Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

Despite Everything, Let Us Honor Memorial Day!

by

Eric Paul Nolte

Yesterday, Memorial Day, I was brooding over the terrible situation that we Americans have created for ourselves with all our crazy wars abroad. I wrote nothing about it then. Today, a friend posted a picture of the grave stone of his grandfather, who was an Army veteran who bravely went ashore at Normandy in 1944. I wrote the following on my friend's post (and have since considerably elaborated on it below):

I honor our veterans, I treasure their service, as an aspect of the legitimate purpose of government, namely, the protection of every individual's right to life, liberty, and property.

Now, I myself am an Army veteran of the Vietnam era. I was drafted--which hijacked my college career, because college deferments were abolished that year. I thought of immigrating to Canada as an expression of my loathing of the Vietnam War and what I deemed to be the immoral slavery of conscription, but I didn't go to Canada because, among other things, this would have meant that, as far as anybody could have known in 1972, I would never again have been able to see my friends and family unless they came to see me abroad.

I am increasingly troubled by how mindlessly our collectivist-altruist leaders squander the lives of our gallant young soldiers in crazy foreign military adventures that yield us worse than nothing--all guided by our leaders' insane, suicidal rules of engagement which are drawn from the marching orders they created for themselves in the doctrine of "Just War Theory.”

Nevertheless, let us honor Memorial Day. 

Let us honor those who gave their all to the unique, unprecedented, and crucial idea of America! 

Think of it!-- The idea of America: your life belongs to you! The good is to live it! Live and let live, and let those who can, voluntarily lend a helping hand to those who can’t! Let us deal with each other by mutual consent as traders, exchanging wonderful values for other wonderful values, all of it to our mutual benefit! 

This ethos never appeared anywhere else on Earth before America! These ideas certainly began here imperfectly, but for all their warts today, you have to conclude that they have nowhere played out any better anywhere on the planet, and nowhere do these ideas portend a more promising realization in the future! Heaven on Earth belongs to the future, but the idea of America is as close as we have come to it today! 

By the way, for those among you who "Feel the Bern," let the record show that Heaven on Earth is not to be found in Cuba or in Venezuela, or in the social science departments of American universities which lend themselves to these views. 

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