A salute to Memorial Day
Lori Borgman | Monday, May 18, 2009
On a sunny day in May, Confederate commander J.E.
B. Stuart sits on horseback against a deep blue sky with billowing
white clouds. His horse has a front leg reared in mid-air poised
to gallop.
The statue of Stuart is in Richmond, Va., on Monument
Avenue, a broad parkway with grassy medians and regal statuary commemorating
Confederate leaders. It is the only street in the country to be
listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Farther down the avenue, a statue of General Robert
E. Lee anchors the center of a large roundabout. Lee, too, is on
horseback, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle, the head of his
horse gallantly bowed. The commemorative plate simply says, “Lee.”
In the next stretch of avenue is Jefferson Davis,
president of the Confederacy. Davis is standing at the base of a
large monument with one arm raised and outstretched as if giving
a proclamation.
Genteel homes with manicured lawns border the
avenue. They are mostly brick, two-story, with plantation shutters.
Many have small balconies with trailing ivy and flower-filled porches.
The stately homes reveal nothing of the battles, the bloodshed or
the carnage that filled the countryside more than a century ago.
Stonewall Jackson is on horseback high atop his
monument. The final Confederate monument is that of Matthew Fontaine
Maury, commander of the Confederate States Navy.
When I watched the Ken Burns “Civil War” series
I would occasionally drift off then reawaken to the narrator’s voice
intoning, “And on this battlefield thousands died.” Over and over
the process repeated itself. “And on this battlefield, thousands
more died.” The staggering loss of life and stench of death from
both the Confederacy and the Union are impossible to grasp.
Even now as our soldiers serve in Iraq and Afghanistan,
it is hard to grasp the ripples of death, the number of hearts that
break for every soldier that falls.
The first Memorial Day was declared to honor Union
Soldiers who died in the Civil War. The South, wishing to distance
itself from the northern holiday, called their memorial Decoration
Day.
In long-standing tradition, there will be a Memorial
Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery this week. Flags will
be placed on graves and a wreath laid at the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier. A bugler will play taps, that sorrowful close-of-day melody
that came into being in a Union camp near Richmond during the Civil
War.
As the origins of Memorial Day fade into the shadows,
it has become less a day for honoring fallen soldiers and more a
day for sales, pool openings and cookouts with family and friends.
Hopefully, we will take a moment to give thanks for those who gave
all for duty and honor in previous wars and conflicts, and an extra
measure for those who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln said that we
cannot dedicate, consecrate or hallow the ground on which men died.
He was right. The way we best honor the war dead from all generations,
is to honor that which they died for – to cherish freedom and to
purpose ourselves to protect liberty.
In Lincoln’s words, the greatest living memorial
a nation can offer is to see that a “government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
