![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/files\/2010\/05\/1005memday.jpg\" "\\"1005memday\\"")
<\/a>A wreath laid at this morning's Memorial Day service in Westport, NY<\/p><\/div>We’ve had a weird flurry the last few weeks of Democratic and Republican politicians fibbing about — or exaggerating — their military service. <\/p>\n
The motivation is pretty obvious: nothing in our society warrants more respect than a stint in the Armed Forces, especially the kind of sacrifice that comes with service in a time of war. <\/p>\n
The backlash against these incidents has been gossipy and gotcha stuff, but there’s a deeper value at question here, and that’s the importance of memory.<\/p>\n
It is an essential component of any democracy that we push through the jingoism, the propaganda, and the political claptrap that always surrounds war.<\/p>\n
We have to keep in mind the real meaning of the sacrifices we ask our men and women to make. We have to confront openly and bravely the motivations that drive our leaders when they take us to war.<\/p>\n
One of my favorite writers it he Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who saw his own country swallowed by Soviet tanks in 1968. <\/p>\n
But it wasn’t the tanks that frightened Kundera, it was the lies and self-deceptions that accompanied them. “The struggle of man against power,” he wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”<\/p>\n
So here’s my challenge to you — and also to us who write this blog. Over the next year, we’re going to write and think a lot more about the wars now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
Firstly, we’re going to fight the temptation to let these terrible conflicts slip out of focus, and out of view. The men and women serving overseas deserve better.<\/p>\n
But we’re also going to fight the temptation to accept simple, easy answers about why we’re there and what we’re hoping to accomplish.<\/p>\n
Obviously, this kind of effort doesn’t match the sacrifice and courage of our service members in harm’s way; but on Memorial Day, remembering is the very least we can do. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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