Memorial Day
I don’t celebrate Memorial Day (American holiday for those of you elsewhere – meant to honor dead American soldiers), evil, God hating, man hating, war hating unPATRIotic as I am, no.
Why celebrate Memorial Day? Well of course if you personally know a soldier in your family who died on the battlefield, yes, this day has a special meaning to you. But if you don’t? The guilt-laden signs are all around, rich with all the symbolism of the American military and how we should honor those who “died so we can be free”. As if they personally, each and everyone, voluntarily joined the military out of the deep sacrificial goodness of their hearts because AMERICAN FREEDOM WAS ON THE LINE and they wanted nothing more than to defend it for the good of their loved ones and FELLOW countryMEN.
In fact, most veterans of war were conscripts. Until you get to the never ending stupidity of modern war-without-end on Iraq and other places overseas, and then they are “volunteers” – young men and women who come from depressed areas of the country and have little to no money for college and no real prospects for a career. The military offers them travel, job training, college money, and rather than sit around their childhood bedroom chafing at their lack of a life, they bite, probably with encouragement from their family. Then they get sent off to some imperialistic wank in a desert somewhere, feeling they made a huge mistake but unable to turn back on it, meanwhile being constantly screwed over, browbeat, and brainwashed by everyone around them into parroting the same lines over and over until they half believe them. Then they are released and when they have PTSD or Gulf War syndrome the government acts like they are crazy and making it up. So they end up back in the lower middle class, the lower class altogether, or even on the street. So much for average citizens honoring their sacrifices – the VA can’t even be bothered to honor its own mentally, physically wounded soldiers itself.
For this I’m supposed to have some big debt of gratitude? These are “freedom fighters” I should honor? I’m sorry, I think of them as dumb, unlucky kids caught up in the war machine. I don’t bear them any ill will. But I simply don’t know any who really “joined up” for some high falutin’ ideals of God, home, and country. My grandfather was a WW2 vet (he died when I was a baby, I never knew him) but I know damn well even he was conscripted. And how many wars, since the inception of America, have truly been about preserving our American freedoms? Iraq isn’t. Afghanistan isn’t. Vietnam and Korea sure as hell weren’t. World War 2 we entered after an put up job of Pearl Harbor was deliberately orchestrated as an excuse to let us turn the tide of American opinion enough that we could enter the war. Even then it wasn’t really an attack on American freedoms, but a power/land grab. World War 1 also did not pose any threat to American freedom or sovereignty. The Civil War was a total travesty on both sides, the only good thing to come out of being the nominal end to slavery (quickly replaced, after Reconstruction, by Jim Crow Laws and the sharecropping system). Every other war we’ve been in was straight up imperialistic tendencies on our side.
If we were truly a country under frequent attack, with armed troops trying to invade us and impose their morals, laws, and way of life on us – as we are doing to others every day for at least the last 60 years – we would be right to describe fallen American soldiers as having fallen in the name of keeping America free. but this is far from the truth.
Instead, I urge every young person with half a brain and any conscience to walk away from the army recruiting posters and their false promises of education and awesome career training.
Here is who I propose honoring as Americans who fought, risked their lives, and sometimes died defending “our” (as in, not just that of rich, white, landed men) freedom:
Susan B Anthony. Sojourner Truth. Andrea Dworkin. Frederick Douglass. Ana Mae Aquash. Martin Luther King Junior. Johanna Justin-Jinich. Fannie Lou Hamer. Dr. Barnett Slepian.
There’s many more of course. That’s just a tiny few.
