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| Soldiers National Monument at the center of Gettysburg National Cemetery. Credit: Photo: Henryhartley at en.wikipedia Statue: Randolph Rogers (1825-1892) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
As a child, the idea of remembering
fallen veterans as individuals never really occurred to me. I learned
in school that wars had happened at various points in my country's
history, what those wars meant, and that people had died in them. I
learned that there had been people who believed so strongly in the
principles that their country stood for that they actually went off
to die for them. From there, my family was probably expected to pick
up where the government left off and make those lessons personal.
No one in my family has fought in any
war since World War I. There is this unspoken sentiment among us that
it was supposed to have been The War To End All Wars – so why do we
keep having more of them? I never knew my great-grandfather, but the
impression I get of him is that he never wanted his descendants to
know of war as anything other than a bunch of people marching in
formation and singing funny songs all day. Today, my family's biggest
concern on Memorial Day is that we carry on the tradition of having
hamburgers for dinner. We have never made a habit of visiting
cemeteries on this day in particular; our war dead hail from both
sides of the Civil War, and are scattered all across the South. The
concept of fighting and dying in a war is so foreign to most of us as
to be practically meaningless on a personal level.
So, this was me as a child: I believed
that inanimate objects were quintessentially alive and I could
communicate with them, that the message behind a song could be
dishonored by dancing poorly to it, and that people who died in wars
became impersonal spirits who watched their country from the heavens
to make sure it still upheld the values that they died for. As I grew
older and looked around at my country – specifically at the
narcissism and nonchalance with which we invoke the memories of the
fallen – I came to the conclusion that the spirits must be
displeased. I was the only one who seemed concerned by this, but I
was mired in a culture that was heading steadily in a worse and worse
direction, and I knew that I could not help but be part of the
problem.
As I
became an adult I became aware that things weren't even that simple.
Not all of those fallen veterans were volunteers for their country. A
large portion of them were draftees, mostly from the lower classes,
so that rich old men wouldn't have to fight in the wars they had
started. Some of them were recruits tempted with promises of travel,
academic opportunities, and the promise of steady pay: things they
couldn't count on in civilian life. The promise of being remembered
in death might not pop up in recruitment brochures for the armed
forces, but I'm sure it helps. In every modern country whose military
exercises I have read accounts of, war is simply society's method of
culling the poor.
So
those impersonal spirits of the dead I spoke of before got there not
by fighting for something they believed in, but being forced or
tricked into fighting for their lives. Their deaths were repurposed
by the very people who used them, melting the patchwork of personal
stories and reasons for fighting into a single narrative: they died
honorably, for the principles that this country stands for. When I
think of them I no longer see a throng of guardians staring
disapprovingly at the atrocities our society has committed since
their time. Instead, I see thousands of individual men and women
standing high atop pedestals. If they seem unhappy, it's only because
they are stuck up there forever and can never get down: if anyone
were to actually remember their personal stories, hopes, and dreams
they would fall from their place of honor and into eternal obscurity.
They occupy a place of great honor in our national culture, so long
as we let their deaths be the only thing that matters about them.
There
are a lot of apocryphal stories about how the tradition of Memorial
Day (initially called Decoration Day) began, but the one I prefer is
the one that took place on May 1st
of 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina. On that day, nearly
ten-thousand people – mostly newly-freed former slaves –
landscaped and decorated the burial grounds of almost three hundred
Union soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Confederacy and
buried in unmarked graves. It was described by some as an act that
gave meaning to the Civil War, a so-called “Independence Day of aSecond American Revolution.” I'm sure, however, that no one tending
to the graves that day was under the illusion that those soldiers had
died specifically to free them. What they did that day was give those
nameless soldiers an identity. They publicly called them martyrs –
The Martyrs of the Race Course – in an area of the country
populated by the very people who had killed them. The very existence
and remembrance of these nameless dead flew in the face of the
precious Lost Cause movement – the notion that it was the honor and
chivalry that the Confederacy supposedly embodied that had been their
downfall – which Southern whites embraced in the aftermath of the
war.
Thus,
it seems only appropriate that we should take this day to remember
our nameless martyrs. Whether they be known military men whose deaths
have been appropriated for political ends or innocents who have died
at the hands of their supposed protectors, they are proof that the
stories we tell ourselves about freedom and righteousness are lies.
Today should be about reclaiming those identities and remembering the
dead not for how they lost their lives, but for how they lived them.
Go
forth and be kind to each other.
