Memorial Day

Every now and then, I like to sing our national anthem in the shower. It's a tricky little song with music that can be quite powerful, as I'm sure we all know. But in these last few years, I've come to view the song in a much more mournful light than the traditional, triumphant, pre-football game rendition conveys.

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I am struck by the imagery here. The only means by which the observer knows his flag still waves is the violence of the war which surrounds it. Only the light from the explosions reassures him that his cause still stands. The last lines now speak to me with a cold mockery: the land of the free and the home of the brave, that place lit by the fire of the war which sustains it.

I realize this reading was not intended by the author, but it can't help jump out at me now. I spent many silent moments thinking about violence this past September. The anniversary of 9/11 always gives me pause, less due to the events of that day than the realization that the students in my classroom were toddlers when it happened. They've never known a world without a War on Terror, or US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've always taken their shoes off at airports. That seems like a sad thing to me.

And of course the recent events in Iraq and Syria have also occupied my thoughts—the beheading of innocents, the brainwashing of children, the rape of hundreds, the slaughter of thousands.

So I find myself, as many other thinkers have before me, having to chose between two evils: death and death. Do I stand with my country, "support the troops", raise the flag, and exterminate the enemy, accepting as inevitable the "collateral damage" of civilian deaths? Or do I stand by and let the world sort itself out, let ISIS carry on its invasion, persecution, slaughter, and rape? There are times when doing nothing is surely the graver crime.

Where on this war-torn beach do we draw the lines of justice? Are we capable of judging when members of ISIS have lost their right to live? After all, many of the fighters were simply children who were stolen from their homes and brought up to think the way they do. Many are themselves the victims of oppression and violence and are simply acting out in the only way they know. Fighters for ISIS are just as much a product of their time and place as you or I. Should they be punished for the sins of their circumstances?

But what if there is simply no other way to stop them? We cannot airlift teachers into Iraq to instill a sense of multicultural appreciation or to educate ISIS members on the pragmatic benefits of the separation between church and state. There will be no talk of inalienable rights or government of, by, and for the people. These are largely Western ideas which took root in Western soil. What if the only option we have to save thousands of innocent lives to kill thousands of "guilty" ones? The line must be drawn somewhere, and since we have the bigger sticks, we are the ones who get to draw it.

To me, each death is a tragedy. Each death is a failure of our civilization to comes to terms with itself, to take care of itself, to come together as a single species with a single shared fate on this finite spec of rock. To me, there is no glory in war, no triumph, no victory. Violence will never beget peace; at best it only delays the start of the next outbreak. The deep conflicts which scar the globe will never be solved by war. The death of a "terrorist" inspires a dozen more moderates to turn to violence. In the end, I think our only hope is the spread of information and those few among us who Weber called "charismatic prophets," those few clear-sighted individuals who manage to inspire us to think beyond ourselves and our national anthems.

You can say that you stand apart
Put a fence around your yard
You can build a tall rampart and guard it with a gun You can dig yourself a moat
Burn the bridge and burn the boat
It won't matter that much, you know
Because all the world is one, all the world is one

You can march in a big parade
Every Independence Day
You can raise up your own flag and sing your own anthem It will ring out in the air
With all the other anthems there
Till the winds of the earth declare
All the world is one, all the world is one
-Peter Meyer, "All The World is One"