Column: Thoughts from Dr. Joe: A call for volunteers for La Cañada’s Memorial Day commemoration
The fallen, Yankee and Confederate, litter the fields of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee.
The dead of World War I were so numerous at the Second Battle of Ypres in the Flanders region of Belgium that John McCrae was moved and so wrote “In Flanders Fields.” Ironically, he discarded the poem because he believed it did not express sufficient sentiment. It was later retrieved by soldiers and became the most significant work of the war.
During World War II, the frozen dead at Bastogne were stacked for later burial. On Okinawa, E.B. Sledge wrote in his diary, “Every crater was half full of water, and many of them held a Marine corpse. The bodies lay pathetically just as they had been killed, half submerged in muck and water, rusting weapons still in hand.”
This has been the world that has shaped the commemoration that we call Memorial Day, a day born in darkness. Today, an age in which few of us go to war, the somber, deep, important meaning remains.
Memorial Day has become a company holiday, an excuse for a three-day weekend, and an opportunity for retail sales promotions that signal the beginning of the summer season. We have forgotten what it is all about. Unfortunately, with less the than 1% of the population in the military and the total number of veterans shrinking every day as we lose our greatest generation of World War II veterans, the general population doesn’t have a personal connection to Memorial Day. Subsequently, over the course of the last century, the number of families touched directly by the fire of war has dwindled. Meanwhile, the size and diversity of the American community have expanded. Thus, when America goes to war, she does so in single digits. Further, the actual share of those able to bear the burden of battle has declined.
From the initial days of the Revolutionary Army, the United States has been a nation of free peoples. Forced military service was an anathema and only for times of peril. Volunteerism in all aspects of public life, without coercion or special privilege, is the essence of Americanism, which transcends to military service. The population of those who bear the burden of sacrifice are atrophying; consequently, there exists a greater disparity between the soldier and America. Yet, America’s warriors fight and die because they have chosen to put their lives on the line for the rest of us. As long as our nation produces men and women willing to “bear any burden, pay any price,” our nation earns the liberty it enjoys. That is the meaning of Memorial Day.
On May 28, at Memorial Park in La Cañada, my team will commemorate those soldiers who lost their lives in American wars. The children of the foothill communities will prosecute this ceremony, for if this tradition is to survive, then it will evolve from them.
I am calling for volunteers. Email me at doctorjoe@ymail.com for more details.
JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.
