Jamie Broker

CW: war/armed conflict, mention of prayer/religion, mention of suicide

For reasons that are too tedious to detail here, I will be attending no fewer than four Memorial Day ceremonies tomorrow. They’re all basically the same: prayers, sometimes poetry, patriotic music, wreaths, roll call, a 21-gun salute, “Taps” specifically. Then everyone goes home and eats a lot of American summertime food, and the local students are ready to be done with school to a level that shouldn’t be physically possible.

This is probably one of the most important holidays in the United States, as war-obsessed as we are. We should take a day to stop and think about the fallen. About the lives cut short by insatiable greed and pride and callousness. About those who found parts of themselves ripped out, never to return. And we should take a good part of the day to think about everyone who fell during armed conflict, whether or not they wore a uniform or carried a weapon.

I don’t usually like the prayers and poems that are read on Memorial Day. They often make the war dead into saints and holy warriors (if not little gods, on occasion) and often lecture the listener on the importance of Supporting the Troops and Being Grateful for Everything They’ve Done and so on and so forth. My least favorite is a local pastor who starts their “prayer” off by addressing the Almighty and nearly-instantly veers off into haranguing the captive audience with just such a lecture. I’m relatively certain that the Big Guy doesn’t need to be reminded how many of our brothers, sisters, and siblings in humanity have been slaughtering each other, nor of how we’ve enabled them to keep doing it, nor of how many came home physically but never mentally, nor some who took their own lives as a result of all that they did and was done to them.

We need this holiday. We need to remember. And then we need to fucking do something so that we no longer need to add new names to the roll call.

May all the dead rest peacefully, and may the wounds of war be healed someday.