Memorial Day During Wartime

Memorial Day was created to remember the Civil War.

It was controversial from the start, especially in the South. Southerners created their own Confederate Memorial Day, and state offices in my hometown still close for it.

But what do you do when Memorial Day falls during War Time?

With foreign wars, we use it to pay tribute to our soldiers fighting “over there” for “freedom.” Memorial Days near the start of the Iraq War were especially poignant. We’ve now had people fighting, and dying, in Afghanistan for over 17 years.

But there’s another war going on right now. It’s a Civil War. Like the one that happened over 150 years ago, it’s being fought in 10,000 places. Because it’s a Civil War, however, it’s not acknowledged by both sides. Probably because all the casualties are, by the definition of warfare, civilians.

This Civil War also takes several different forms.

There is a war against the unarmed, and children, being fought on behalf of the NRA, at places like Parkland, Las Vegas and Santa Fe High School.
There is the war against black people, especially young blacks, fought on our streets each day.
There is a war against women. That was a motive in the Santa Fe attack, but I’m talking also of the slavery of women to sperm, a war we’re losing.
There is a war against workers, as we found in a recent Supreme Court decision allowing employers to force disputes into arbitration, even when their crimes are on a massive scale.
There is the war against foreigners, with ICE abusing people every day.
There is a war against the environment, with the public sphere being shrunk, and abandoned to private plunder.

That’s a lot of wars. There are some I didn’t mention. Each one has casualties. Those perpetrating these murders are, like those who rejected the first Memorial Day, refusing to acknowledge the crimes.

But these are crimes nonetheless. History won’t forget. The victims’ families won’t. Nor should we. Nor can we.

Before going to The Monument I went to the Equal Justice Initiative museum, which doesn’t treat either slavery or Jim Crow as something from the distant past, but as part of a continuum of conflict that continues today.

That’s an important statement. History is made every day, when the news is put to bed. But most Americans don’t see things that way. Instead, we insist that events marinate in the national consciousness for decades, until a consensus emerges about what to say about them. At that point, a homogenized version of the past is spooned out like pablum to young people. Small wonder they don’t like it.

My history books in school ended with World War II. My kids’ history books ended with the fall of Saigon.

This Memorial Day, and in the next few years, we need to change that. We need to know now, and remember, that 2018 is War Time, not peace time. We need to remember those who have died in this war, and we need to offer support to those people who are still on the front lines.

Because there are so many conflicts going on, because the causes and (sometimes) the alliances are different, because most of us (white, male, middle class, childless) remain largely behind the lines, untouched by the sorrow, we don’t recognize our time for what it is, and what it will mean to the future.

But it’s the most important struggle we have ever gone through, a combination of the World War II struggle against fascism and the one in the 1860s against slavery. Both causes are at risk, as they have not been at risk in my lifetime. And in the daily to-and-fro of news, in the normalizing of Trump and his actions by the state Fox media, or the “both sides-ism” of the rest, we tend to forget that. We will be told to forget that.

We must not forget that.