Memorial Day 2020: Later that same day

"Now, I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."--George C. Scott Patton

We do not commemorate the dead on Memorial Day because they died for us, or for this country.  We commemorate them because they are dead.

We've lost almost entirely the idea that the dead are dead, and that in death they deserve some regard. We prefer to remember them for what they did "for us."  It is much more comfortable for us to do that, than to think about death.  But this day is "Memorial Day," and it is a day of commemoration.  It is not about us and what we have thanks to them.  We have freedom thanks to us.  We have the dead to remember, to commemorate, because they are the silent majority.  They are dead; we are alive.  We should not forget them.

Commemoration, after all, is for the living.  The dead are beyond honoring, beyond receiving our thanks, beyond accepting our accolades.  Funerals are not for the dead; neither are commemorations.  They are meant to comfort us, or to make us better people, more mindful of the others on this planet, in this country, in our history.  The decoration of graves in the South that was the root of Memorial Day today was to acknowledge the losses, to not let the dead become anonymous, to recognize pain.  Families decorated graves, communities remembered those who were gone, mystic chords of union were affirmed.  Not because the deaths did those communities any good, or transformed the famlies of the soldiers into keepers of our freedom, their sons placed willingly on the national altar to appease the gods of human desire.  To commemorate was to recognize a loss that made us all human:  grey and blue, Confederate and Union, South as well as North.  It was to say "We have suffered a tremendous grief, and we should remember, and we should say so, and we should recover some measure of humanity from this horror."

That is what Memorial Day is for.  Put away the jingoism and the patriotism and the empty gratitude for our "freedom".  Never again think to praise "the land of the free because of the brave."  They did not die for some metaphysical purpose.  They died because people still study war.  We should not be proud of their deaths, take value from their deaths, thank them for being a sacrifice instead of us.  War does not pick who dies.  War does not establish merit for the survivors.  We should not commemorate war.

We should commemorate those who are dead, because they are dead.  Because they shouldn't have died, but we established conditions that made war inevitable, and made soldiers inevitable, and war and soldiers make death inevitable.

We should commemorate them.  And we should be humble in our sorrow, at the world we have created, and we have survived in, while they did not.  Who is to say we deserve it?

On this day, of all days, let us not even hint that we do.