Our national holidays are in general an odd lot. Of the 10 holidays we observe, most celebrate past events and birthdays, traditions and milestones cut down to manageable scale. Part historical poster art comprised of big, simple images conjuring up big, simple ideas, and part seasonal celebration, the lessons we’d like to draw from their narratives can be elusive.
Independence Day (now only occasionally the 4th of July) is the best fit — a specific event, a triumphant outcome, and a shared national idea. The patriarchal birthday holidays — one for Washington and Lincoln, and one for Martin Luther King — feel almost the same. Drawing on extraordinary vision and courage, each man confronted America’s existential conflicts and then singularly raised us beyond our base instincts, laying the boundaries of our political and social prospect. It’s easy to pause on their days and bask in the glow of their gifts to us.
Memorial Day is more nuanced, and has a bit of a checkered history. It began as Decoration Day, proclaimed not by broad acclamation but rather as a result of effective lobbying by a politically powerful fraternal order of Union Army veterans to establish a national holiday honoring Civil War dead by “strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”
Failing to reach beyond the unquenched bitterness following Appomattox, though, the holiday didn’t gain support in the South until its focus was broadened, and the 115,000 killed in World War I and the 405,000 in World War II were added to the staggering 750,000 Civil War dead whose graves we tend, and the name changed to Memorial Day. And as a national event, Memorial Day has really taken off since Congress changed its date from May 30 (poetically chosen because it celebrated no particular battle) to the fourth Monday in May (chosen in order to assure a three-day weekend) in 1968.
Memorial Day should be a rhetorical softball, combining appreciation of the many who have been killed in combat (and not incidentally the families they’ve left behind) with the happier kickoff of the summer season we’ve grafted onto the holiday. In fact, though, more than any other national holiday, it provokes strong ambivalence: How do we keep faith with our countless dead while we observe the futility and empty failure of so many of the wars that claimed their lives?
The complex events that lead to war may be at the same time inevitable and avoidable. The legislators and foreign policy lobbyists who lay the groundwork, argue the cases, and cast the votes may be wise and thoughtful. The valorous dead may be willing. But weighed against the evidence and outcomes, 1.3 million American military graves and countless millions more wherever we travel to do battle seems simply barbaric.
So for this Memorial Day, after we decorate the graves and cheer the parades, but before we celebrate the start of another summer season, we should hug our children, and then think about how we outsource warmaking and resolve that we’ll think about the intellect and the fundamental humanity and humility of those to whom we delegate this horrible power, and about the promises we should extract in order to guard against the heedlessness with which our surrogates sentence our young to die. Because never forget: These dead we honor result from choices we make, and are on our hands.