What we owe the fallen (Author AWOL Unexcused Absence of America's Upper C

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-05-24-memorial-day-edit_x.htm

Memorial Day, as celebrated today, is a long weekend of barbecues and drinking beer. For many, it approaches its original purpose only as a demonstration of the American way of life that our men and women in uniform die to protect.
Memorial Day, of course, was chartered as a day for remembering those who have fallen in the nation's military service, those to whom we owe a debt for the very lives we live. But what if that debt were not merely rhetorical? What if we do owe, and it's payback time?

We are at risk of becoming a nation of delegators — we have others prepare our food and watch our children. Theda Scokpol, a leading Harvard sociologist, writes about how Americans now join issue groups that require nothing of us but our money. We delegate to others the job of helping and convincing our neighbors of the causes we believe in.

Increasingly, since the 1970s, we have delegated to a small cohort the risks and honor of armed service. To whom do we delegate it? Those who serve are largely middle- and working-class, from the South and West, and already from military families. Upper-middle class from the Northeast or California? Chances are, you are excused. We have, in effect, delegated to others the very stuff of our citizenship.

But not all of us. This Memorial Day, I will think particularly of Madison, with her soft brown eyes and bouncy pigtails and freckles. She is my second-grader's friend. This is her first Memorial Day since her father was killed in Iraq. I'll think of my neighbor on the base where I live. A few months ago, Summer lost her childhood sweetheart, Brandon, the father of her four schoolchildren. He was killed training in the east African country of Djibouti, which many Americans don't even know exists.