I have watched more than two decades of parades go by in Great Neck – they are a parade of faces which reveal perhaps more than any other event, a portrait of our town, a collective portrait of our community.
The faces have changed over the years, and yet there are also constants. There is the ever-present New York City Police Department Emerald Society Pipes and Drums Band, which have provided the beat for our parades year after year, and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy Color Guard and Band, though the cadets are an ever changing group. There is the Great Neck South High School “Rebels” marching band, but the youngsters are altogether different; this year marked the return after many, many years, of a marching band made up of our elementary school students.
The parade is a moving portrait of a changing community that celebrates and commemorates iconic, unchanging ideals.
Memorial Day is our time to remember and express our gratitude for those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve those values- freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights.
We actually can put a figure on how many have been lost in our wars: 1.3 million. Add to that the two soldiers killed in Afghanistan this Memorial Day.
We are still in the midst of 150th commemoration of the Civil War, the war which gave us Memorial Day. Many have claimed to have been the “first” to host the event that has come to be Memorial Day: there are the women of Savannah, GA who decorated soldiers’ graves in 1862; in 1863, there was the cemetery dedication at Gettysburg, PA which was a ceremony of commemoration at the graves of dead soldiers. Local historians in Boalsburg, PA, claim that ladies there decorated soldiers’ graves on July 4, 1864, so Boalsburg promotes itself as the birthplace of Memorial Day.
New York’s Village of Waterloo in Seneca County also claims to be the birthplace of Memorial Day: In May, 1866, a pharmacist named Henry Welles organized a “Decoration Day” in Waterloo to honor the New Yorkers who died during the Civil War. The graves of fallen soldiers were decorated, patriotic bunting was hung on buildings, and veterans of the Union Army paraded down Main Street, Waterloo.
“Decoration Day gained popularity and eventually spawned a national movement to recognize a single Memorial Day for all of the soldiers who died during the Civil War,” the state stated. (This past week, Gov. Cuomo unveiled a special Memorial Day exhibit at the State Capitol to honor New York’s service men and women who have died in war. You can explore the exhibit online
www.hallofgovernors.ny.gov/generic/memorialdayexhibit).
The first well-known observance of a Memorial Day-type observance after the Civil War was in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865. During the war, Union soldiers who were prisoners of war had been held at the Charleston Race Course where at least 257 Union prisoners died and were hastily buried in unmarked graves. Together with teachers and missionaries, blacks in Charleston, now free, organized a May Day ceremony in 1865. The freedmen cleaned up and landscaped the burial ground, built an enclosure and an arch labeled, “Martyrs of the Race Course.” Nearly 10,000 people, mostly freedmen, gathered to commemorate the dead.
The Civil War was the ultimate if you look for a war fought to preserve union, spread freedom and liberty. The first to sign up went with a sense of glory and the idea that the battle would be over in weeks if not months; no one anticipated a war that would slog on for five years, and take the lives of 618,000 Americans on both sides (still the most lethal of our wars). Wall Street financiers pocketed a bundle; Irish immigrants unleashed the Draft Riots.
Yes, we are in the midst of the commemoration of Civil War Sesquicentennial, and yet, there is little analysis and less remorse for a war that could have and should have been avoided (and which holds lessens for us in today’s polluted partisan political environment).
I have an easy way: if the Supreme Court, in the most blatantly awful decisions in American history, the Dred Scott Decision, had not said that escaped slaves who had made it to the North were still property that southerners could have reclaimed, Lincoln could have freed the slaves, prompted an exodus of blacks who would have left en masse and the Southern economy would have completely collapsed. Indeed, the Emancipation Proclamation was less about ending slavery than it was about unleashing a death blow on the South.
Another way that Civil War could have been avoided and still maintain the states rights that the South claimed was their basis for the war, could have occurred if the South had agreed to a compromise where they would gradually transition to freeing the slaves – allowing slaves to be educated and earn money and buy freedom, automatically freeing their children, and devising a system where freedmen would earn wages.
The South was responsible for the Civil War, and even 150 years after, instead of admitting it, and expressing remorse, there is new defiance.
And yet, the only reason that the Union and the notion of “freedom” and “liberty” prevailed was because the North theoretically won that war, though today, it seems the South controls the body politic and we are again hearing those catchphrases of “nullification” and “states rights” regarding everything from health care to immigration.
Today, we honor all those who died to preserve our freedom and liberty – the ideals we call American, and seem to paint all the wars with the same idealistic brush.
When people want to justify war, even Iraq and Afghanistan, they go to World War II. There is little argument that that war was indeed fought to preserve freedom and liberty; had Hitler conquered Europe and Japan conquered the Pacific, the notion of American-style democracy spreading across the world would have been impossible.
And yet, Germany now dominates Europe. Ironic, isn’t it.
Meanwhile, the Egyptians had their first democratic election in more than 5,000 years of history – and it didn’t take American soldiers fighting to win it for them – Obama’s motivating speech in Cairo and the implicit understanding that America would not prop up Mubarak was what enabled the Arab Spring. Nor did we have to have lose a single American in Libyans’ revolution toppling Muammar el-Gaddafi.
We say that our wars were fought to preserve our American values, but is that always the case?
This year’s Memorial Day parade in Great Neck was dedicated to Iraq War veterans and their families. Commander James Barton who has so nobly led the Memorial Day Parade committee for so many years, made touching remarks.
He reminded us that America paid a dear price in blood and treasure – 4,774 lives of service men and women lost, $800 billion (most went to Iraq politicians and Halliburton), plus 32,226 wounded.
“The payment doesn’t end with the sacrifice on the battlefield,” Barton said: “2,465 of us lost a spouse; 3,137 children lost a parent, 8,964 parents lost a child, 4,446 lost a grandchild.”
He didn’t mention the Americans lost in Afghanistan – that war is still ongoing, at least until 2014 when Obama has said combat will end and he will have brought down the number of troops from 68,000 to 20,000 until 2024, though Republicans want to keep it going. The number of Americans killed in Afghanistan so far is 1,985 U.S. soldiers killed, with two more added just on Memorial Day.
Meanwhile, the Republican House is pushing for legislation that seeks to slow down the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, keeping 68,000 through 2014.
“In good conscience, how can anyone ask the troops, to continue to risk their lives, limbs and emotional well being for this endless, futile war? Our military policy has failed,” says United for Peace & Justice, doing the unconscionable thing of questioning war on Memorial Day, when the nobility of the cause can never be questioned.
More of the soldiers who suffered grievous wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan are surviving – many are lucky enough to be able to be rehabilitated with state-of-the-art prosthetics. Americans will have to figure a way to provide $1 trillion in new funding for Veterans to fulfill the promise we have made to our veterans.
One of these veterans who survived against all odds was remembered by Great Neck Plaza Mayor Jean Celender this Memorial Day. She said that she had just heard about a personal friend, just 29 years old, whose legs were blown off in Afghanistan just two weeks ago. “What kind of life can he look forward to?”
Many have criticized the fact that in the era of an all-volunteer military, the brunt of war has fallen on just 1 percent of our population, with these soldiers forced to serve many tours of duty in the battlefield. One of the results of this has been an incredibly high suicide rate. In fact, the rate of suicide currently exceeds the rate of soldiers killed in battle.
But because the impacts of war are concentrated among the population, the rest of us do not feel the pain and suffering of war.
These critics say that a draft would force the politicians who send our children to war – too often for political reasons and to profit the military contractors – would think twice if people had a vote.
Well, it didn’t work in Vietnam, which if you look at the new war memorial at the Village Green, shows the dates as 1958-1975, making that one the longest war. More than 56,000 Americans perished in that war, and untold thousands more lived with horrible physical and mental scars.
Obama dedicated this Memorial Day, the 50th Anniversary of Vietnam War, to the Vietnam War veterans, noting in his address, “You came home and were sometimes denigrated rather than celebrated, a national shame, a disgrace that never should have happened.”
Obama has done more to recognize and help returning veterans and help save them from unemployment, homelessness, depression than any other president; Bush never hesitated to “support the troops” with flag-waving and slogans, but treated the soldiers as cannon fodder for his political agenda. The wounded warriors were liabilities.
Romney in his Memorial Day campaign speech sounded much like the Bush/Cheney campaign, pressing for more military spending. “A strong America is the best deterrent to war there ever has been invented.”
It’s like theater: if you see a gun on stage, you know it will be used.
If we did have a draft, Bush (or Romney) would have had an unlimited supply of cannon fodder for his wars of convenience and profit.
Now, with the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision (one of the worst in history), you could imagine the Koch Brothers and Fox News waging a propaganda war perhaps restoring the Russians as the evil doers (as Romney has said), or pushing us to attack Iran (as Romney has said he would do, when Obama’s economic sanctions actually seem to be working), just as Hearst’s “yellow journalism” brought us into the Spanish American War of 1898, using the lie of an exploded war ship to seal the deal, and just as Bush-Cheney-Rice used the threat of a “mushroom cloud” to bring us into Iraq with Bush’s ‘preemptive war’ policy.
On Memorial Day, we somberly remember the sacrifice and suffering of those who perished in Iraq and those who came home from the fight, but do we remember the Iraq War? Was that a noble cause? Was that a fight to preserve American freedom and values? Or was it fought to benefit Halliburton and Blackwater? What do you tell the 8,964 parents who lost a child in this war of choice?
No, there should not be a return to a draft, when a corrupt political leader would have an unlimited source of cannon fodder before the “democratic” process could work, if ever.
There should be a volunteer army, when people would sign up to a just cause, a real cause.
The somberness of Memorial Day serves to silence any opponents to military and military spending. Those who advocate peace, who advocate peaceful means and an end to war, are branded as not supporting the troops – as if patriotism means war, and advocating peace is traitorous.
The Memorial Day Air Show at Jones Beach pays tribute to the fallen and to the bravery of those who go to battle, but it is largely a vehicle to recruit (as the U.S. Navy Blue Angels unabashedly pronounces), as well as to show to taxpayers how wonderful their spending has been on such state-of-the-art weapons as the F-22 Raptor.
But Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under Clinton, dared to write in “Nation of Change “his reflections on Memorial Day: “We can best honor those who have given their lives for this nation in combat by making sure our military might is proportional to what America needs.
“The United States spends more on our military than do China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, and Germany put together.
“With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop – but the ‘base’ defense budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships, and tanks – not including the costs of actually fighting wars) is scheduled to rise. The base budget is already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation.
“One big reason: It’s almost impossible to terminate large defense contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their plants and facilities in politically important congressional districts. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and others have made spending on national defense into America’s biggest jobs program.
“So we keep spending billions on Cold War weapons systems like nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, and manned combat fighters that pump up the bottom lines of defense contractors but have nothing to do with 21st-century combat. ..
“The absence of a budget deal on Capitol Hill is supposed to trigger an automatic across-the-board ten-year cut in the defense budget of nearly $500 billion, starting January.
“But Republicans have vowed to restore the cuts. The House Republican budget cuts everything else — yet brings defense spending back up. Mitt Romney’s proposed budget does the same.
“Yet even if the scheduled cuts occur, the Pentagon is still projected to spend over $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.
“At the very least, hundreds of billions could be saved without jeopardizing the nation’s security by ending weapons systems designed for an age of conventional warfare. We should shrink the F-35 fleet of stealth fighters. Cut the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons, ballistic missile submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And take a cleaver to the Navy and Air Force budgets. (Most of the action is with the Army, Marines, and Special Forces.)
“At a time when Medicare, Medicaid, and non-defense discretionary spending (including most programs for the poor, as well as infrastructure and basic R&D) are in serious jeopardy, Obama and the Democrats should be calling for even more defense cuts.
“A reasonable and rational defense budget would be a fitting memorial to those who have given their lives so we may remain free.”
This year, Great Neck’s 88th commemoration of Memorial Day, the grand marshal, Jack Weinstein was someone who really does epitomize both sides of the proposition: those who fight and those who uphold the American ideals. Jack Weinstein served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of World War II as a submariner. While the primary mission was to rescue and recover drowned airmen, Weinstein was responsible for sinking several enemy vessels, for which he received a Letter of Commendation from COMSUBPAC. He served out his military career in the Naval Reserves until his honorable discharge in 1949.
He went into law, was a law professor and in private practice, and then accepted the call to public service: he was appointed to the U.S. District Court in 1967, and served as chief judge from 1980-1988, achieving serious status in 1993.
We don’t have a parade for the peacemakers but at last, we have a Memorial Day grand marshal who really does epitomize the ideals our soldiers fight for: justice and freedom and right to trial and the quaint notion of “innocent until proven guilty.”
