Today we honor the valiant service members throughout our history who believed that the supreme sacrifice of their lives was a price worth paying to bring about a better world.
The world is indeed becoming a better place. Progress is slow and uneven. It is halted by ethnocentrism, greed, and ego in some places, while surging forward in others. Overall the ideals of human rights remain a beacon.
The United States as currently led has declined to take part in this better world. Our current leadership might as well be pissing on the graves of fallen heroes rather than laying wreaths. They view the military as expendable labor, a cost of doing business. And they're poor, wasteful businessmen.
If we let the trend continue, every person who died from the Revolutionary War onward wasted their death. We don't honor the equality defined in the Declaration of Independence. We don't have a secular government allowing free expression, latitude for all faiths, and a free and inquisitive press. Current leadership seeks to rescind constitutional amendments that don't fit their view of the hierarchy that favors them.
The massive casualties of the Civil War occupy acres and acres that could be turned into golf resorts for all that their courage matters now. Because the civil rights movement continued to press the issues of the Civil War against the tactics that replaced outright slavery, their casualties deserve to be remembered alongside the official war dead. And the current policies at the federal and state level continue the theme of erasing their gains.
Every war is supposed to push us closer to a time when we no longer need to send people out to give up everything else that they might ever have been and done. Every war fails us in that regard, because too many of us focus on the heroism and fighting skill, and not enough on what those people were fighting for: not to have to do this again.
Humans are a deeply flawed species. Various leaders will continue to rise and believe that they can conquer the world, or at least a good chunk of it. We will always have a need for heroes who will hold their ground and say no. Remember this: all that is required for good to triumph is for evil people to do nothing. You pick a side every day, multiple times a day. Which side are you on?
The technology of mechanized slaughter becomes ever more impersonal and heinous. There was never much glory in the mass murder contests we've conducted though the millennia, but there's ever less in the ways in which we can obliterate whole swaths of each other without even looking closely. And once a year we grow briefly solemn and say a few words before going to our various barbecues, weather permitting.
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