Of this planet's 7 billion people, a good number live each day in fear of tyranny or tragedy. If not biting their tongues lest the wrong word slip from their lips, prompting a swarm of uniformed goons to burst into their homes and drag them away late some night, they're dodging bullets and bombs – and burying their dead.
I have no idea what that's like. Nor, I suspect, do you, and tomorrow, we remind ourselves of the reason why.
On Memorial Day, we remember those who died serving this country. Parades will be held. Speeches will be made. We'll try our best to express our gratitude, but whatever we say or do, it never will be enough.
When someone gives his life so someone else can be free, how do you square that balance?
You don't.
You can't.
I've known only freedom. I've never witnessed war. If that strikes you as damned lucky, it does me, too. But luck is just the half of it – if that much.
Some of us have the great fortune of being born in this country. But one does not choose the origin of one's birth any more than one chooses the curve of one's ear or the pattern on the skin of one's thumb.
Where one is born, when and to whom we owe to chance.
Freedom and peace, in contrast, are no accidents. They're not matters of happenstance. They cannot be wished into being or found borne on the wind. Where freedom and peace exist, it is because they have been made to exist.
Such is the case in America
The freedom we have and the peace we enjoy we've earned. People fought for them. People took lives and lost them because they wanted this to be a place without tyranny and tragedy and the terrible suffering they bring.
More than a million Americans have died in war since this nation was founded. Millions more have served and survived. These Americans have come from every corner of the country, from every race and religion, from every class and ethnicity. Their differences have been many, but from what I can tell, there is a certain characteristic common to them: a terrific sense of justice. In them is a desire that people get a fair shake at a decent life whether they live in this country or in some faraway place. That is what inspires them. That is what calls them to serve, and I find that remarkable.
In a speech not long after the end of World War II, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower said: "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. Yet there is one thing to say on the credit side: Victory required a mighty manifestation of the most ennobling of the virtues of man – faith, courage, fortitude, sacrifice; if we can only hold that example before our eyes."
Tomorrow when we remember those who died in defense of this country and others, we ought also to remind ourselves of those they left behind: the mothers and the wives and the daughters and all the others who, too, made a sacrifice as great if not greater than the ones their sons and husbands and fathers made because in addition to what they gave up, they had the crushing burden of having to carry on having lost a piece of themselves.
In no way is this meant in disrespect, but it would be nice if at some point in our history when we mark Memorial Day, every remembrance we have will be faded and distant. None will be fresh and distinct.
If ever that day arrives, it will mean those we honor Monday finally will have gotten what they wanted: freedom and peace for all.