Skip to main content

Memorial Day

I try to be friendly and so my reflex around most holidays is to wish casual acquaintances a happy holiday. (I'm a bit more selective with religious holidays as appropriate.)  Some holidays don't work with happy; Memorial Day is one of them.

We celebrate the sacrifice of members of our military who gave their life in uniform on Memorial Day, which certainly isn't something to be happy about. We do seek to acknowledge and encourage virtue. As much as I find war abhorrent I try to limit my criticism to those making decisions and not those who carry them out in an honorable fashion.

But I am dearly reminded at times like this how isolated I am from the costs of combat. I do not know anyone currently enlisted in the military, only ROTC students and members of previous generations.  9/11 was the exception as was 12/7/1941 where many folk enrolled after our country was attacked. The rule with the all-volunteer military seems to be having soldiers fight for us who are worse off than the rest of us. To be more precise, the end of the draft (with all of its loopholes for bone spurs, etc.) meant the end of shared service. Those with more job prospects are less likely to enlist.

I don't think that we as a nation really face that head on, that we are comfortable asking those who have benefited the least from their citizenship to serve. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Momentum

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...
Post a Comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more