Giving Thanks to the Dead

 ON THIS SPECIAL  HOLIDAY we honor the fallen heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom, for whatever passes for freedom, for whatever we think freedom is. Freedom, said Goethe, is nothing other than the opportunity to do what is reasonable under all circumstances.Since obviously there is in life often no real opportunity to do anything reasonable, freedom is tenuous and sporadic, sometimes with us, sometimes not. Another way of looking at it is that no matter what circumstances confront us, there is always the opportunity to do something which seems reasonable, and thus, we are always free. Yet another option is that nobody really knows what freedom is, free will maybe be nothing but an illusion, and therefor what we fight and die for is nothing other than a concept we hold dearly, a concept we cannot define. Freedom in the end, is a state of mind. Immanuel Kant said that he was in awe of two things: the starry skies above him and the moral law within him. On Memorial Day, what amazes me, what I am in awe of , in a mostly negative sort of way, is humanity's seemingly infinite capacity to inflict suffering upon itself with perpetual organized violence, and our creative capacity to reconcile our violent behavior, to honor and justify it,  within the framework of whatever the organization, the country considers to be its best interests. Our own national violence is always justified; that of other foreign nations is usually not. Only if they fought as our allies, as if our enemies did not have a point of view. Thus we slaughter each other, then we bury the dead, then we honor the dead with holidays. An equal and opposite holiday decrying the insanity of war would be appropriate. Peace day, maybe. Or better yet: "War Renunciation Day".  On that special holiday we would all acknowledge our collective sin of of our inability to resolve our disagreements in a civilized manner. Einstein sat behind his desk, clad in his usual grey sweatshirt with attached ink pen, looked somberly up and into the camera in that famous photograph, and responded to the question: "As long as there are people, there will be war". he was probably right. he usually was, even though he mad the horrible mistake of endorsing a crazy scheme of deliberately injecting excess carbon into the atmosphere to warm the atmosphere and increase agricultural yield in a starving post World War Two world. Hey. we all make mistakes. but let's not make the mistake of commemorating wartime sacrifice without adding a touch of war renunciation. We may not eliminate war, ever, but by god we can at least try. On this special holiday may we honor our fallen heroes and resolve to somehow find a way to stop making needlessly dead heroes. We need a new system. Under the present one, the people to whom we give our deepest thanks are unable to appreciate them.