Gratitude Monday: The nation's wounds

It seems appropriate that Memorial Day is a Monday holiday, because it’s the day we’re meant to reflect upon the sacrifices of the men and women who defend our country.

You know—to express gratitude in some way for their willingness to trade their lives for the security of our society.

I feel better about this than I have in four years, because we now have a president who isn’t hell-bent on screwing the armed services, stealing money meant for their housing and social welfare programs to build a pointless border wall, using them as background props for self-aggrandizing photo ops and dissing them as losers and suckers when required to visit a military cemetery.

As a military historian with a focus on the human element of conflict, it’s always been clear to me that the real cost of war isn’t the treasure, it’s the blood. It’s the sons and daughters who go into harm’s way and never return, or who return so altered as to never really find their way back. As we reflect upon those costs, we really ought to consider the suicide rate of combat veterans; per Department of Veterans Affairs figures, 17.6 veterans killed themselves every day in 2018. That’s 6500 per year. I’m not going to talk about drug and alcohol addiction or homeless rates resulting from PTSD; they’re line items on the butcher’s bill, too.

I wonder what that says about our society that we send these people out to do terrible things on our behalf and then essentially shrug our shoulders and avert our eyes when they come back not in bandbox tiptop condition? Kinda feels like a broken contract to me.

Memorial Day marks the “official” start of summer in the US; rather like acknowledging the dead who made possible the picnics and fireworks of Independence Day. I would like to hope that this year marks the beginning of a national recognition of the real—human—price of wars and a genuine movement to address that price. I have no expectations that Republicans will do this—not even eye-patched combat survivor glory hounds; homeless vets don’t make campaign contributions. (Not like aerospace corporations, anyhow.) But we’re better than Rs, aren’t we? A true expression of heartfelt gratitude ought to include what Abraham Lincoln referred to as work “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him that shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan”.

At least, that’s what my gratitude means.