Smitten With Our Own Feathers

Off The Shelf (Memorial Day, 5/30/2022)

Dear Friends,

Today is Memorial Day, and I wish you all a meaningful celebration. No, that does not necessarily mean a day of melancholy or sorrowful remembrance. It means meaningful. “Full of meaning.” A backyard barbecue with your family or friends, an ice cold beer under a high, hot sky, the sound of children splashing around in the sprinkler, smiles and laughter between husbands and wives—whatever the day brings, you get to do it in freedom and peace.

We do not often enough recognize how strange that is in the annals of history, and today is our opportunity to consider. World history is a story of more or less uninterrupted war, oppression, and fear. And there are many places still full of war, oppression, and fear. Ukrainians have their outdoor parties interrupted by air raid sirens and explosions. Elsewhere, you have an outdoor party only by the leave of some government bureaucrat. 25 million citizens of Shanghai just spent two months—just think about that—literally locked in their apartments, psychologically tortured by their government for “their own good.”

Peace, freedom, and prosperity, in the grand scheme of things, are hard to come by. And somehow we’ve come by it. No, not “somehow.” Our nation was founded by wise and learned men who built it for just this purpose, and for some reason God has seen fit to bless us, sometimes in spite of ourselves. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” said Benjamin Franklin, and part of keeping it has been our own continued but sometimes shaky commitment to its principles—and by increasing our consistency with those principles, too, as the Civil War and the Civil Rights years illustrate.

But we have also kept it because courageous men have given, in Abraham Lincoln’s immortal words, “the last full measure of devotion.”

Memorial Day is not Veteran’s Day. Memorial Day is not for those who served; it is for those who never returned from serving. They didn’t get a party in peace, freedom, and prosperity. And I hope that today you take a moment to consider that we are no longer talking, as I always thought in my youth, about ancient history—that Memorial Day was about honoring members of World War II’s “greatest generation” or even veterans of the Vietnam War. We are now talking about my generation, and even a generation younger than me, as hard as that is for me to fathom. We have just concluded (in miserable, disheartening, and dishonorable fashion) twenty years of live-fire active combat around the globe in a war against radical terrorism. And there are many young widows and fatherless children among us. Honor those men (and, to a lesser but by no means less significant extent, women). Love those families that have a gaping hole at their centers. And be grateful.

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That is the epigraph at the start of one of the finest war novels ever written, in my opinion: Anton Myrer’s Once An Eagle.