On this Memorial Day, I’ve been pondering the problem of gratitude, not only for my children (the two still at home) but for myself. Millions of soldiers and their families sacrificed much, even their lives, and my family and I have gained from their losses. Their losses are real, and often heart-breaking, and I cannot read a story like In the Name of the Sons without pain, and a little guilt.
I know they suffered and I and those I love gained much (and much we take for granted) from their suffering, but I find it hard to feel gratitude, or to feel it as strong as I think I should. But it’s not, entirely, my fault.
People raised when and where I was were taught that wars were expressions of national self-interest or the designs of the powerful and that any national hero or patriotic story could be exposed as at best a mixture of good and evil, if not an act of self-interest or desire, when it wasn’t simply made up by the public myth-makers. The Constitution may have spoken of several freedoms, but these were limited in application to certain people and applied with favoritism for the rich and powerful. We actually read something in a social studies class by Charles A. Beard.
As the “humanistic marxist” Theodor Adorno famously put it, “There is no monument of civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism.” That was the mind we were taught to have. Slavery in the new United States was not a failure of the men who wrote the Constitution and of their descendents, but evidence that the whole enterprise was at root a sham or a con. George Washington was really this, Thomas Jefferson really that.
Growing up in a college town in New England, my peers and I got all this years before most children would have done, though eventually this mind must have spread to the corn fields of the Midwest and the forests and fields of the rural south. We were taught cynicism as a form of sophistication, of seeing through what other people ignorantly accepted. (Though I suspect, thinking back, that many of our teachers may have been less dogmatic than they appear in memory, but being adolescents, my friends and I missed this — and in fact the more leftwing we were, the more our teachers praised us.)
We learned to think like Adorno, and that was not a good thing. But not entirely bad either. I don’t regret the training in questioning the public stories, because many of them were exactly what my teachers said they were. We homeschool our younger two children, and we are always looking for good books free of the typical contemporary prejudices and predilections.
Yet many of the old books are startlingly naïve, or just one step up from propaganda. America is almost perfect, its every policy enlightened, its every foreign adventure undertaken solely for the good of others. No American Indian was, for example, ever mistreated. Anything impossible to whitewash, like racial segregation, is simply left out. The story, though often written by ardent Christians, is an alternative to the Christian one, and one in which the Christian story has been absorbed and put to alien ends.
My childhood training prepared me for Christianity, when I first saw it clearly, especially for its moral realism, which I think I first saw, though I didn’t then know it was a Christian work, when reading The Lord of the Rings at twelve. Everyone is a sinner, no motive is ever unmixed, the ego and desire always intrude, yes, all true, yet that it is not the whole story: men created in the image of God can be heroes and even saints, but — a twist — that heroism and sanctity may not look like any the world recognizes, including the world represented by the books I just described.
My teachers had taught me to see behind our society’s mythology, and that mythology included secularism in all its forms, conservative as well as liberal. They prepared me to see the world as composed of two Cities and to give each its due, to be able to say “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” as St. Thomas More also famously said.
Yet, child of my childhood schooling as I am, I’m still disturbed by my inability to feel moved as the old men march by in the Memorial Day parade. They are a kind of public memory, and as Robert Wilken writes in Keeping the Commandments, these incarnate public memories
are not abstractions, but concrete testimonies to the lives and convictions of those who have gone before us. As John Lukacs has reminded us, there is “recorded” history and also “remembered” history. The things we remember in our common life quietly convey a precious inheritance that helps us keep faith with the dead and form, in unspoken ways, the sensibilities and attitudes, not to say hopes and dreams, of those who will follow us. There is no greater betrayal than to impoverish a generation yet unborn by willful acts of amnesia. What we honor in our public life has a bearing on how we live as individuals.
I’m not sure what the answer is to feeling too little gratitude on the day we ought to remember those to whom we owe much, except to follow the traditional Christian instruction to practice what you believe, and pray that the feeling of belief follows. Not that it matters much if it does. You can’t gin up feelings on demand, but feelings don’t really matter.
I have thought of one thing to do, since my Church teaches us to pray for the departed: go to the cemetery at some regular interval and walk along the graves, praying for each soldier or sailor whose grave I find. They may have no one to pray for them. It is a little thing, a tiny investment of time, but it is something.
And I can applaud the old men in their uniforms as they march by. Another small thing, but at least they’ll hear it.
May 31st, 2010 | 12:54 pm
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May 31st, 2010 | 1:03 pm
A prescription for restoration of your spiritual health: Read “The Natural Virtue of Patriotism” by R. R. Reno on the homepage today. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of ideologically driven education. An article appeared some years ago written by a man who had grown up in Soviet Russia. He had been carefully taught to hate all Americans as evil and accepted this teaching without question. He described the anger and revulsion he experienced on learning that he had been taught lies. Education, such as that you describe, which purports to expose errors of emphasis (or outright lies) in previous teaching and then goes to do precisely the same thing from the opposite point of view has great power. It undermines the students’ ability to tease out the rightness of a matter that is (always) intertwined with the wrongness that is present in any human endeavor and leads to the kind of inability to trust that you describe.
May 31st, 2010 | 2:26 pm
I’m not sure why you would pray for people who are already dead.
May 31st, 2010 | 3:33 pm
A few years ago, I set up a library and volunteered as the librarian, at a small private school attended by my young daughter. I found a book, which I read to the 1st grade students there just before Memorial Day.
The book, written by Margot Theis Raven, is titled “America’s White Table.”. The story involves a mother telling her children the significance of each part of a special place setting they are laying out on an isolated white table beside their own to honor an uncle who is either a POW or
MIA (I can’t remember which).
I cannot begin to tell you the impact that story had on those kids. They all wanted to share the stories of their own relatives who had served or who were serving. And, they loved the idea of setting a special place setting in their absence to honor them and to keep them close in mind.
I recommend the book and the practice, for both young and old, of setting that empty place to honor those who serve, whether they are MIA or simply missing from home.
God bless them and keep them and whisper our gratitude to them.
May 31st, 2010 | 3:52 pm
How odd it is to read this, David. As you know, I grew up in a family more leftist than yours — members of the Communist Party, in fact. Yet because the Soviets were our allies during WWII, and I was born during the war, American Communists were intensely patriotic during my early childhood, and even after the Cold War began, they still gave the military a great deal of respect because they had, after all, defeated the Nazis.
In the late 40s and early 50s, when I was in public elementary school, everybody’s father had been in the war, so it was an ordinary thing to talk about the military in a positive way. We sang all the service songs in assembly — the Marine Hymn, Anchors Aweigh, etc. — as well as the patriotic ones.
Perhaps these experiences have something to do with the ease with which I left my family’s radicalism behind in early adulthood — regaining my love for my country and my appreciation for the military (this was during Vietnam) wasn’t as hard to do as developing it from scratch would have been. My brother and sister, a few years behind me in age, and with different experiences, think I’m out of my mind.
And now, with a husband who went through hell as a Marine, and chokes up while he’s making his Memorial Day speeches, how can I be anything but grateful to such men as that?
May 31st, 2010 | 3:53 pm
Diane,
I happened to meet Margot Raven at the Republican convention in 2008. She is married to a Vietnam War POW.
May 31st, 2010 | 5:23 pm
Kathy,
The real question is “Why wouldn’t you pray for someone who is dead?” (And in what way would such a prayer have to differ from one for someone still with us?)
David Mills,
A touchingly honest essay. It leaves me with little concern for your spiritual health in this matter.
May 31st, 2010 | 6:19 pm
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May 31st, 2010 | 6:52 pm
Judy: Oh no, my parents weren’t leftists. At the time they were New Deal Democrats, which was already getting to be an old-fashioned point of view. My mother idolized Eleanor Roosevelt — I was once ejected from the dinner table for making fun of her writing — and despised Richard Nixon. But my schooling, that was leftist in method if not in conclusion, even when my teachers were simply liberals.
May 31st, 2010 | 10:53 pm
One more thing: An e-mail friend sends the link to something he wrote on a related subject: “Radio/TV patriots snipe from safety of homefront” at http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/256882. He has strong feelings about this.
June 1st, 2010 | 11:25 am
Your “e-mail friend” thinks one’s vocation confers more and less legitimacy on opinions about public matters, and out of pique, he exaggerates his opponents’ positions. (Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh do not regularly accuse people of cowardice.) Those who serve are not above criticism, and their politics have nothing to do with their service. He is a poor example of a serviceman to so sloppily mix the issues in an attempt to vilify those who disagree with his politics.
I have never served, I am a patriot, I am conservative, and I do not hold my manhood cheap next to military people, with or without a chip on their shoulders. I respect their sacrifice. I assess their politics independently. I am not intimidated by hot-headed claims of illegitimacy based on irrelevant factors from either side. The chickenhawks and the Sussmans are on equal moral ground, both abusing the separation of ethos and logos.
And holidays, remembrances, and ceremonies in honor of servicemen are meant to demonstrate our respect as a nation. What we feel or do not feel is irrelevant. You don’t have to feel gratitude to show gratitude. In fact, our emotionalist over-emphasis on feelings turn what should be solemn events into maudlin festivals of sentimentality that cheapen the civic ritual.
June 14th, 2010 | 3:03 pm
[...] for pastors: a friend who pastors a small Evangelical church nearby writes in response to Memorial Gratitude, my reflection on the difficulty some of us have in feeling the kind of gratitude that soldiers [...]
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