Today is Memorial Day. It’s common to confuse it with Veterans Day. One example comes from the Twitter feed of one business, “Today we honor all Veterans, including those on our Staff here, we thank all of those who have served our country, and we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.”
There was a letter-to-the-editor someplace that captures the distinction nicely. It was posted on Facebook, but given that platform’s penchant for playing hide-and-seek with updates, I can’t find it now. So I’ll paraphrase: Memorial Day isn’t about military service or all veterans. It’s about the lives that are never lived to completion, and in the case of men who died before they became fathers, babies who were never born. Here’s my solitary example from my family history: My grandmother had a brother who saw military service in the Asian theater of World War II. He contracted malaria or yellow fever or some such disease, and died, leaving no heir. What contributions would he, or his children, made to America in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond? We will never know. Lives cut short, or not lived at all. That’s what we should think about on this day.
One of my blogging friends, Mitch Berg, takes on Memorial Day from a related though different angle. He writes on Facebook (ellipses in the original): “The two challenges of Memorial Day: Remembering those who died to keep this nation free (and thanking those who didn’t die, naturally) … and making sure this nation is worthy of that sacrifice.”
That in turn got me thinking of some lectures I heard yesterday, by the late J. Rufus Fears. He argued that there are three components to freedom: (1) National sovereignty; (2) Freedom to participate in politics; (3) Freedom to live your life as you wish, as long as you don’t harm others.
Which components of freedom have America’s veterans died for? One hopes the answer is “all three.” After all, the conventional wisdom is that the United States is defined not by bloodline, race, or clan, but by an idea, roughly that of personal and national self-governance, with a large dose of regard for others thrown in. Each element of freedom, Professor Fears said, can exist independently of each other. (Note here that I’m expanding on his remarks.) A country can have national freedom but lack political and personal freedom. Its government is sovereign and not subject to any other state–but the people lack political and personal freedoms. Fears cites North Korea as an example. Or, a country can have national freedom, and the people can have a great deal of personal/economic freedom, as long as they don’t question the government. (Imperfect examples of this “ideal type” may include Chile under Pinochet, Spain under Franco, and today, Singapore and some regions in China.) Finally, a country could have national freedom and political freedom but lack economic freedom. (Perhaps Sweden after World War II until fairly recently is an imperfect illustration.)
What is the scorecard of the United States? We have national sovereignty nailed down, so yes, military personnel who die in combat today preserve national freedom. (Mitch asks whether the existence of “open borders” undermines my claim. No. The U.S.A. has chosen to have semi-open borders; this was not a decision forced on it by other countries.) What about political freedom? We’ve had a checkered history of that. See, for example, the various efforts throughout the decades to deny the vote to blacks. We’ve made strides toward improving political freedom (the Civil Rights Acts, despite their numerous flaws, are one example). Conservative groups can complain about the abuses of the IRS, and liberals can look back in the 1960s to the Department of Justice. But overall, the country is still doing pretty well on this regard. Personal freedom? Well, the status of that depends on how you define personal freedom. If you define it the way FDR defined it — “freedom from want” and in brief, risk and hardship — we’ve enacted an enormous federal government to promote that, though its efficacy and wisdom can certainly be questioned, even on its own terms. If you define person freedom from the perspective of “leave me alone,” we’re not doing so well. Something like one-third of all employed people work in jobs that require a state license or certification, for example. Then there is the alphabet soup of agencies–EPA, FDA, USDA, EEOC, DOL, not to mention IRS–that stands ready to pounce on the non-compliant.
Traditional conservatism might say that national freedom is sufficient reason to die. The argument goes, roughly, that each person is embedded in a specific culture and society, and fealty to that society is worthwhile. Maybe they’re right, but that is emotionally and intellectually unsatisfying. Traditional conservatism also embraces natural law, the idea that there is a right and wrong that transcends cultures. So dying for a national government at the expense of a gross violation of natural law (Nazi Holocaust, anyone?) is not commendable.
Is death in the service of the United States today a foolish thing? Some people would say yes, saying that the country has gone far off the rails, that personal and political freedom is a mirage. Military personnel die, if they think about it, only for their comrades, and if there’s any larger beneficiary of their deaths, it’s the “empire.” The ideas that may have made “the ultimate sacrifice” have been squashed, squandered, or never there in the first place.
So is this a correct point of view? I can’t say that it is, not now. Yet, I do fear our national politics and national culture are pushing us in that direction. We chant “USA! USA! USA!” at the Olympic Games, while governments and the culture at large put the squeeze on personal freedoms.
So perhaps one way to honor those who have died in uniform is to be an advocate for political and even more importantly, personal freedom.