"MEMORIAL DAY - WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE"

“MEMORIAL DAY – WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE”

            I’m always ambivalent about celebrating Memorial Day.  I give thanks for those who have given their lives in this country and in other countries so that we might have some semblance of self-government and so that we might keep working towards that best idea of America:  that all people are created equal.  Yet, I am also aware that most of our wars have been based in greed rather than in equality.  Also, I am a conscientious objector who served my country during the Vietnam War.   This is my ambivalence on that war – as we look back, it clearly did not have a noble purpose.  We fell into it in a fog of anti-communism and a desire to control the “Asian menace.”  Now we are trade partners with Vietnam, headquartered in the former enemy capitol of Hanoi.  It reminds me of the Bob Dylan anti-war song of 1964 “With God on Our Side,” and here are the first two stanzas:

Oh my name it ain't nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I was taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side

Oh, the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh, the country was young
With God on its side

            I remember sitting beside Perry Poole in junior high in the segregated schools of Helena, Arkansas.  Our science teacher had us pass around a butterfly specimen, asking us to feel how delicate yet how powerful their wings were.  I remember giving it to Perry and telling him how amazing it was.  His reply was that he could not feel its delicacy because his hands were so callused from working on the family farm.  I was stunned by that – I did chores at home, but nothing like that.   Later on, in order to get out of that life, Perry joined the army and was killed in the Vietnam War.    I don’t know if Perry thought that he was fighting in a noble cause, or if he was just doing his duty as an army soldier, or if he was doing both, but I have thought so often that he gave his life for an ignoble cause. 

            I am reading the excellent biography of Frederick Douglass by David Blight, and in it, Blight traces Douglass’ journey from pacificist/Garrisonian/nonpolitical abolitionism to political and a-willingness-to-go-to war stance in order to end slavery.  In another context, I was reading the 19^th chapter of Revelation, where the Second Coming of Jesus is portrayed in these terms:   “From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron;  he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty.  On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, “King of kings and Lord of lords.”

As a white Southerner, raised in the neo-slavery of white supremacy, I can truthfully say that I don’t believe that the legal slavery of the pre-1860 days would have ever ended without the terrible swift sword of the Civil War.  Julia Ward Howe’s song using these words from Revelation 19 may have been true.

            I think about this a lot these days because of the presidency of Donald Trump.   Like so many others, I am desperately hoping that he will lose the presidential election of 2020.  At this point, I do not know that he will.  I read a NYT article recently that indicated that Nancy Pelosi is working hard to make sure that Trump suffers a massive defeat in 2020, because she is afraid that if he loses in a close election, he will not yield the presidency, challenging the legitimacy of the election.  At that point, it will be up to the courts and maybe even the military to determine the future of our country.  In the meantime, he seems to be doing everything that he can to undermine our democratic institutions.

            So, in my ambivalence about Memorial Day and about nonviolence and the efficacy of violence in service of social justice, I want to give thanks to my father, my adopted father Gay Wilmore,  my father-in-law Herman Leach, and to so many others who have served our country.  I also want to thank people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Vernon Dahmer, Elijah Lovejoy, John Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr.,  Malcolm X and so many others like Perry Poole who have given their lives for our country, even on these shores.  Perhaps the best that I can do with this ambivalence is to turn back to Bob Dylan’s art in the closing verse of “With God On Our Side:”

So now as I’m leavin”

I’m weary as Hell

The confusion I’m feelin’

Ain’t no tongue can tell

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor

That if God’s on our side

He’ll stop the next war.