Memorial Day: A Rejection of Peacenik Foolishness

Memorial Day puts the lie to the nonsense that violence never solves anything.

Those rows of white tombstones decorated with little flags are the reason Americans don’t walk downtown, past the ruins where the synagogue once stood, to grab a schnitzel und ein bier from that little imbiss next to der bahnhof. They are why there isn’t a smoking pit in the heart of Los Angeles where the Library Tower used to be.

Violence never solves anything, war is not the answer, arms are for hugging…. It’s hard to believe that there are adults out there that actually buy into such foolishness.

Memorial Day is about men and women who didn’t orient their lives to the dictates of poorly thought-through bumper sticker clichés that belong on the rear of some NPR-listening public school administrator’s Prius. It’s about men and women who understood that sometimes doing the right thing means doing the hardest thing.

Violence can solve things. Hitler – solved. Tojo – solved. Saddam – solved. Sometimes it takes time: Bin Laden – solution pending. But all the earnest teach-ins and doofy drum circles in the world haven’t kept one Darfurian from being killed by the janjaweed Islamist militia. The only thing that will ever do that is a division of Marines; until the activists call for the Devil Dogs to go in, they’re just posing.

Frequently, war is the answer. With the sorry state of history education in America, it’s easy to see how some people could embrace the delusion that there is nothing worth fighting for. But the Nazi concentration camps didn’t liberate themselves. Bosnia and Kosovo’s ethnic cleansing didn’t end because Milosevic got a pretty please with sugar on top. And the Taliban aren’t about to see the light and stop throwing acid in schoolgirl’s faces for the crime of wanting to learn to read.

War and violence aren’t the only answers – I worked in civil affairs on one deployment and we made a huge difference without firing a shot. Sometimes American soldiers’ arms are for hugging – I’ve seen that too – but before you can build a peace you have to enforce security. That means a grunt standing watch, M4 in hand, with a pilot in an F-15 overhead and a destroyer off-shore.

What is ironic is that Hollywood, for all its superficial peacenik posing, gets it. The messages of two of the biggest movies out right now, Star Trek and Terminator Salvation, are that there are things worth fighting for and dying for. Sadly, Hollywood feels the need to cloak that truth in the guise of battles against pointy-eared space aliens and death-dealing cyborgs that look like our governor.

Hollywood, just lose the metaphors. It would be nice to see a straight-up movie about the sacrifices of American soldiers in the War on Terror that doesn’t replace jihadi psychos with Romulans or SkyNet.

Memorial Day is the perfect occasion to embrace the truth. Do not listen to those who say that it is just another day off where people do nothing but drink beer and eat barbecue with their buddies. That’s a strawman offered up by the bumper sticker set because they fear Memorial Day’s true meaning.

At the risk of being presumptuous, those who gave their lives for our country would want you to gather your buddies and drink beers and eat barbecue (Resolved: Barbecued beef ribs are superior in every way to pork ribs. Discuss.). I plan to. There is a reason that on Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff only until noon, when it is raised to the top of the pole again. It symbolizes that we honor our dead by going forward with our lives.

Honor our fallen by remembering them, and just as importantly, what they did. We can do that best by confronting the nonsense that surrounds us by telling the stories of these brave American men and women. When little Jimmy comes home confused because the teacher said that America is irremediably racist, you tell him about the Union soldiers who fell at Gettysburg. When your daughter tells you her textbook says that World War II was really instigated by war profiteers, pop in the disc of the Band of Brothers episode where Easy Company stumbles onto a Nazi death camp. When your son asks what that bumper sticker saying “End the War” means, you tell him about what the cops and firefighters had to do on 9/11. Let the truth be your tribute.