Memorial Day

Several years ago on a trip we were at one of the national military parks on Memorial Day and saw the flags at the graves at the cemetery there.  It was something to see.

Memoria Day is a holiday to honor and remember the men and recently women in the armed forces who fought for this country and didn’t make it back.  Americans should remember what we are honoring them for – valor, courage, perseverance, proper patriotism, and steadfastness and fidelity to duty in the face of danger which proved fatal.

Doing so is especially important these days with much of the traditional media in the hands of leftists. From the 1960s through the 1980s American leftists generally publicly despised and demeaned the armed forces. That turned out poorly for them politically, and in recent times they have tried to give an impression in pubic of supporting people in uniform and honoring the dead from America’s wars. Since many  leftists generally speak well of people other than themselves only when they can represent them as members of a class of victims, and as they are unwilling to speak of (and perhaps unable to appreciate or even understand) the qualities mentioned above, they have settled on sacrifice as what they will declare as the praiseworthy thing about the honored dead.

Most conservatives and other thoughtless people in the media have gone along. They shouldn’t have. It is wrong in fact as a simple thought experiment shows. If sacrifice is the criterion, one would have to have more respect for an imagined invasion by soldiers at Normandy or marines on Iwo who marched ashore unarmed and got slaughtered to a man producing a total sacrifice than for the brave men, survivors and fallen, who fought those battles.  It also shortchanges those Memorial Day honors by ignoring or dismissing their quality of character and martial virtues.  It skips over the importance of what they fought for since one can sacrifice for anything. That makes it harder for young people to understand that from these honored dead they should take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. Lincoln understood. The political and media characters these days don’t.