A Memorial Day Meditation

Of all the virtues we pray for our children to exemplify, courage is one we hope they will never need. Strong, yes; intelligent, of course; attractive, kind, generous, compassionate, gregarious, creative, successful, the list goes on… but brave?  We hope against hope that life will not require of our children the very virtue that forged for them a nation so prosperous and free. We hope that the price paid in others’ bravery will suffice to preserve for them the blessings of liberty. But history has shown us that this is not so. What then shall we do to prepare the next generation for a host of challenges which we can barely begin to imagine, and which we prefer to pretend will never come?

On Memorial Day, a much-needed day off to relax and recreate with family, it is tempting to push aside the weighty demands of citizenship in order to savor its blessings, and gloss over the fact that the purpose of American holidays is to reinforce in the American conscience the central value that is the focus of each holiday. But our holidays demand attention, for they tell us who we are and shape what we will become.

Clearly, Memorial Day tells us who we were. In the midst of an unrelenting pace of life, it builds into our calendar a pause for the sake of recounting, with deep and sober gratitude, the men and women who died in service to the United States in all its wars. And we cannot help but marvel at the strength of character their generation embodied as they braved the brutal horrors of war to fight back the forces of oppression and preserve goodness and decency in the world. The risks were known to and suffered by not only the soldiers, but also the families who sent them and supported them in every way. The shining glory of America is inexorably tied to the heavy glory of bloody sacrifice.

Whether or not we are eternally grateful depends on how well we impart that gratitude to our children and instill in them the virtues necessary to sustain the nation our forebears fought to forge. Thus, Memorial Day provides for us a mirror of who we are and who we will become.  Against the backdrop of Memorial Day the question stands out: how will our observance of this holiday shape the future?

The measure of the gratitude we express for their sacrifice reveals to what extent we are merely self-centered consumers, mooching off the remains of a falling empire.  On one hand, it is an entirely appropriate expression of gratitude toward those who sacrificed all for our freedom, that we relish liberty to the fullest. In this regard, a carefree day at the lake with loved ones will no doubt suffice. But if our day of revelry and repose lacks any reference to the sacrifice that made it possible, we miss an opportunity to impart to our children the sort of values that built and sustain a thriving republic.  

It is well said that values are caught, not taught. To visit a cemetery to honor our fallen heroes, or buy a drink or a meal for someone in uniform goes a long way to demonstrate for our children a very appropriate reverence for those who serve and who have served, an example we hope they will emulate.

But what of the strength that will be demanded of our children? Of course, we savor the thought of our children besting the bullies, but we hope they won’t ever have to risk being pummeled and we certainly don’t want our kids to go about picking fights. And so, a generation of helicopter mommies engenders in a generation of perpetual dependents the debilitating expectation that some ever-faithful force will intervene and obviate the need for courage. This is surely a perversion of the savior narrative, for nothing in Jesus' teaching advocates a lack of courage among his followers. We sanitize courage, conveniently reducing the definition of strength to one of toothless restraint, long on threats and posturing, but short on resolve and not knowing what, if anything, is worth fighting for. We bastardize the term using "courageous" for everything from an avante garde fashion statement to a de rigeur critique on the most benign of social ills. We confuse peevishness for courage as much as we confuse politically correct speech codes for tolerance. How can such a generation be entrusted with a task so ponderous as the preservation of a republic? What will stir in them the resolve to resist charismatic tyrants who promise a life of ease on someone else’s dime, if only they surrender their liberty?

It must be observed that our culture is increasingly squeamish about the violence that underwrites our existence.  Practically speaking for most folks, ground beef comes from the supermarket wrapped in plastic. We don’t have anything to do with raising, slaughtering, or butchering the cow that we enjoy on our barbecue grill.   Some people who awake to this brutal reality are scandalized by it, so they swear off meat on moral grounds.  Perhaps this is because they were unnaturally insulated from it in the first place: living in a luxuriously sanitized subset of the world that is provided to them by others and thus demands from them little or nothing and presents them with easy problems and similarly easy solutions, they live in condescending protest of reality.  (To be fair, many embrace reality with sobriety and gratitude, exercising ethical stewardship of natural resources while maintaining a fondness for cheeseburgers.) 

It's even easier to be overwhelmed by the weight of painful sacrifice that has been required to sustain the American experiment in self-rule. Preferring a sanitary world of easy problems and easy solutions, it is all too easy to indiscriminately mash all violence into the same category, declare that war is never the solution, and place our hopes in appeasing the diplomatic machinations of charismatic tyrants.  This temptation is all the more tantalizing as we lovingly trace the name of a fallen ancestor from a marble wall of remembrance, and the thought occurs: will my child’s name be engraved one day on such a wall? We try to banish the thought. We pray it will never come to that. Many of us deceive ourselves into thinking that evil can be placated, that war is never the answer, vainly trying to bend reality toward our best hopes for a bright future with no cost.

But the situation we face as a nation demands otherwise.  Today, our nation continues the drawdown of forces after more than ten years of war, while many continue to question not only the cost but the strategic sensibility of such wars. Plans are underway to reduce the size of our active force, and we hope that unmanned drones will reduce or eliminate the human cost of conflict, despite the myriad indicators that the next conflict our nation will face will require boots on the ground to defeat an increasingly lethal hybrid threat of near-peer regular, irregular and insurgent forces metastasized in urban terrain and equipped with the firepower and operational capabilities previously only possible for nation-states. All this in the face of budgetary cutbacks necessitated by economic turndown and excessive social spending. Make no mistake, courage will be demanded of our sons and daughters in the moral and mortal threats they will inevitably face.

To be sure, there is wisdom in the words of the great military strategist Sun Tsu: "To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Clearly, it is preferable to be so successful in attacking the enemy’s strategy that we don’t have to shoot a single bullet or risk a single soldier. But the enemies of liberty are many, and while they may be evil they are not stupid.  We do not have the luxury of using Sun Tzu’s maxim as a copout from the eternal vigilance required of citizen soldiers in a republic. This would only play into our enemies’ hands.  Far better to recall yet another of Sun Tzu’s sage observations, which our enemies know all too well: "peace and war are difficult to distinguish from each other and are part of the same ongoing conflict."

All this underscores the point that the most immediate and persisting front in the struggle to preserve our republic is to be found in the seedbed of our children’s character.

Whether it be youth sports, a spelling bee, or taking the training wheels of their bicycles and refusing to let them quit until they have gone all the way around the block on their own steam, or any other experience that forces them to rise to the occasion and do the right thing in spite of their fears, teachable moments abound to instill courage in the character of our children. As we honor the fallen on Memorial Day, it is an occasion to introduce into their awareness the virtue of service to our nation, a sense of the reality of sacrifice in that service, deep gratitude for that sacrifice, and above all appreciation for the value of liberty as worth the cost in blood and treasure.

To prepare them for the challenge of sustaining the American republic, it is imperative that we reinforce the central role of the Constitution in deciding when and how to go to war, and a purpose worthy of sustaining our effort amidst the soul-taxing challenges of warfare. By inculcating these values, our children see the heroism of the past as a normal expectation of American character: not to die, but to be so committed to our constitutional republic that they serve our nation up to the ultimate measure of devotion.

Let us pray this Memorial Day not that our children will be spared the challenge, but that as we entrust to them our republic they will persevere on to victory, upholding America as a cause worthy of their courage. And let this be a reminder to us to teach them every day to become the sort of men and women of whom it is rightly sung: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

- JKB