Memorial Day parade a coronavirus casualty
Another casualty of the coronavirus in the lockdown states is the Memorial Day parade, which signals the beginning of summer.
Do you remember those Memorial Day parades in your town?
The old soldiers and the young soldiers setting wreaths to remember comrades lost in our wars. The families lining the parade routes. The flag. The bands and the Boy Scouts marching in the sun. The echoes of taps bouncing off a clock tower in the town square. As the color guard departs, a father on a park bench turns to his little boys and reads them the poem “In Flanders Fields,” the one about the poppies.
The other day Eileen Byrne — you may remember her from her days on WLS-AM radio in Chicago — sent me an email about her father, who a few years participated in a parade in his wheelchair, then stood and carried the wreath to a memorial.
Joseph Byrne, 94, is a World War II U.S. Army veteran and proud former member of the New York Police Department. He and his wife, Rosaleen, 90, live with Eileen and her family in the north suburbs.
They were looking through photos of a past Memorial Day parade and “I was struck by all that we can’t do, probably never again,” Eileen said in her email.
“My father can’t accept a handshake from a Boy Scout or the personal thanks from another veteran. And I thought it was very ironic, seeing what these brave men and women have seen and fought for, and also sad.”
She and her husband, Jeff, have three kids. Jeff ’s mother, Joyce, 76, also lives with them. They’re worried about the virus. Jeff and Eileen constantly clean and fret.
“Jeff ’s the one with the spray,” she told me.
With several generations living under one roof, she’s not adamant about opening up the country, as many are, including me. She thinks about all the elderly who have died of coronavirus, alone, without their children, unable to say goodbye.
But she knows what the loss of the Memorial Day parades means. And she arranged a Zoom interview with her dad.
“That was a tremendous generation,” Joe Byrne said. He talked about the Gold Stars that were hung in the windows of the homes of families who had lost a member overseas.
I asked him about the cancellation of parades.
“I’m sad,” said Joe quietly. “It’s part of the generations.”
So this year, in some places, there won’t be the passing of memory from the old to the young in parades, at least not here, in lockdown towns in a lockdown state. Somewhere else they might have parades, but whether parades are held or not, the idea brings with it a searing irony.
Memorial Day is the day we honor the dead. It is why the poem “In Flanders Field” was associated with it, a poem about the dead calling out to the living, with the poppies growing among the crosses marking the graves.
The irony is that now, as we think of Memorial Day and all those who faced fear of death on the battlefield, America is gripped by fear of the virus at home.
Some insist on calling this a war. I may have said so myself, and if I did, I was wrong. This is not a war. This is not our Pearl Harbor. The virus is a virus. Yes, we know it’s dangerous, and many are afraid.
But the men of the Greatest Generation who once stormed the beaches of Northern France were afraid, too. The bomber crews being shot out of the skies were afraid. The young men wounded at Gettysburg and left out on the battlefield to fight off the ravenous hogs were afraid. They could hear each other screaming, and the hogs grunting in the long night.
They and all the others honored on Memorial Day died to preserve something we once prized more than anything: our liberty.
Yet here, now, in 2020 America, many of us easily give up that liberty they fought for because we’re afraid. I’m not trying to shame you or provoke you if you disagree. I hope you don’t contract this serious disease and hope, as do you, that there will be an effective treatment soon, if not a vaccine.
But the way I see it, we’ve given up our liberties quickly, in a matter of weeks, on the word of experts and politicians afraid of being wrong. The experts have seen the data change by the day, and so have their expert recommendations on what to do. It’s all been so stunning. The rise of the technocratic elite. The eager capitulation of the people. The shutdown. The jobs and businesses lost. Our liberty lost.
There was an American soldier who understood fear. He knew the difference between illness and war. He survived a great pandemic. He sent men to their deaths.
He was a public man who valued expert opinion. But he also valued the common sense of the American people.
In 1961, in his last address to the nation he loved, he warned us of many things, from uncontrolled deficit spending, to the growth of the size of government to the rise of the military-industrial complex. And he warned of putting all our faith in experts.
“Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Dwight David Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander in World War II. He was 34th president of the United States.
And he understood Memorial Day.