Memorial Day

Today is the day we honor those who fought for our freedom. On this day and Veteran's Day I used to like to tell my father-in-law Thank You. Now he lies in Arlington National Cemetery.

It boggles my mind that someday in the not-too-distant future the World War II veterans will all pass over to the other side. My late father, also a World War II veteran, used to tell me of the conversations he had with Civil War veterans as a boy. Both his grandfathers fought in the Civil War, one for the Union and one for the Confederacy.

Dad gave me his grandmother's diary, kept when she was a teenager, living in New York City during that war. I cherished it growing up, for she spoke to me more than any living relative.

Mary Louise was passionately Pro-Union and anti-slavery. She wrote about her brother in the Union Army. She wrote a witty poem satirizing Jefferson Davis and predicting a Union victory. She believed in Love and Justice. At the close of the war she argued just as passionately against the cruel policies of Reconstruction. Everyone had suffered enough, she wrote, and Reconstruction will only cause needless added suffering and breed resentment, resentment that would be taken out on the newly freed slaves.

Ironically, it was this passionate Unionist and Abolitionist who married the Confederate veteran. But it was the values in Mary Louise's diary, passionate in the belief that love in private life and justice in public life spring from the same fount, that were passed down to my grandmother Frances, to my father and to me. Mary Louise and her descendants understood that if this country does not work for the least of us, it does not work at all.

We are not a plutocratic or theocratic fiefdom with a carefully brainwashed populace spouting oft-rehearsed but nonsensical slogans. We are the United States of America.

On this day I try to remember why my ancestors sacrificed so much to come to this country and to fight for it. I have run into foolish souls who think an Obama-Biden sticker and a yellow ribbon sticker for the troops, including my brother-in-law, are contradictory. But those who think their suffocating ideology holds a monopoly on patriotism don't get it. They don't get it at all.

Honor the dead today, but remember to thank the living, too.