The Cause Worth Dying ForVictor J. Massad
(Exclusive to The Briefing Room) I attend a church in rural Pennsylvania in which there has been a Sunday service every week since 1722. For many years in its history, there were enough parishioners to accommodate two or three services, but these days there is only one service, and we light a special candle next to the altar to commemorate the weeks when we have more than 100 in attendance. Most weeks, the candle does not glow.
To my mind, one of the nicest things about our church is its cemetery (pictured above). We have hundreds of gravesites, many going back to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. On the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, there is published in the bulletin a list of the war dead buried in our cemetery. This week being that Sunday, I perused the list before the service began and noted that there were two Kauffmans -- Jacob and Phillip -- who gave their lives in the Revolutionary War. Then I saw that a George Kauffman gave his life in the War of 1812. The family was apparently one of the few spared during the Civil War, Indian Wars and WWI. But then WWII came. Ray and Warren Kauffman died in that war. The country was still not done with this family. The son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of Revolutionary War hero Jacob Kauffman, a soldier by the name of John M. Kauffman, died in the Persian Gulf War, bringing to six the number of sons this family had sacrificed for the country.
Today our church directory lists four Kauffman families, all presumably related to these honored dead. I sincerely hope that as they sat in church reading the names of their relatives in the bulletin, their pride in the sacrifice their family members made was at least equal to my awe.
Being from California, I grew up unfamiliar with the concept of generational familial continuity, particularly as it related to my country. My father’s father immigrated here from Syria as a 5-year old Christian refugee. Given the number of people who migrated to my state during my lifetime, by the time I was in my 30s it was rare to meet a fellow California native, let alone one whose family roots went back for more than a few generations. Reading about the Kauffman war dead, and seeing their offspring in church today, I was struck with the idea of continuity, and the hope that whatever these Kauffmans and the all the rest died for, they did not die in vain.
What did they die for? During the church service various veterans came forward and read from works about remembering war veterans. Terry Werley read from the poem “In Flanders Fields.†The key line in that poem reads “ If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep.†I take this to mean that we are admonished to remember their cause, although we are not told in the poem what that cause is. Jim Hirko came forward and read “The Gettysburg Address.†Abraham Lincoln makes the cause very clear in his famous speech: “so that government of the people, by the people and for the people does not perish from this earth.â€
So is that the cause we celebrate on Memorial Day? The continuous survival of democracy in the USA?: Is that what all of the Kauffmans died to preserve? So long as the democracy survives, the war dead will not have died in vain? If that is the case, then perhaps I can realign my thoughts about war and death and vanity. I have long held that the soldiers in Vietnam died in vain. No single objective of that war was ever accomplished, and the United States suffered a humiliating defeat. In recent years I have come to feel the same about those who died in The Iraq War. Why did Americans die so that Iran could have a client state? It made no sense.
This is by no means a denigration of anyone who fought in those wars, but rather an admonition to the politicians -- and, yes, also to the people who elected them (including myself who twice voted for George W. Bush) -- who sent our sons to die without knowing even what they were dying for. If there is anything worth remembering on Memorial Day it is that we should take war so seriously that we are unwilling to engage in it for any reason that is not existential to our survival as a country. Unfortunately, every war since WWII has been a war of expediency, fought for the purpose of diplomatic leverage.
Something troubled me about the “government of the people, by the people and for the people†business as well. Lincoln is saying that these honored dead have died for democracy. In Lincoln’s day, that may have been well and good, since the great flaws of democracy had not yet revealed themselves. Today we see that democracy can easily lead to a tyranny of the majority. Without the constraints imposed by a constitution guaranteeing strong individual rights, a political party or movement can cull together a plurality that can bully and rob whoever falls outside their well-defined circle. I see people who are stigmatized for being rich, male, Christian, smokers or believers in traditional values; while people on the left think they live in a world in which people are stigmatized for being LBGTQ, ethnic minorities or women. Both sides are in a desperate tug of war to gather a majority so that their righteous indignation can be manifested into legislation that will stick it to their enemies.
In America, we claim to love freedom, but we have more laws than any country on the face of the earth. Our tax code alone is longer than the entire criminal codes of most other countries. This is the fruit that “democracy†has yielded. Put another way, If Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump represent government “of by and for the people†I am not so sure that is worth dying for, either.
These are my thoughts on Memorial Day. I have great respect for people of positive conviction, whether it be missionaries who put their lives at risk to bring a message of peace to places in desperate need of it, or soldiers who also put their lives at risk to bring mayhem to places lest that mayhem find our shores. Particularly to the soldiers, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to express freedom in my life, limited as it may have been by those enemies of freedom, both foreign and domestic.
Although it was not read in church today, it is a good day to read Ayn Rand’s 1974 speech to the graduating class at West Point. In it, she makes a libertarian’s case for the US military, complete with the true soldier’s moral justification for dying:
“You have chosen to risk your lives for the defense of this country. .. the defense of one's country means that a man is personally unwilling to live as the conquered slave of any enemy, foreign or domestic. This is an enormous virtue.â€
That is the virtue for which I honor our war dead.
