Memorial Day
I have very mixed feelings this Memorial Day. My family has made no plans for BBQ’s and we will not be attending any heroes parades. We are one of the less than one percent of the U.S. population with a member who served in the Iraq Occupation. My son is out of the service now, and it has been two years since he was in Balad, Iraq, so I have a different perspective than most when we talk of honoring the fallen.
I am also the wife of a Viet Nam vet who has been experiencing intense PTSD for a large part of our marriage, so I know what it’s like to survive those horrors, and re-live them with regularity.
A buzz-phrase often attached to “Suport our troops” is often along the lines ”who gave their lives for us… to protect our freedoms.” That may have been true during WWII, but it was hardly true during Korea or Viet Nam. Today, it is the furtherst thing from the truth. We are in this Occupation because of the short-sightedness of Karl Rove, who wanted to assure President Bush’s re-election by making him a war-time president. He knew historically, war-time Presidents have never been defeated, so in a wag-the-dog strategy, he created a war, based on false pretenses, to give President Bush the edge he needed. A little cheating went a long way as well.
Now we are in a conflict with no end in sight, that drains our coffers and fills our coffins, and fractures the souls of countless American families (still under 1 percent), with a ripple effect no one wants to acknowledge is crippling even more working-class Americans.
I’m all for celebrating the lives of those who fought the good fight, but I cannot rationalize lost and wasted lives at the behest of a President who should have known better, but couldn’t care less.
As a political activist, for me, everyday is Memorial Day, and it is no reason to celebrate. Whether it is CNN’s Fallen Heroes list, or George Stephanopolous’ This Week’s “In Memoriam,” everytime I see a name of a soldier killed in battle, I check the age and melancholy sweeps over me. Never enough to stop me in my tracks, but just enough to make me think: 25, I wonder if he went to college? 42, must have been a lifer — or was he in the National Guard and missed his daughter’s graduation?
I like BBQ’s and family gatherings, but to do so while more of our children, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers and friends continue to be killed in the name of making a President re-electable is a heartless act I can no longer do.
Maybe next year.