Yesterday there was a Memorial Day Tribute here. We heard Obama's Memorial Day speech, sang the Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America, listened to a roll call of residents who served in the military and watched a video consisting of clips from military funerals and memorials at veterans cemeteries around the country. It was a moving event.
Last night I watched the National Memorial Day Celebration on PBS. It was much more theatrical than our morning show but also quite moving.
I wouldn't have expected any negativism at these events. But still I kept thinking of the futility of our wars since WWII. By and large, we did not make things better for the world. We did not win any of these wars. We damaged the lives of many. We wasted tons of money.
The truly sad and fearful part is that things are worse in the 21st century. To most of us the wars are a nonentity. We don't have a relative there. We know few people who do. Unlike WWII the news about the war does not dominate the media reports; Deflategate gets more attention than ISIS. We now bomb countries with which we have not declared war. We kill civilians on the premise that there is some bad guy near them. WHY?
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