There is a Creamery just down the road and Sunday was just the perfect day for the first ice cream cone of the season. It was one of those rare combinations of warm sunshine tempered with just the right amount of cool breeze. We first went for a walk at the beach, watching folks out for the day, playing beach games and letting their kids scamper along the water’s edge. We walked about a mile and an half, the ocean washing over our bare feet and the start of the tourist season washing over our senses. Afterward we drove down the road while contemplating flavors.
She went for a kiddie cone of chocolate chip and I went for a small cone of “extreme chocolate”. Nobody ever gets a large at this place. We sat in the shade and enjoyed the treat. The place was pretty busy with families and young kids. These are privileged people. My wife and I are privileged people. We are older and white, with college degrees. Our children are grown and college-educated and involved in their professional careers. The customers at the Creamery were all white, young, driving foreign cars with license plates from “away”, up to visit their family vacation homes along this part of the Maine coast.
It’s just me, it’s just the way my mind works, watching these good-looking couples with their beautiful kids, without a care in the world…my thoughts went to the mess in Iraq and Syria and the daily violence that happens to families that may also be young and good-looking and have beautiful kids but their world is shattered, seemingly beyond repair.
More beyond the fold.
In church a man stood up during prayer request time and asked for prayer for all the young men who gave their lives in service to our country. He didn’t include service women but otherwise he was earnest in his plea for us to remember young lives cut short in war. I thought about Gulf War I and how Colin Powell argued against invading Iraq – “you break it, you buy it” I think he said. George Bush Sr. listened and we stayed out of Iraq but imposed sanctions that began killing the children of that country.
Later in time, that same Colin Powell argued before the United Nations about “mobile weapons labs”, showing fuzzy aerial photos that justified our invasion of Iraq in Gulf War II. We invaded and millions of Iraqis died as a result. Thousands of US soldiers were killed and hundreds of thousands returned home wounded in body and soul after cycling through their combat tours. Somewhere in the back of my mind a link seemed to surface between an even younger Major Colin Powell in the Vietnam era then involved with the investigation of US soldiers and their behavior toward Vietnamese civilians in that conflict. Seventy-thousand plus US soldiers and three-million plus Vietnamese killed. I wondered where these things begin and if they will ever end.
I won’t be going to the parade today. There is a song, “Why Can’t Every Day Be Christmas”. It’s played around the Christmas holiday, along with all the glitter and glitz of our brand of celebration. And somehow a parade and a salute and some wreaths, while symbolic, for me fail to do just honor to the lives damaged or cut short by the violence of war. Especially wars of choice, if not even wars of design.
Retired USMC General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient Smedely Butler summarized things pretty well in his 1935 publication, “War Is A Racket”:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
In this country we argue about things like whether we are or should be a “democracy” or a “republic”. We argue about federal versus state rights, about taxes, abortion rights and gun control. But we don’t argue very much about “why we fight”. I look around, look at myself, and wonder: is that because we somehow all, directly or indirectly, benefit from this racket? I’m sure the voices of the war dead and those living with the scars of combat would have something to say, if we would only learn to listen.
That’s what I remember on this Memorial Day 2015.