Washington, DC, USA. Holding true to the true meaning of Memorial Day is painfully easy for some and easily difficult for many others. Our nation most usually divides over our wars, slowly unifies in our respect for the dead, then far too often merely forgets until current events jar us away from our barbeques. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with any particular war or not. Every one of us should respect the sacrifice made by our military men and women who die in service. 

 

Words often fail those who stood aside from the actual horrors of combat as they stop to ponder the sacrifices of individual combatants known and unknown.

 

By many accounts, liberated slaves and white abolitionists first observed what was then called a decoration day at a race track in Charleston. It had been a Confederate prison camp and mass grave for Union soldiers who died in captivity. Patriotic singing and a picnic followed a parade with thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers.

 

Other events converged after World War I into the current Memorial Day. The day is to acknowledge and remember the sacrifice of all soldiers who died bravely and honorably for all our causes whatever we may in hindsight believe is their good or bad justification. We understand the sacrifice of our soldiers as a selfless contribution to the essential meaning of our nation.

 

Individual soldiers and their particular combat can vanish in the summaries of great and extensive battles. Those of us who clawed our way past death know how the battlefield narrows from grand political manifesta to the jeopardy faced by beloved comrades in arms.

 

Grand structures defeat our best intentions by evoking a pity for the dead that does not properly express the respect we feel for their sacrifice. But Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a veteran of Civil War combat, offered that enlarging the individual soldier’s view can give meaning to the sacrifice offered by all and accepted of some.

 

Those who died often did not reap the full bounty of liberty in their lives.

 

They were deemed at various times as out of alignment with majority views, unacceptable as Americans: black, female, foreign-born, gay, HBS, homosexual, lesbian, religious, transsexual, transgendered — all in all, deviant from fashion. Some weren’t even Americans.

 

They all joined in because they loved us, because they cared, depositing their example for future generations.

 

Leveled out now in graveyards, the dead of our ancestry bivouac at the edge of our vision. They are the dead in fellowship, reminding us that we must not love a life that excludes liberty. 

 

 

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