To those we are "remembering" today: if you died truly believing that you were helping the rest of us, what can i do but thank you, mourn you, and wish you comfort in the next life. But I do not believe you were helping us, and I wish you were still here among us. for those who were truly heroic, i thank you for your heroism. for those who were there b/c economics made it appear your best survival option, i mourn you as well. i believe you were all victims of a government and of an economic system that has betrayal of its citizens built into it. My brother died years ago, probably as a result of war: he had been in an area of vietnam sprayed with agent orange. i have no need to try and remember him today: i remember him and mourn him every day of my life. But i will not confine my memory or my grief to american military victims. i do not believe any one human life is intrinsically more valuable than any other, and so remember and mourn also the soldiers of the countries we have fought, who died probably in the same convictions that spur american soldiers to die. and i also remember and mourn the civilian victims of all our wars, killed by soldiers, by war-caused famine, by all the other horrors that war brings with it. If we are to dedicate a day to memorialize our war dead, let it be not through depersonalizing sentimentality, but with real grief for the tragedy of their deaths, whoever they are, whatever they did.
2 comments:
Amen.
Karen, you are kinder expressing such thoughts than I. But I have the same ones . . . only more so. I just posted a blog entry about a Marine who wrote about his wish not to be thanked for his service. All in the same vein.
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