By Kenneth Kowald
It was called Decoration Day when I was a kid, but it has been officially called Memorial Day since the 1960s.
To honor those who served in the Armed Forces, there will be many parades and speeches – and probably sales – that day or before or after it, depending on the community. Queens is usually big on this stuff.
Then, the flag will be returned to full staff from half staff, the parades and speeches shall end.
Will our concern for our veterans end until next Memorial Day?
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln established what is the Department of Veterans Affairs. Since then, the VA has gone through some rough times, Veterans have suffered because of inefficiency and perhaps downright fraud. While we keep getting news of improvements, eternal vigilance is needed on this and all aspects concerning those who serve or have served in our Armed Forces.
Remember, too, that the members of today’s military are all volunteers. We owe them a big debt and not just parades and speeches. After the Civil War. General William Tecumseh Sherman attacked “those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded and lacerated…(but) cry aloud for more blood, more vengence, more desolation.”
Health care for veterans seems to be a sometime thing, depending on where you are. And, surely, the concern for employment of veterans is not a constant among our elected officials. They make their speeches, they wave to the gathering and then they walk away.
Abraham Lincoln died 150 years ago last month. For a time, Lincoln’s Birthday was a holiday (not everywhere, of course) along with Washington’s Birthday later in February. Now we have Presidents’ Day. Which means Abe and George and TR and Tom are in the same class as, say, James Buchanan. Think about that for a minute or two. At least Jim is not on Mount Rushmore. And, then, there is Warren G.Harding. Presidents’ Day, indeed.
After the rah-rahing of Memorial Day, it might be wise to think of words that Walt Whitman wrote toward the end of his magnificent threnody on the death of Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” For me and for many, this is the finest poetry written in our country.
“I saw battle corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men – I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest – they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d – the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.”
Our armies are still suffering as our wars continue, really with no end in sight, call it what you will. The troops and the veterans suffer. The mother, the wife, the child – they all suffer. Our young men and women – all volunteer – continue to suffer.
Let us not forget that, long beyond this Memorial Day and many others.
Je Suis Charlie
(See my Blog, No Holds Barred, at Times
