own political gain, is grotesque.

Grotesque…and dangerous.

For, in time, if we do not support the fallen and the brave, they will begin to ask a very pertinent question.

Two wit, if we are not for them, then why should they be for us?