I'm a member of the Oregon Symphonic Band, and in recent years, it had become tradition for us to play a Memorial Day Concert at the Willamette National Cemetary. Obviously, we did not do this last year nor this year, but a thought struck me yesterday: Despite not enjoying the overtly patriotic nature of the music, I miss the concert, I miss playing the music. While the ceremony is indeed for the servicemen and women who are buried at Willamette, and for their families in attendance, it's one of the moments where I reflect on the servicemen in my own family -- namely, my mother's grandfather, who was in la Résistance Belge (and indeed, completely coincidental, one of the pieces we play is "March of the Belgian Parachuters"), and my father's father, who was a Marine in the Pacific Theatre. I'm of the strong opinion that waging war is giving into our base instincts, acting much like our evolutionary cousins chimpanzees but with faster and more efficient ways to kill each other, and for us to have a military such as we do is but to stroke off the politicians who will never be endangered to see the front lines of any action themselves. However, while I don't know much of my grandfather's service and what action he saw if any, I hesitate to think how Belgium or Europe as a whole might be different, however marginally, without my great-grandfather's efforts, no matter how insignificant his actions might ultimately have been when cast against the bigger picture of the resistance against the Nazis and fascism as a whole. And because of that, I miss this annual concert. To play some patriotic jingoisms and to reflect on why people go into the Service -- whether drafted, like my grandfather, or to defend against a foreign and ideological invader, like my great-grandfather, or, for many people later on, because joining the service is one of the few viable ways to improve their life. It shouldn't be, but I understand the reality, and I can't begrudge the individuals for such choices. So, to Gerald Sellers, to Marcel Poncin, who served in the same war on different sides of the world, I raise my bass clarinet to you. May we find a way to stop this dick measuring competition we call war, may we find a way for the US to stop being the world's policeman, and may the world ease into a decently cooperative equilibrium to fill the ensuing power vacuum. Unrealistic, of course, but the fewer bodies filling national cemetaries of any country, the better.
I'm not a big fan of Memorial Day. I understand the import, but there are two events in particular that tarnish it for me. One, my hometown growing up has the dubious honor of claiming the beginning of the holiday. The first soldier who died in the Civil War was from there, and the women of the town decorated his grave and commemorated the event. Problem was, he was a slaver. Personally owned slaves, voted for secession as a delegate at the Virginia secession convention. Called up a militia after the John Brown raid specifically to kill anyone who tried the same. He led that group at the battle of Fairfax Station, and was shot dead by Union calvary. Two, the whitewashing of the event, from probably was it's real origins in the US. Why? It occurred in the heart of the Confederacy, in Charlestown SC, home of treason and Fort Sumter. The CSA held US prisoners there at a race track. By the end of the war 250 of them had died from disease and malnutrition, and the bodies were thrown into a mass grave. After the war ended the freed slaves organized a group to go to that site, where everyone knew of the death of the US soliders, and they dug them up. They transferred them to new individual graves, with headstones. As they worked a crowd formed and thousands of people then spontaneously marched around Charleston, the first memorial day parade, holding the US flag to honor the men that had given their lives in the conflict that ultimately led to the destruction of slavery. The Charleston politicians of course would have nothing to do with it, and the fact it occurred was buried in history, like so many other events until recent days. A historian happened to find a packet from 1906 that mentioned the incident, and tracked down the primary source material - it had run in newspapers in the Charleston Courier and the New York Tribune. It's only recently been brought to attention after languishing as forgotten history for 15 decades.
