In the United States our collective relationship to Memorial Day has been evolving in strange ways over the course of my lifetime, but this year it has arrived in especially absurd existential terrain. The end of the draft in 1973 polarized the nation's experience of military sacrifice. In 1980 18% of the nation's citizens were war veterans. That ratio had fallen to 6% by 2022. In the decades since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, Memorial Day has been a yearly commemoration of terrible loss for millions, a day to barbecue at the beginning of summer for tens of millions of others.
This bifurcation has arguably never been as wide as it is now. With 50,000 troops deployed, "Operation Epic Fury" is the 6th or 7th largest active deployment of U.S. troops since 1945. Fifteen service personnel have died in the conflict. As low as that number may seem in the abstract, the families of those men and women feel their grief and loss as keenly as those who lost loved ones in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. While they mourn, the war that took their family members' lives, though far from over, has become vague background noise for the rest of the country.
Memorial Day was first observed in the midst of the national trauma following the Civil War. The pall of grief was universal in those years. Virtually no family had been spared by the cataclysm. A day to pause and cope with loss facilitated collective healing.
It is hard to escape the feeling that as a nation we have lost the plot. The tragedy at the heart of Memorial Day is the fact that in order for all of us to live freely, some of us must see our lives cut short. On this holiday we should pause to honor those who have made that sacrifice, and offer comfort to those who feel their loss most deeply.
The sacrifice of our veterans should generally be above politics, but we cannot engage the absurdity of this year's divided Memorial Day without confronting the callously negligent leadership that helped bring us to this impasse. Thoughts and prayers on one day do not truly honor those for whom the day is sanctified. We will not recover the meaning of Memorial Day until we understand that every use of the military involves risk, every deployment of our soldiers, sailors, air personnel, and marines can lead to the ultimate sacrifice of one of the nation's sons or daughters. We cannot claim to understand such truths until we demand that our leaders act accordingly.
