The North Coast times-eagle., April 01, 2003, Page 16, Image 16

PAGE 16
NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , APRIUMA Y 2003
DRAWINGS BY ASTORIA ARTIST ROGER HAYES
FLOWERS FOR ALL
At the end of May the United States gets sentimental about its citizens who died
in its wars. Graves of American war dead, who are buried all over the world, are smeared
with flowers and tears. Hundreds of thousands more remain unfound and unburied and have
provided nutrients for warblasted soil or meals for undersea life.
The dead are not remembered as the terrible cost of the wars that killed them They
are used instead to recruit fresher crops for planting underground.
Memorial Day has from its beginning (just after the Civil War) been a rallying cry for
war, however unusual it might seem for the specter of death to be a successful recruiter. The
war dead are praised by the country’s leaders who extol their lifeless co-conspirators to soufid
the warcry for more wars and suggest to newer generations that only such acts of sacrifice
justify the lives of able citizenry. Families and friends lay flowers on the graves, and though
they grieve, they seldom question the rightness of the loss.
Each modest gesture toward peace is buried underneath official contempt and scorned
by a war mentality that, like weapons technology, is vividly self-perpetuating. Harsh religious and
military values are imposed on our society, which seems indifferent to its ideals of freedom and
equality War and the worship of wealth and power are substituted for human rights. Our most
cherished values serve as warcries to commit horror, and we choose leaders who offer us
nightmares disguised as dream worlds
The only purpose for the existence of armies, despite claims of righteousness and
deceptions of pageantry, is the destruction of other human beings. Soldiering is big business,
the first order of every empire as it has always been for generations of warmen sent out to kill
and die by every culture and society, but soldiers themselves are little more than expendable
pawns, readily discarded. Paeans of glory, duty and patriotism are perhaps a greater treachery
than the hoax of original sin.
Much emphasis upon heroic sacrifice will undoubtedly be the official piety this Memorial
Day in the aftermath of a questionable war. Perhaps the showy pageant of mourning over the
few American deaths in Iraq is to mask its shaky premise and also, more ominously callous,
disregard the probably large toll of innocent Iraqi civilians killed in the war
Americans might wish to take stock of what they are being led into before steadily
increasing numbers of coffins of American dead regularly arrive for interment in the homeland
as a consequence of protracted wars. With the principal political policy of the United States
interminably militaristic, we can expect more stacks of body bags of American soldiers.
Arguments for war are as stale as the bones beneath the flowers. The world has
changed. Humanity has seen it from space, small and frail; the same technical mastery that
sends rockets to the stars is also capable of sending them on a much shorter, final journey of
obliteration. The most fundamental struggle in history is between advocates of world suicide
and those who oppose it, which is the real war of our era. If we do not reverse direction we
will all probably be among the war dead, and there will be no one to provide us graves or bring
us flowers.
- michael M c C usker
Bikes & Beyond
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