Communicating Authentically

I’m conflicted about Memorial Day.

On one hand, I cannot imagine the selfless courage it must take to be willing to give one’s life for one’s country. As a mother, I would gladly give my life for my children, but for my country? There would have to be a pretty compelling reason.

I would go to war to stop a powerful leader like Hitler from destroying all that is good in the world with a fascist and hateful agenda. But even World War II, considered by many to be “the last just war,” was caused in part by the U.S.-Japanese conflict over oil in Indochina.

And before the end of the war, the average American did not know about the six million Jews the Nazis had murdered. Most Americans fighting WWII only knew the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and were allied with the Germans. They fought to avenge what they saw as an attack on the American way of life.

I sometimes see memes or bumper stickers with images of soldiers and the words, “Freedom isn’t free” – meaning, I suppose, that we would not have freedom without soldiers dying to protect us.

But isn’t freedom a God-given right and a natural state? Freedom is removed by despots and playground bullies: those who believe that taking away from others makes them stronger and rationalize human rights violations and socially engineered cruelty with the same misguided zero-sum philosophy.

I believe that humans can engineer a society in which everyone has enough food, water, shelter, and basic health care. If all truly believed that everyone deserved to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I believe we could exist in peace. We could have freedom without wars.

I don’t condemn anyone in the military. But I also reject that the U.S. needs a military budget that exceeds that of all other countries in the world – combined. I strongly suspect that most military interventions are waged by corrupt officials for corrupt reasons and are largely unnecessary.

Even in a utopian society, we would need laws and peace-keeping forces on local, national, and international levels. But militarized police, armed forces, and civilian contractors in military interventions too often commit unspeakable crimes against innocent people – the Orwellian term for these poor people is “collateral damage.”

It isn’t freedom we purchase through these acts; it’s the maintenance of our current social order, which has nothing to do with freedom.

I realize that many, if not most, Americans see military veterans as heroes for the American cause and would find my views to be cynical and heartless in the extreme. They might be right, at least about being cynical. In fact, I pray that I am simply cynical and that our world is not so mercenary, and our government not so corrupted with corporate influence as I believe it to be.

And I mourn everyone who has died in war with all my heart – both American and foreign, military and civilian. I mourn the dark side of human nature that drives us to fear each other as a first response; to grasp and hoard wealth instead of sharing it; to hate those we don’t understand; and to kill each other with self-righteous fervor because we are too foolish to see that we hold the keys to our own freedom but don’t know how to use them.