http://www.republican-eagle.com/event/article/id/70231/group/homepage/By: David Harris, Red Wing, The Republican Eagle
In commemorating historical events it is good that we celebrate courage and sacrifice whatever the circumstances that evoked them (“Celebrating Veterans Day,” R-E Nov. 3).
But there is a risk of convincing ourselves and younger generations coming up that the events themselves were glorious and triumphant, a risk of promoting the repetition of tragedy.
Red Wing, like communities all over the country, is about to celebrate Veterans Day, a time to honor those who gave up part — and sometimes all — of their lives in service to our country.
We must not forget that this was originally called Armistice Day, not a day to celebrate and honor the soldier, but a solemn day to remember the end of the “War to End All Wars” in 1919, which only a generation later, after we entered the second world war, was renamed World War I.
I grew up during that second world war, went to college during the Korean War, and proudly enlisted as a young surgeon for two years in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, but I will not celebrate those years.
The Korean War was a tragic stalemate in which over 50,000 GIs and uncounted Korean and Chinese soldiers died, leaving a country still divided today.
The Vietnam War, as I came to realize, was an unjustified war that killed 57,000 young Americans and over 2,000,000 Vietnamese.
Wars continue
There followed a series of covert wars in Latin America, Asia, and Africa in which American casualties were either unknown or unreported, or — as in Serbia and Bosnia — avoided by dropping bombs on both soldiers and civilians rather than risking American lives.
And now we have entered on an era of seemingly endless war in the Middle East, a war which, for all the rationalizations and fabrications by our government, Democrats and Republicans alike, is a war for oil and economic hegemony.
As a Jew growing up with memories of the Holocaust, in which the bulk of my wife’s family was exterminated in the gas chambers, I find it especially painful to see the country of Israel become a major contributor to a war for domination over the Arabic and Persian Muslim world.
Whatever one thinks of war — just or unjust, for freedom or for oppression — the cost to the United States of maintaining an empire overseas and the cost to the American people of corporate globalization has meant an uncertain future in which national security means ever-shrinking personal security, in which wealth and power for those on top brings anger and frustration for the common person.
In this environment, it is not surprising that division and discord flourish in politics as do violence and escape into a fantasy world of drugs and sex among our youth.
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