Our thoughts are with those who signed on the dotted line to protect our people. Our thoughts are with those who lost their lives for all the wrong reasons. Our thoughts are with those who live on still despite the horror, the loss, the degradation, the inward maelstrom of misery, the emptiness. Our thoughts are with those who are left behind, behind the lines or at home.
We do not wish a 'happy Memorial Day' to any of these, we just wish you to know we are thinking of you, we are calling for the end of wars, we are asking that those in power learn to respect your lives instead of throwing them all away.
For the troops of all generations, for the families, for the loved ones of all kinds: We Remember You.
Memorial Day — first called Decoration Day — got its start as holiday commemorating fallen soldiers at the end of the Civil War, according to Yale historian David Blight. In 1865, former slaves exhumed Union soldiers from a mass grave in Charleston, South Carolina on the site of that city’s racetrack and buried them in individual graves. It was a ten-day project that ended in a day of celebration of the newly united nation, peace and freedom in which thousands of Charleston’s African-American families gathered to decorate graves, pray, play games and picnic.
Now, almost a century and a half later, there’s no end in sight to U.S.-led military operations across the globe. The loss of life, limb, mind and more from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone has been staggering. “We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, the retired general who led the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, famously remarked when asked about Iraqi civilian casualties. But we do do body counts of our own fallen. Groups like Veterans for Common Sense and projects like the Washington Post‘s Faces of the Fallen regularly publicize Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs data of U.S. troop casualties while projects like Iraq Body Count helps ensure that civilians killed in U.S.-lead wars get counted.
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