Thank You For Your Service

Today, we remember the military personnel who have died while serving in The United States Armed Forces.

Given the events of the last few weeks, and all those weeks before, I would like to suggest that on this Memorial Day we take a moment to break a norm and honor the non-military personnel who have made the ultimate sacrifice in another kind of war, one that defies categorization.

I’m referring to the Americans — of all colors, of all political persuasions, of all ages — who have died innocently and senselessly on the field of battle which, nowadays in this country, can be a grocery store, an elementary school, a synagogue, a movie theater, a church.

Abraham Lincoln, himself a victim of gun violence, is not alive today to pen poetic condolences to survivors of this new kind of domestic war, like he did famously in his letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby.

But, really, what could he write to the parents of Robb Elementary School students?

Perhaps something like: “I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the gun lobby, the gun manufacturers, and the political careers that your children died to save.”

He probably would not have written such a letter, not because those words aren’t true, but because it would have been unfathomable to Lincoln that something so preventable — death by assault weapons, which went “from an average of 4.8 per year during the [assault weapons] ban years to an average of 23.8 per year in the decade afterwards”– would have been tolerated for so long by so many.

And by “many,” I mean those who insist, without a trace of tragic irony, that guns have nothing to do with the gun problem in America.

Video games. Prescription drugs. Even doors are to blame, they say. Everything but the guns.

While the dark money continues to flow, and while our bought-and-paid-for representatives — who represent special interests, not voters — continue to place the right to owning a military assault rifle before your right, or your children’s right, to see another birthday, we can at the very least make a little room on this and every Memorial Day hence to remember non-military folk who have died.

That is, all the American civilians, the unwitting combatants, who gave their last full measure by simply waking up and going to school. Or a concert. Or a religious service. Or a movie. Or a grocery store.

And who never came home.

They are our family and friends, and friends whom we will never meet in this life; and all those school kids who have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar, not of Freedom but of pure and perfect greed.