Last Friday, as the week downshifted into the
Memorial Day three-day holiday, the official Twitter account of the Democratic
Party wished the country a “Happy Memorial Day weekend, everyone!” and tweeted a pic of – whom else? – President Obama lapping at an ice cream cone
while media lapdogs zoomed their cameras in to capture the photo op. CNN anchor
Jake Tapper injected a note of perspective by tweeting back, “Respectfully, @TheDemocrats, this is not what Memorial Day
weekend is about.”
Indeed it is not, but for Barack Obama, of
course, everything is about Barack Obama. And for the Democratic party, everything
is about selling the American people a crock of big-government idolatry, and so
they followed up the Obama photo with tweets about a 15% off holiday sale at
their website store – because nothing memorializes the men and women of our
armed forces who paid the ultimate price for their country quite like a
discounted “I Heart O’bama” Shamrock Lapel Sticker or a “Like a Boss” POTUS t-shirt.
This all came in the wake of the fall of
Ramadi in Iraq to the demonic forces of ISIS – you know, the JV team that has
absolutely nothing to do with Islam. In the early years of the war in Iraq,
more American lives were lost in the intense fighting to secure the province of
Anbar, which includes Ramadi and Fallujah, than anywhere else in the country.
Now our warriors who survived that fighting,
and the families and friends of those who didn’t, are watching ISIS reclaim
Iraq and are wondering what that sacrifice was for. It makes the loss of their
loved ones and brothers-in-arms painful all over again. But not to worry – Obama
has declared the fall of Ramadi a mere “minor setback”; meanwhile he and the
Democratic party, who have worked assiduously to undermine America’s war efforts
and to gut our military, urge you to celebrate a “Happy Memorial Day!” and
enjoy your ice cream and BBQ.
In the very same month in 2004 when American
warriors faced escalated attacks in Ramadi and Fallujah, my 81-year-old father
Roger E. Tapson, a former U.S. Army Staff Sergeant and veteran of World War II,
died in Sherman, Texas. He was buried near a small lake in the rolling,
pastoral grounds of the Dallas-Ft. Worth National Cemetery alongside thousands
of other veterans. There, those veterans, as poet Stephen Spender might say, are “feted by the waving grass, and by the streamers of white cloud,
and whispers of wind in the listening sky.”
That cemetery is exactly the kind of place my
dad would have described – without a hint of New Age devaluation of the word –
as “spiritual.” It was the way I once heard him describe a still, brisk, early
autumn morning on a gorgeously wooded golf course, his favorite place to be.
Spiritual indeed. To stand in a military
cemetery among the unadorned, uniform white markers that stretch out in precise
rows like an army-in-waiting, is to feel a spiritually heightened quality to
your surroundings that demands humility, gratitude, and a more solemn
reverence. You can feel that – to quote Spender once again – the fallen warriors
have “left the vivid air signed with their honor.”
This is not to diminish the final resting
place of anyone interred in civilian burial grounds, but the “vivid
air” of a military cemetery is undeniably suffused with something extra,
because it’s not merely a graveyard, but a memorial to qualities that
constitute the best of humanity – honor, courage, dignity, service and
sacrifice – and to warriors who once embodied them. Their grave markers stand
as a challenge to those of us who remain.
Honor, courage, dignity, service, sacrifice –
how many of us civilians can say that we commit to embodying those qualities in
our daily lives? How many of us can say we are truly tested, body and soul, ever,
much less on a daily basis, the way that the men and women of our military have
been, and continue to be? How many of us can say we are ready and willing to do
what is required for our country and our fellow Americans, even at the cost of
our lives? Precious few if any, I would guess, and we civilians are all the
lesser mortals for it.
That makes us all the more fortunate that
there are Americans who can and
do rise to that challenge on
front lines around the world. It takes a special person to embrace that
responsibility and earn a uniform of the United States armed forces, and it
takes a special family – warriors too in their own way (“they also serve who
only stand and wait,” as John Milton wrote) – to support their loved one from the home
front.
That is why Memorial Day is not about ice
cream and BBQs. It’s certainly not about Barack Obama, a man who has done more
to diminish America’s standing, power, and military than any single figure in
American history. It’s not a time to celebrate. It's a day to be humbled and
grateful that the men and women of the United States military have the
rare and noble qualities it takes to be a sword between us and America’s
enemies – when our government officials let them. It’s a time to honor the warriors
who have purchased our freedom and rights and prosperity with their lives.
And this year in particular, it’s a time to
meditate on the challenge that those fallen veterans have left us civilians:
the challenge to do our part, to earn
what our veterans have handed us, and to be warriors ourselves on the home
front, so that their hard-won victories and sacrifices were not for nothing.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 5/25/15)
