OT: The Patience Of Memorial Day

[Guest guest]

May 26, 2003

 

At one time — long ago, it seems — Memorial Day could almost slip past

without notice. But not in recent years. The memorial observances we

make are too fresh, drawn from too sudden a memory to have lost any

of their solemnity.

 

Today is a good day to ask just how far back we choose to remember. The

last of the veterans of World War I are all but gone, and the veterans

of World War II are fast going. Vietnam may still seem current in the

American political conversation, if only as an undertone, but it will

soon be 30 years since we left that country and it has been more than 40

since we first entered it. The war in Iraq this year was an opportunity

to reprise any number of military memories, as well as to make new ones.

But it was also an opportunity to remember that though warfare is a

separate strain of history running through the life of most nations, in

this nation it has always been contained by our essentially civilian

purposes. The test of every military venture must be the highest

principles of the ventures that have come before, right back to the

American Revolution. That includes the reintegration of the soldiers who

have done the fighting. Some, like the American lives lost in Iraq, come

home to be buried on native soil. Most come home to take up the tasks

they left behind, to join us side by side in looking ahead to the

future.

 

This year adds its own new chapter to the American military chronicle.

Old soldiers — including the youngest of old soldiers — gather with the

rest of us today to pay homage to their comrades. But they gather as

civilians, as citizens, no matter how much their experience of war sets

them apart from those of us who have never gone to war.

 

Most days it seems as though we live in the slipstream of the present

and that history belongs just where we find it, in the past. But

Memorial Day is a time for remembering that history endows the present.

It seems strange, some years, to stand in patient memory at the brink of

summer, when the weather, the month, the impetus of our calendar is

urging us to get busy living before summer erodes. But that patience is

always rewarded. We connect too often with the pattern of American

history on a note that is shallow and unreflective. Today we acknowledge

the depth of this nation's history, how rich and sustaining its best

moments have been. Above all, we recall the lives that have been given

willingly to make our history what it is.

 

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company