SUMMARY: our Memorial Day, that sacred day when we remember and rededicate ourselves to the calls of social justice which hundreds of thousands of our countrymen fought and died more than 150 years ago, has been profaned this year almost beyond redemption. It has been profaned by a lewd man, a coarse man, a wicked man, a man conceived in bigotry and awash in treason.
America’s wars have always had about them a sense of social justice, waged as they have been by American fighting men and women of every sort and condition imaginable on this planet. What makes America an extraordinary nation is her diversity, her astonishing ability to be a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels have no meaning, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, Jew, and the Muslim, all serve together, in the same uniform under the same flag, by the same appellation.
Donald Trump does not understand social justice; he rejects diversity, and he sees America as just one of a league of ordinary nations. On this Memorial Day, when the sadness is so deep no tears can come, we must resist this man with all the strength and all the perseverance God has given us. Let us say an unequivocal “no” to the wannabe dictator, and let us not be found wanting in this hour.
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Memorial Day is about social justice. From its beginnings as a celebration among South Carolina freedmen of the lives of the Union troops who had died to save the union and extirpate the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery, Memorial Day has become a time to remember all who have laid what Abraham Lincoln, in his immortal letter to Mrs. Bixby, referred to as “costly sacrific[es] upon the altar of Freedom.”
For all the tacky, jingoistic excesses into which our memorials for the fallen have sometimes veered, we have never until now allowed our pride and gratitude to suffer profanation.
Until now.
If last year we could still dare to hope that we were living in an America in which the arc of our moral universe, though long, nonetheless bent toward justice, the passage of a year has bereft us entirely of that hope, instead reminding us that America is no longer a shining city on a hill but rather part of the league of ordinary and disreputable nations.
We have managed to profane everything about America that had been good, decent, true, aboveboard, honest, worth crossing oceans for, and worth laying down our lives for. We accomplished all this by allowing a vulgar, crass, gross, coarse, wicked, traitorous man to steal the presidency with the active assistance and collusion of Bernard Sanders and the Russian State.
Because we have managed to profane so badly what Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop once famously described as that city on a hill on which lay the eyes of a watching world, we Americans, those who have borne arms for this country and those who have not, find ourselves grappling with a sadness so deep no tears will come.
Has it come down to this? Did our American fighting men and women, particularly the estimated 1.4 million who laid that most costly and ultimate sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom, do so in order that America might be governed by a downright moron, by a gibbering idiot whose basic loyalties to America and to the West are open to the greatest question?
What an insult Donald Trump has been to our sacred dead! His performance at the recent NATO and G-8 summits has been likened to that of a drunken tourist. He has managed, perhaps in furtherance of instructions from Kremlin, to drive such a wedge between the United States and Europe that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a rally in Munich, was moved to pronounce what may have been the epitaph of NATO, telling her Bavarian audience that Europe could no longer rely on the US or the UK to help provide for the defense of the continent.
In short, Donald Trump has given the Kremlin everything it has been seeking since 1949. I will leave for another time the particulars of the betrayal which Donald Trump, his supporters, and those of Bernard Sanders, have been responsible.
For now, however, I will content myself with the observation that the current occupant of the White House, along with his organized crime family, represents a searing repudiation of every American value we have been raised to hold dear.
War has few, if any upsides, but for the United States, the minute pearl of consolation we have always been able to draw out of the rough oyster of war is that every one of America’s conflicts has had the effect of incrementally precipitating the American body politic toward greater inclusion, toward forming a more perfect union in which all men truly are created equal. Our wars have always had an implicit social justice dimension to them.
Yet the current occupant of the White House, together with his organized crime family, scoffs at the very notion of social justice. With his open and overt racism, the current occupant of the White House demonstrates that he is truly “a man of the 50s:” a man of the 1850s.
Yet to scoff at social justice, or to scoff at environmental justice, and to scoff at the idea of any kind of justice, which the criminal in the White House has done so often, is openly and notoriously to declare that one is willfully, knowingly, volitionally, out of touch with the values we consider integral to our American way of life.
In every one of America’s wars, those who laid down their lives in the service of this country laid down those lives, at least in some measure, in the service of a vision of America as that city on the hill upon which rested the eyes of all people, of America as the exceptional nation, of America as the nation that had transcended the ancient quarrels and rivalries and tribalisms of the ancestral lands from which we all migrated, even Indians.
Our fallen did not face foreign shot, foreign shell, and foreign steel, bear foreign plagues, foreign pestilences, and foreign afflictions in the service of an ordinary nation. Our American fighting men and women did not march and countermarch in the service of European dynastic quarrels over a few acres of Silesian snow or a few French fortresses.
What has sustained us has been our sense of ourselves as an extraordinary nation, as a nation called into being as a place of refuge where the ancient quarrels were no more, where the Frenchmen and the German, the Gael and the Sassenach, the Christian, the Jew, and the Muslim, could fight together in the same uniform, under the same flag, for the same country, under the same common appellation. Our diversity has been our greatest strength, and it continues to be expressed in our original and true national motto “E Pluribus Unum,” of many, one.
Yet the current occupant of the White House scorns the diversity that has made this nation truly extraordinary and exceptional. Instead of seeing America as melting pot or, in a more modern understanding, as a tossed salad, the current occupant of the White House sees this country through a Russian lens, as a squabbling congeries of antagonistic tribes, unfit for self-government, but fit rather only for rule by an autocrat, preferably of Muscovite derivation.
On this Memorial Day, we Americans have a stark choice. We can either accept and normalize the sinister, malignant views of the wannabe dictator in the White House, turning our backs upon the sacrifice of the 1.4 million Americans who laid the ultimate sacrifice on the altar of Freedom, insulting her memory and setting at naught their heroism and their offering of life itself. Or we can reject the malignant and warped ideals, wrong ideology, and skewed values of the wannabe dictator in the White House. We can say to our war dead that we take up their quarrel, remembering the heart wringing words of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The sadness of this Memorial Day is so deep that no tears will come. Our duty to the fallen is simple. Resist. Resist all our soul. With all our strength. With all our mind. With all our perseverance, as God gives us strength to persevere. We must be equal to the task of building again that city on a hill that cannot be hid, for the whole world is watching.
The. Whole. World. Is. Watching.
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