Today, we are bombarded with broad messages thanking our veterans for fighting and dying in the name of "freedom." We write and post and "Like" these sentiments without once stopping to examine what freedoms these soldiers died to preserve.
In the first 90 years this country existed, men fought and bled to establish and preserve a democratic ideal that allowed for the owning of fellow human beings. Many Americans will gather today and lay wreaths on the graves of men who died so that that the right of that ownership would not be taken from them. Scores of cemeteries will be visited, and words will be spoken and prayers offered up to honor the memory of US soldiers who fought and died in order to deny the rights and freedoms of the native population who lived off of and sustained this land for thousands of years before the first European set foot on these shores.
Many who are alive today can place a flag at the grave of a veteran they knew who fought and died in '98 to "Remember the Maine," engaging in combat to establish freedom for the few remaining Spanish colonies. In actuality, they did so in order for to preserve the American right to profit at the price of other people's sovereignty.
Less than 20 years later, American soldiers embarked for western Europe to engage in some of the most deadly and savage fighting the world had ever witnessed while, at home, their government jailed anyone brave enough to question publicly this country's involvement in that war. They swore loyalty to a president who sat in the White House and praised the racist filth in "Birth of a Nation" as good history.
Ceremonies will be held today to commemorate the veterans of the Greatest Generation, who marched off to war in defense of a country that imprisoned thousands of American citizens for the duration, simply because of their ancestry. Many of those soldiers fought to preserve their freedom to keep in place a social order that kept the children and grandchildren of slaves in economic subjugation. They fought as part of a military structure which still segregated its troops based on the color of their skin.
Ironically, while the need for American participation in its next several wars is extremely questionable, they were the first wars in which there was actually something approaching freedom here to defend. With the end of "separate but equal," with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, with the bloodshed and turmoil of the 1960s, we came closer than ever to being a country that honored the thing for which it claims to always be fighting.
Those freedoms, though, are still far less than they should be. Men and women are still fighting (in their minds and the minds and hearts of their supporters) to preserve a type of freedom which oppresses their fellow citizens, whether it be religiously, intellectually, economically, or socially, and we, on whose behalf these men and women are dying, need to never lose sight of this.
If we don't fight here at home, every day, on every front, with all of our energy, for the rights and the equality of everyone, then we continue to allow our soldiers to die in vain, in preservation of a freedom that remains a shadow.