On Memorial Day we are always presented with a bill. It is usually entered in our national accounting as, “the price of freedom”. But the C.P.A of conscience cannot find one credit of freedom purchased with the last 70,000 American military lives or two trillion dollars of lucre. There is not one new liberty that has been purchased by the sword, or any unalienable right that has been credibly threatened by any foreign state or potentate to justify the debit of death and destruction supposedly necessary to secure our “freedom”. But by now we pay the $800,000,000,000 per annum in a daze of patriotic rote, with the additional tender of our innocent youth, to make the waste “honorable”.
We are conditioned to genuflect to waving flags, polished brass, and precision marching called to a halt at freshly turned graves, and have become habituated to the caravan of the Reaper bringing product traded in distant lands to fill the holes. "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”, is duly compensated with white marble headstones.
When we are encouraged to imbibe in “memorial” at the expense of “memory” it is easy to forget we haven’t yet been advised of our lawful justification for invading Iraq. It is easy to overlook that we are in a bloody decade-long Fabian stalemate with a substitute adversary in Afghanistan. And it is becoming increasingly more difficult to remember to ask, “Why?”
Our celebration of Memorial Day has become the antonym of what it is supposed to be- “Lest we Forget”.
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