Memorial Day 2022

Memorial Day 2022 has come and is now gone. The wreaths have been solemnly laid upon the graves of soldiers, the speeches honoring the braveries and sacrifices of soldiers have been made; sad songs were sung and “Taps” has been sorrowfully played. Tears have been shed and photos have been mounted in places of honor. Flags were flown at half-mast. Near where I live there is a veteran’s cemetery with symmetrically aligned gravestones settled on well-manicured grassy acres. The grounds were busy yesterday with visitors who could leave. Those who had been buried there did not speak and they could not hear. There remain space for more. I thought of Eric Bogle’s song “No Man’s Land”: he sings, “But the suffering the sorrow, the glory, the shame/The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain/For William McBride it's all happened again/And again and again and again and again.” As I write the war in Ukraine rages and the headlines do not fail to record its progress and show many, many pictures of the pain. There are wars and other deadly conflicts all over the globe: civil wars, pogroms, genocides . . .  no end to the violence, no end to the destructions, no end to the violent deaths. Nineteen children (all under the age of 10 years old!!) and two teachers shot dead in their classroom as the school year ended in Uvalde, Texas. Ten people shot dead by yet another racist thug at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Yesterday was Memorial Day. On Memorial Day what is it that we remember? What are we to do with those memories. 

I repeat: Memorial Day 2022 has come and is now gone. The wreaths have been solemnly laid upon the graves of soldiers, the speeches honoring the braveries and sacrifices of soldiers have been made; sad songs had been sung. “Taps” was sorrowfully played over the graves. What value in remembering on this day when tomorrow what has been memorialized today is forgotten. I remember once in a teacher-filled graduate class in the master’s program at the University where I taught for 28 years. I do not recall the precise year I now recall, but I do know that the class met on a September 11, a day on which 2,996 people died and almost 6000 had been injured. There had been speeches made and wreaths placed and memorials celebrated (!) throughout the United States. In our class the teachers wondered how they might address the events that occurred on that day thus many years ago with their students in the present in their classrooms. I listened as these educators responded thoughtfully and sympathetically to those horrific events and to its place in their classrooms. When they had spoken and there was in our classroom a moment of silence, I wondered aloud that if perhaps what was more important was not how they remembered the heart-rending day on its anniversary, but how as teachers they might address those events on September 12th and 13^th and on the days that followed. I suggested that there had to be more in their classrooms than mere memorialization and temporary sadnesses.

I am so weary of the celebrated days of prayer and declared moments of silence. Our so-called leaders pontificate to their constituents about the Constitution and do nothing to protect them from the too-regular slaughter with which they are daily threatened by terrible people carrying assault rifles and who arrive dressed in protective combat gear. And our leaders do nothing except visit the cemeteries on Memorial Day and espouse sympathies and regrets! And depart from the grounds to grab a drink and hurry off to the picnics. 

Memorial Day is ended and on this Memorial Day we remember that the drums have been beaten slowly, and the pipes have been sounded lowly. We hear that they have memorialized the dead with oh, so lovely words. They have fired the rifles o'er the silenced fallen as they lowered them down. The bugle did play the last post and chorus, and the pipes did play the "Flowers o' the Forest.” There might even have been some tears shed. I thought: all this ceremony on display to avoid action.

            I am so weary of days of prayer and moments of silence. Maybe what we have to remember is how to stop piling up these days for memorial celebrations.