I am sharing this not because I endorse it, but because I finally was able to articulate why I do not.
This
poem was written by Charles Michael Province in 1970 during a very dark
time in our nation's history when some misguided protestors were
burning American flags. I have seen it passed around Facebook and the
Internet many times since then and each time it seems a bit more dated,
harking back to an age of hippies and Woodstock and free love and long
hair. I have attended my fair share of protests and most of them are
family affairs with people who have jobs and short hair and are just
concerned about the future of their country. I have yet to see an
American flag burned and were I to see one, I would do my best to stop
it or leave. It upsets me when car dealerships fly the flag incorrectly
or allow it to become tattered or touch the ground.
Province
who wrote much about General Patton might have felt lost in an age
where the children of those who benefited so much from the sacrifices of
an earlier generation were unwilling to continue dying in a faraway
place simply because their government told them that they should. Most
of those who prosecuted Vietnam were World War II veterans and seemed
puzzled that the rest of the country and the world could not see the
fight in Southeast Asia as a noble cause akin to liberating France and
defeating Hitler.
But
the reality of course is that that metaphor was strained and that not
all wars are about freedom, or if so, we are not clearly on the right
side of that struggle. At any rate, I am not aware of any war since
perhaps the repelling of the unsuccessful attempt to repel the British
invasion in the War of 1812 or what became an attempt to abolish slavery
during the Civil War that are remotely connected to preserving or
protecting American freedoms.
Yes,
in World War II, we fought for the freedom of the French and those in
the concentration camps we stumbled upon, but we also fought against the
freedom of the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs,
Romanians, Hungarians, and tens of millions perishing in camps across
Russia by allying ourselves with Stalin.
Our
only ally in the fight at one point, Winston Churchill, had few
illusions about freedom - his objective was to preserve the British
Empire. The great irony of the war is that it led to that empire's
unraveling - 2 years later India peacefully (not through force of arms
or the soldier) freed itself from British rule. The French had a
similarly unpleasant introduction to wars of national liberation and
protracted counterinsurgency battles that they would lose.
Freedom
is a complex thing but it's hard to understand what role the soldier
played in freeing African Americans from Jim Crow - not only were the
freedom fighters in that struggle unarmed pacifists, but Martin Luther
King fiercely opposed the war in Vietnam which he saw as racist and a
deep moral rot at the core of America.
Similarly,
the Eastern Europeans then later the Soviets freed themselves from
communism not because of any violent threats from us but through a
largely peaceful, nonviolent wave of demonstrations that showed the
futility of having thousands of nuclear weapons if you could not provide
freedom and prosperity to your people.
If
the soldier is the key to freedom, then North Korea, China, and Russia
in Soviet times should have been the freest places on Earth.
Soldiers
suffer terribly and for that suffering we should respect them. It is
human nature to want to find meaning in terrible suffering and in some
wars we can find a thread of something akin to the sentiment expressed
in this poem, but most are simply convulsive outbreaks of violence
started by those in no danger of suffering the consequences for what
they have begun, fought with other people's children.
Maybe on this Memorial Day we should leave it at that.
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