Memorial Day is Monday. It
will be different than any other
year. Many of us feel that we have been trapped in a never ending three-day weekend for more than two months. Although many states are cautiously—or
flagrantly incautiously—beginning to
reopen most of the usual
celebrations—parades and cemetery ceremonies have been canceled,
even the decoration of soldiers’ graves with American Flags by the Boy Scouts. And in many places,
including Illinois, home barbeques are supposed to be limited to 10 or so people who must
observe social distancing.
Most
years for a lot of folks it’s just the beginning of a long weekend and the start of summer. And that’s ok. You can go elsewhere to be scolded for
forgetting the sacrifices of the war dead. Just about every newspaper in the country will serve up an editorial on the subject plus letters from the VFW. But a lot of us do hold
it in our hearts for very compelling and complex reasons.
Those
of us who will go church services Sunday will hear various reflections on the meaning.
My
Unitarian Universalists, who tend to
be, on the whole, anti-war folks,
often find themselves conflicted. How do we honor the final sacrifices of warriors
without necessarily honoring or glorifying
war itself? How can we express sincere love
of country while acknowledging its
frequent errors and injustice?
Can we place our hands over our hearts
and bow our heads as a distant Taps is blown and a flag is lowered to half-staff without feeling hypocritical? Can we twist a Poppy
around a button without embracing
the jingoism of some veterans’ organizations? It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who reminded us
that “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing
ideas at the same time and continue to function.” As for me, I choose to lay my symbolic wreath on the memorials to departed souls.
The
question for some might be which souls. Do some get left out?
The bombing of civilians at Guernica during the Spanish Revolution shocked the world but became the model of modern war. |
Remembrance
of the war dead is all well and good.
But, especially in modern wars,
soldiers, sailors, and airmen are
only a fraction of the victims. Civilians, both those who just got in the way—collateral damage in the cold,
efficient jargon of the military—and those murdered as a matter of strategy
and policy dwarf the dead in uniforms.
Despite
international treaties and high minded and high
flown declarations of noble intent
by governments, insurgents, and other involved
factions, the accepted dogma of
modern warfare is that civilian deaths, the more brutal and indiscriminate
the better, will “demoralize” the enemy and “sap them of the
will to resist.”
This
is utter hogwash. It has never been the case. Civilian deaths simply inflame the passions of the targeted
peoples, raise their determination
to both resist—and if possible wreck vengeance. It also sets up generational resentments and enmities
that threaten to rekindle conflicts
again and again.
Ask
the “indomitable” people of London. Or for that matter the Germans under Allied carpet
bombing or the Japanese whose wood
and paper cities flashed over in fire
storms even before we dropped atomic
weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Although
the Axis Powers were eventually overwhelmed by superior military and industrial
capacity, the war was not shortened
by even one day by demoralization due to civilian deaths. Even in the case of the Atomic bomb drops—which were widely viewed as forcing the Empire of Japan to surrender before a hugely costly invasion of the Home
Islands—it was not the vaporization
of the population of two cities that caused the ultimate surrender, but the calculation
of the General Staff that the
military would be rendered useless
by atomic attacks on their forces and equipment.
Modern
terrorism is the war of the weak against the strong. And it assumes that enough mayhem will break the will of whatever
presumed oppressor. But there is no real
difference between leaving a bomb in a
mailbox and flattening a neighborhood with drones. It is simply a
matter of scale and technological sophistication.
All modern war is, in essence, terrorism.
Israeli bombing of densely populated Gaza is terrorism on a grand scale in retaliation for the primitive terrorism of home made and largely ineffective rockets. |
In
the mid 1990’s I was asked to write a poem for a Memorial Day Sunday service at
the Congregational Unitarian Church in
Woodstock. I was asked to write something that
memorialized ALL of the war dead. Using the headlines of the day—a time when our nation was supposedly at peace—I
came up with In the Century of Death.
A "grainy photo on page six of a million tires burning..." |
In the Century of Death
They
are like that grainy photo on page six
of a million tires burning somewhere in New Jersey.
We shake our heads
and click our tongues
with disapproval and dismay,
reflect a split second
before we turn the page
and hurry on to check out
Ann Landers,
the crossword puzzle,
National League standings
or the price of gold in London.
of a million tires burning somewhere in New Jersey.
We shake our heads
and click our tongues
with disapproval and dismay,
reflect a split second
before we turn the page
and hurry on to check out
Ann Landers,
the crossword puzzle,
National League standings
or the price of gold in London.
They
are the dead,
an uncounted century
of waste and carnage,
stacked as carelessly and deep
as those tires,
alike the cast off refuse
of industrial efficiency.
an uncounted century
of waste and carnage,
stacked as carelessly and deep
as those tires,
alike the cast off refuse
of industrial efficiency.
And like
those tires they earn
a moment of our passing pity
in the rush of our busy lives
between work and soccer practice,
haircut and committee meeting.
a moment of our passing pity
in the rush of our busy lives
between work and soccer practice,
haircut and committee meeting.
Unless
by accident we are near
and a pungent change of wind
stings our noses and eyes with acrid smoke
and oily ash drifts
onto our own innocent cheeks.
and a pungent change of wind
stings our noses and eyes with acrid smoke
and oily ash drifts
onto our own innocent cheeks.
—Patrick
Murfin
Note: This poem appeared in my Skinner
House Meditation Manual, We Build
Temples in the Heart, published in 2004 in Boston.
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