We celebrated our Memorial Day by having a backyard cookout with the family. We played Frisbee, ate chicken kabobs and shared some small talk, capping off a nice family day. Nobody ever mentioned a word about war or death or the sacrifice made to make this day possible. As I looked around, I was reminded that the meaning of Memorial Day seemed to be lost. I felt a little guilty. Weren’t we were supposed to be honoring the people that have died for our freedoms? I wondered how we strayed so far from the intention. If you did not know any better, you would have thought the holiday was intended to act as a three day weekend to mark the beginning of summer season.
My father-in-law, who was at the picnic, was probably the only person there that understood the real meaning of the day. He was a medic during World War II and he saw the brutal reality, much which he chooses to keep to himself. He is probably also aware that we have just finished the bloodiest century of all time, a time when a hundred million people were murdered. That equals a dying human every 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 100 years. This is not from some natural disaster, a tsunami, hurricane or an earthquake. This is man made, a conscious decision of one human to snuff out the life of another, one hundred million times. We did it on purpose. We killed over ideology, over power, over an arbitrary line in the sand.
This Memorial Day as I write, I feel the sacrifice that was made to stop the manipulation of others. I also feel the outrage, the sadness, the incredible disrespect and wastefulness of it all. How many brilliant, wonderful, interesting, beautiful, creative people did we murder? Was our next Edison, Amelia Earhart, Einstein, Mother Teresa, Mozart or Lincoln among them? Worse, we now have exponentially more powerful weapons at our disposal to kill .. how many more are we going to kill this century? Will it be 200,000,000? Maybe we will only kill 50,000,000. Wouldn’t that be great? We could tell our grandchildren we made a 50% improvement.
I am concerned but I also have great hope for the future… or I would not be on the trust tour…to me, Memorial Day is about trust and respect. A day I honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice. A day to remind myself to live my life with as much integrity as I can… if I do that, and others do too… maybe future Memorials Days will be renamed Family days and we can just throw the Frisbee, eat chicken kabobs and share some small talk and not have to feel guilty about missing the true meaning of the holiday.
