Memorial Day Column

Memorials are designed for memory and to honor those who have preceded us. Churches are often filled with memorials, large and small. Memorial Day has a bit of spice in it with the recent push to remove Confederate memorials from some cities. I am torn about it. Part of me fears that we think we can erase a history by removing unwelcome images. Part of me grasps that both the government and individuals speak through memorials. I do acknowledge the courage and military prowess of the south during the Civil War.

Part of me has no patience for Confederate memorials. So many dot the southern landscape and call back to the terrible antebellum days of slavery. After the Civil War, the “Redeemers” even got their romantic view of the struggle into all history books. The silent movie Birth of a Nation is testament to its power. Whom and what we memorialize is expression with real purpose, and the proliferation of memorial for the Confederacy in the next generation tried to claim that stain on our country as being in the right. . No matter how much we may claim we are honoring valor, we are also memorializing a regime dedicated to the maintenance and extension of slavery in America. Mayor Landrieu faces this question in removing some of the Confederate memorials in New Orleans: ". . . the monuments in question are history, . . .: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission . . . "

Memorial Day always remembers the fallen. Our cemeteries are too full of memorials to those who died too soon in war. Memorial Day started as Decoration Day as part of the cult of the dead after the carnage of the Civil War. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great jurist, was a Civil War veteran. When he died, his uniform was in his closet in Washington. He was asked to make Decoration Day talks, and here is an excerpt of one-”the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience...in our youth our hearts were touched with fire…. we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference...Such hearts--ah me, how many!--were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring,--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apples trees and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march--honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass away.

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death--of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.”