Whom will we Honor Memorial Day - Howard Zinn

[RoccoR5955]

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader...

...Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

...It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

...“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

Sorry for the large quote. Read the rest here: http://zinnedproject.org/materials/whom-will-we-honor-memorial-day/

[KoKo]

1. Post from Howard Zinn who got it all...and little has changed...so we should keep that in mind.

...Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

...It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

AND..the REST of the READ of your post!

[struggle4progress]

2. If we recruit some willing to put their lives at risk, we have an obligation to avoid

asking them lightly to risk their lives inappropriately

[stone space]

6. Define "we". (nt)

[struggle4progress]

7. If you wish to defend recruiting folk to risk their lives and then asking them to do so

when better options exist, you're free to do so. But it seems clearly indefensible to me

[stone space]

8. I most certainly do not wish to defend recruiting folks into the military.

I'm 100% opposed, and have expressed that opposition in many, many different ways over my lifetime.

That's why I asked you to define "we".

I'm not a part of that "we".

[struggle4progress]

9. If you discover how to make the militaries vanish from the world,

I'm sure you will find many of us interested. As long as they exist, a practical aspect of anti-militarism will continue to involve the thankless nitty-gritty work of limiting deployment

[merrily]

3. He thought Vietnam was Nixon's War?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. Blessed are the peacemakers. K&R

[stone space]

5. Bravo!