Memorial Day

As a child growing up in the 60’s I thought the news was the report of how many people died that day. The reason I thought this was Walter Cronkite always started the news by saying, “Nine died today in Vietnam,” or 12 or 34. It wasn’t until I got a little older did I comprehend what Vietnam was and that the news was not a report of everyone who died in the world.

I eventually came to hate the war, not just for the dying, but also for the tedium and the arguing that seemed to go on about it. Being a Beatles fan I adopted the “All we need is love,” mantra. I had a poster in my room that was a rusted scarecrow like figure made out of an army rifle, helmet and one of those bullet belts set up in a field of tall grown flowers. The caption under the figure read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”

It seemed like a logical question to me as a child in single digits. What was all the fighting about? The adults around me could not really explain it in a way that justified the numbers of dead that opened the news every night.

Today is Memorial Day; the time to honor those who lost their lives in all our wars, not just the popular ones, if you can ever say any war is popular. So thanks to those who made the ultimate sacrifice, but lets try and remember those people everyday before we get into some conflict that causes us to send young people into battle.

Let’s not get into a conflict that goes on for so many years that we can’t remember why we started fighting in the first place. As John Lennon put it, “Give peace a chance.” Let’s not add to the numbers of young men and women we need to remember on this day in the future.