Memorial Day weekend. It’s become the symbolic starting point for summer, a time of barbecues and partying. In those rare instances when we do take the time to consider the day, many of us tend to think of it in terms of patriotism and nationalism.
But it was created from the loss and sorrow of a civil war that ripped this country and many families apart. It was meant to alleviate the grief of the many families who suffered the ultimate loss, to let them know that the nation shared their sorrow in the memory of fallen family members.
In the nearby Woodlawn National Cemetery, where my mother is buried, there is a section that contains the nearly 3000 graves of Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War in the Elmira, NY prison camp. Whenever I look at those stones and think of those men of the south, I always think about their families who may not have even known that their sons were suffering in a cold Northern prison. They were mothers, wives or children who would never see or hug their sons and husbands and fathers again.
And this sacrifice was for what? An idea, the preservation of an ideology that probably didn’t affect their day to day lives in the first place?
Why are we so easily stirred to war, so willing to sacrifice our own kin and their futures?
There are no easy answers. Maybe that’s why the holiday has transformed into what it is today– it’s too terrible an image to bear when we look in that mirror and ask those questions.
So for this Sunday’s music on a Memorial Day weekend, I thought I’d play a song that asks for peace on earth with the hope that fewer families in the future will have to see the earth absorb the blood of their sons and daughters. I know that sounds like a pipedream, a world without war. But I have to ask myself: Why not peace?
Here’s U2 and Peace on Earth. Have a great Sunday and a great holiday.
NOTE: The image here on the left is a new painting, In the Time of Memory, that is part of my show that opens this coming Friday, June 3, at the Principle Gallery. I think this piece deals with some of the same issues raised above.
Redtree Times 