In Remembrance
Freeman Ashworth -- May 5, 2010
Memorial Day – sixty-five years ago the Second World War wrapped up, the worst war in history. Every participant was tired and wanted desperately just to go home, lick the wounds and study war no more. The world today looks much different than it did in the mid-1940’s, whereas most people who remember those times are either dead or well on their way. It was a trying time for all concerned, for we wanted to wrap it up in such a way that this holocaust would never happen again. The entry into WWII was less than 20 years after the close of the First World War. Between December 7, 1941 and December 31, 1946, America had over 16 million people serving in the armed services. Over one million of them came home as casualties or never came home. We wanted such a tragedy never to come upon the Earth ever again.
Years passed, wounds healed, and the new generation has only been introduced to minor world conflicts. Flare-ups, such as Viet Nam, Korea, and the Middle East will be very hard, if not impossible to stop; however, the threat of a third World War now seems improbable. Even the fear of the cold war that plagued the late 1960’s and early 70’s seems to have abated although the weaponry is still around and becoming increasingly available for almost every nation. There even exists a certain glibness about Memorial Day that tends to rub me the wrong way.
We go through the motions of remembering our war dead, even to the placing of flags and flowers on their graves. We leave the cemetery or the parade, put our flags and uniforms away and treat the rest of the day as a gala festival. We celebrated Memorial Day; now let’s get on with it!
Let us get serious for a moment. Keeping the peace is much more than merely becoming so strong that no nation would dare attack us. That, of course helps. If we were to look at Germany after the close of WWI, we would have seen a broken nation. They had essentially put their entire economy into that war. Now they were broke. The 1913 Deutsche-mark in 1923 was not worth one-billionth of its pre-decade value. Talk about inflation. We have heard that it took almost a wheelbarrow of their monetary system just to purchase a loaf of bread. No nation can survive under those conditions. On the other hand, the Allied nations continually dunned Germany for retribution for all the causalities the war had caused. The only hope for Germany was to give people jobs by building war machinery, and build it, they did. We know all too well, what happened then. They used it.
Unfortunately, the lessons of war have to be re-learned by each generation. Just reading about the atrocities inflicted onto another does not set the human mind to the stark realities of war. There is far more to ‘loving thy neighbor, than simply ‘leaving him be.’ There is much more to loving thy neighbor than seeing to it that he is well clothed and well fed. It also involves a concern that everything is right with him. There are evils from war that have no cure and it takes big minds to be able to forgive most of war’s evils. However, it is futile to concentrate our thoughts upon the things we can do little about or nothing.
We may honor the dead on this Memorial Day, but let us give help to those living who suffered the tragedies of war – our wounded soldiers and sailors, the widows and children of the war dead, restore ruins. Let us give helping hands to those who need help. We can do these things and hopefully our actions will prevent another war from starting.
Until later, cheers!