Gerard van der Leun has a touching essay on Memorial Day. Well worth a read as those who once marched on the parades that were part of this day have now gone to join those who did not return from the battle.
And for us … we take the day off. And our children go to the beach or plan cookouts because that’s what Memorial Day means to people who move farther and farther away in time from the events that made this day.
But this time is just a recess from reality; the peace of little wars in which a handful die instead of the mass deaths that made this a day of remembrance. But that terror will come again, made possible by those for whom Memorial Day is designed for “fashionable denigration.”
This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a "tragic" exception that need not have happened and will -- most likely -- never happen again.
That, at least, is the mind set that I assume when I read how the "War on Terror" is but a bumper strip. In a way, that's preferable to the the mind set that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this "explanation" is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.
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