John Zeratsky retweetledi
Memorial Day asks us to remember those who gave their lives in service to our country. It is almost an anachronistic concession that death has ransomed the very existence of national life in the United States of America. Yet we do not celebrate this as a simple call to jingoistic fervor, nor do we valorize some great victory, or read empty panegyrics for past presidents or debate the merits of the wars in which these brave men and women gave their lives.
Rather, today is the somber knock that leaves the coffee half-poured as your heart sinks into the black hole of truth that you know awaits behind the front door. It is the lonely telegram after a rainstorm with a drop or two threatening to disrupt the August afternoon and the slow wave of wheat across the fields. It is the morning paper grasped in shaky hands, tired eyes finding that name, his name, that you must read, reread, and reread, and reread again, because it cannot be true, it must not be true. It is remembrance of the individual loss of all futures for the fallen.
In truth, Memorial Day has become almost unrecognizable in the context of today’s society because a sacrificial death is anathema to the obsession of self. Modern man is little but the epitome of the Self: he is a body-optimizing equation, a recursively self-obsessed creature who seeks only to maximize enjoyment while fine-tuning every inch of himself.
He needs only the right mixture of peptides, fitness, foods, and experiences before he becomes his fully actualized self. This is his greater truth. To the extent he engages in politics or nonprofits it is largely in the service of social credibility or narrow self-interest. More usually, however, he would prefer to condemn or exalt the opinions of others as they pass through his feed. A passive observer and lover of clout. His thumbs are his profession and the evercritic his prophet.
In short, we have become a society of self-enclosed automatons.
It is this notion, then, that has become foreign to us: to not make their sacrifices in vain, who died recently or long ago, for those who possess no social clout, that we have never and will never meet. On this day, then, we should abandon ME for the moment and remember that the precondition for freedom can never be achieved by the faculty of the mind alone. It is paid in flesh from family.
The price is surrendered in a flash, among comrades, or alone. His last breath entangled with visions of home between the peaks of the Rockies or the streets of Manhattan, of childhood lost and the extinguishment of the warm embrace of all that is familiar and good, dying in the mire of some foreign land.
Today summer comes to us, flowers and trees in a fecund firework, our great debts buried below their graves, flags flying above, a reminder that the splendor of our Nation is built not on us alone, but by a great company of individuals willing to give their all for our future.
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