Memorial Day: Robert Lowell, "America the Beautiful," and a few thoughts...

 

On a thousand small town New England greens,

the old white churches hold their air

of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags

quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

from Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"

I started to think this morning about Memorial Day, and all of the soldiers who have given

their lives --whether all at once, in or from battle, or over the years, slowly wasting and

fading away-- and Lowell's poem kept popping into my brain. So I decided this 

morning to read it again; it's been several years since I really dug into it, and at the 

time, I was more focused on the strange images: a little boy's nose smearing across

aquarium glass, the dinosaur-like heavy equipment, the ditch with dead Black

soldiers. 

Today, though, I read it through, and I think I finally get it. The braiding of stories

into the poem's narrative creates the sense of loss-- especially the loss of childhood

wonder, and the realization that what we memorialize may be tainted by biases.

Shaw didn't love his infantrymen, and in fact,

Two months after marching through Boston,

half the regiment was dead;

at the dedication...

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city's throat.

I wonder if we could take a metaphorical step back and truly take a hard look at

what we are memorializing. Yes, it is important to recall the sacrifices made by 

military men and women, and I would add to that, the sacrifices made by their 

families as well. But even under that gloss of honor and glory, there are 

undercurrents, threads, of hostility, bias, racism, etc. that permeate. 

Yesterday, the closing hymn at church was "America the Beautiful." My heart 

rebels at the second verse, which proclaims,

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare of freedom beat
Across the wilderness!

I have a really hard time celebrating colonizers who decimated the indigenous 

peoples, for example. Was it a "thoroughfare of freedom" or was it a land-grab? I just

stopped singing.

This is the core of the problem: when we have a holiday that is meant to honor

those who have come before, do we focus only on what perceived good it has done for us,

or can we, at least for a few sobering moments, consider what has gone on from

both sides of the question? That is not to say we sympathize with those we held

to be enemies, like Nazis. But the Civil War had family members fighting and

killing each other. And Memorial Day has its roots that begin just after the

fighting stopped,  and "some records show that one of the earliest

Memorial Day commemorations was organized by a group of formerly

enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina less than a month after

the Confederacy surrendered in 1865."

At any rate, Memorial Day, regardless of its unclear beginnings,

became a federal holiday in 1971, just as I was beginning my elementary

schooling. It is not a generations-long, established holiday like some

people would assert, and it was codified during the height of the Vietnam War.

History requires context.

So today, for Memorial Day, I think we would be best served to

remember not only the war dead and their grieving families

throughout US history as well as in our own communities and lives, but

we should take a honest look at what we as a country have lost, have

allowed to happen, and for what calculated gains. Maybe it'll help put the present

time and our divisiveness in a different light. What we, the living, do today will either

honor or undercut their best efforts.

In peace,

C