The first part of John Kass’s Memorial Day post is mostly a lament for decaying values. I’ll spare you that part and focus on the most apt part:
It involves us taking time out to think hard and long about a soldier’s poem and the poppies, row on row.
“In Flanders Fields†is that soldier’s poem, written in World War I by Col. John McCrae, a man who’d seen the devastation of war, and hopelessness. Yet with clear eyes and a clean heart he wrote of poppy blossoms as rebirth of hope, those bright orange/red papery thin blossoms, as delicate as dreams, waving in the breeze over the freshly dug graves of the dead.
The scene was Ypres, Belgium at a farm converted to a military hospital, where McCrae was an Army doctor, doctor, dealing with pain and death and disease. Flanders Fields is particularly tragic. The political leadership had led their citizens into hell, and still the citizen soldiers marched toward death and the trenches and the barbed wire, and the gas.
My mother, 92 years old and born of the United Kingdom, hasn’t forgotten. She was born in Guelph, Ontario, the town where Col. McCrae is from. She knew his family. They all knew of the McCraes, but they did not treat them as celebrities. Instead, they respected them.
My mom would put a book of his poetry on the breakfast table when my sons were little boys, so that we’d remember as we taught the boys. And that is how traditions are maintained.
Unlike most of the countries of the world the people of the United States are united by values and our distinctive traditions. The teaching of those values and traditions don’t happen by accident but are passed from generation to generation. They cannot be delegated to the schools at least not if we expect them to be our values. The schools have enough to do without shouldering that responsibility as well.
So, by all means take a day off today and celebrate it with barbecues (or pizza since meat is so expensive) and ball games. But take some time, too, to teach your children the values and traditions you wish to see maintained. They won’t be maintained otherwise.
