I thought about posting this on Memorial Day itself, but something about it didn’t sit quite right with me.
Memorial Day didn’t seem like the time for my opinion, even if it was about how I thought sacrifice should be honored.
I didn’t want to say or post anything that had even the slightest potential to divide or distract from what the day was actually about.
But the more I thought about what this weekend really means, the more conviction I felt to say something.
Sometimes I wish Memorial Day was on a Monday in the winter, when it’s 50 degrees in Florida and 12 degrees everywhere else, so we were more compelled to feel its full meaning. Kicking off the summer with it, and making it the de facto beach, boat and barbecue weekend can feel strange and inappropriate (even though I admittedly and enthusiastically partake). It can feel impossible to treat the day with the solemnity it deserves, knowing a widow is probably sobbing in front of a tombstone while you’re on your third hot dog and 5th drink at 2pm.
But I also don’t know that we have to be in visible grief from sun up to sun down every day of the weekend to understand what was done for us, or think more seriously about the service members and families we put in that position.
I love our troops, and if I’m remembering correctly, I think I always have.
My teenage years are a blur at my big age, but even at my peak libtardation, I don’t think I ever looked at the military like they were a terrorist tool of a settler colonialist state, or whatever the current year word salad the communists are using to describe it.
I’m not naive enough about human nature to believe that everyone that’s ever enlisted is some beacon of morality, is driven by selflessness and patriotism, or that service shields anyone from criticism.
But generally speaking, I have a unique respect and reverence for our military that has remained constant even if my understanding of the wars themselves and what got us into them has dramatically changed.
I never wanted to believe that 9/11 was anything other than what we’d been told it was.
But after a certain number of well-reasoned, thoroughly sourced and articulate deconstructions of the official narrative, I had no choice but to abandon it.
And I feel that way about most of the wars we’ve been involved in recently.
The circles in the venn diagrams of why we actually went into them and why we were told we did very rarely overlap, and when they do, just barely.
But my support for the military has persisted in spite of it all, because new information never changed the courage they exhibited in retrospect.
I want to be mindful of how I express this, because I know a major driver of military suicide is when they feel like what they endured and sacrificed was for nothing.
I think the vast majority of Americans are misled and deceived by our so-called “leaders.”
But if you tell someone there’s a 5-year-old in a burning building, but it turns out to have been a vertically challenged arsonist, the person that ran towards the fire is no less of a hero because they were lied to.
After 20 years in the Middle East, we never found Weapons of Mass Destruction.
We left in one of the most chaotic and humiliating withdrawals in our history, arguably with more questions than we started with.
But my appreciation for the men and women willing to drop everything after September 11th remained the same.
As America watched the second plane fly into the Twin Towers and it became clear that we were under attack, we felt a fear and despair that was alien to most of us. But we also felt the righteous rage and resilience that made us who we are. And our military was the best example of it.
They weren’t drafted or coerced. They went on their own free will, in record numbers, laying their lives on the line to protect the United States of America from a threat that seemed imminent, evil and unlike anything most of us had ever experienced.
And too many of them paid the ultimate price. Too many of them left behind children, spouses, parents, siblings and friends. Too many of them had their lives cut short violently and tragically, without being able to say goodbye to the people they loved most, doing what they thought was right.
And if this day actually means something to you – more than a compulsory post on social media or a soulless statement slapped together by an AI chatbot – I would implore you to reconsider what you’re willing to send Americans to die for and why.
Valor is a limited resource, and it seems to be dwindling by the day. If we want a fighting force we can actually be proud of, we have to stop treating the men and women that actually embody it like they’re expendable.
Most Americans (including myself) have never had to live through a war in a meaningful way.
It feels like something we watch unfold on screens and at gas pumps instead of something we have to deal with firsthand.
We aren’t living in constant anxiety, aware of every explosive that detonates, and while we feel the residual effects of war as our dollars get us less and global stability seems more and more fragile, our day-to-day lives don’t feel intricately intertwined with the Pentagon.
Most of us have the luxury of forgetting what’s going on.
But some of us aren’t so lucky.
For our service members and their families, war isn’t something that they can escape by putting their phones down, turning off their televisions, or biking instead of driving. They’re living it at every moment, knowing that at any moment their lives could change forever.
Soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen killed in combat aren’t faceless numbers, abstractions or disposable pawns, even if that’s the way our government, lobbyists or certain political factions treat them.
They are individuals, made in the image of God, that were once held as babies, with dreams that were never realized, that will be mourned long after the dust settles and Washington has moved on.
If we believe what we say about them – that we’re the home of the free because of the brave, and that all gave some but some gave all – we owe them and their families much more hesitance and apprehension about what causes we’re willing to pay for in their blood.
what do you think?