Johnny has gone for a soldier

Today millions of Americans are off work, ostensibly to pay tribute to the hundreds of thousands of war dead that have died in the name of the good old U.S. of A. Memorial Day should not be confused with Veteran’s Day, which is in November and honors both living and dead military men and women.

Generally speaking I don’t have a problem with honoring both living and dead soldiers, but soldiers aren’t the only casualties of any given war. In the end, however, am I really expected to honor soldiers who are fighting and dying for a cause I don’t agree with? I feel bad that so many have died, and so many more have been injured, but these are deaths and injuries I feel should have been avoided. Should I call these soldiers heroes because they are willing to fight whatever war President Bush wants to wage? Are they heroes, or are they slaves?

Memorial Day was first celebrated as a means of memorializing Civil War dead. The South had the idea first, and the North followed suit. 150 years later, it is hard to blame either side for that war. But it was a war that meant something, a war that was to determine a way of life for the people of America. Should the South have been allowed to secede? Is it a war that should have been avoided? These are answers I do not have. I can say I am glad to have grown up in a single, unified America, but I can’t say how the fates would have played out had the U.S. been divided.

I’m not naïve. I realize that there are wars that must be fought. I’m just not convinced Iraq was one of them. I’ve heard all the justifications, all the pro-war monger statements. I’m still not convinced. Hussein was a bad man, a Hitler, no doubt. But could we have found a better way? In the wake of news of soldiers decimating a group of civilians, of the weird afflictions our soldiers are returning home with, the pain, the nightmares – couldn’t there have been a better way? A better way, instead of having a generation of our best soldiers broken down slowly by the diseases of war. A generation of fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, lost.

On Memorial Day, I shall remember the war dead. The soldiers, the civilians. The families of both who are forever bereaved. The millions dead to genocides worldwide. The millions upon millions of survivors who face a battered land and untold hardships in the fight for reconstruction. I memorialize them all. But most of all, on Memorial Day, I wish for peace.