Gettysburg National Cemetery
Thomas Paine, having helped transform a mutiny over taxes into a revolution in the principles of government, said, “An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.” Since then, the wars that define us as a nation have been about principle. Abraham Lincoln ennobled a brutal, slug-fest of a war with the principle of “a new birth of freedom.” In a war of unimagined reach and toll, Franklin Roosevelt reminded us of our “common humanity,” a principle we reaffirmed by rebuilding half the world – not so that we could rule it but so that we could live in it in peace.
There have been other wars, even wars of aggrandizement and empire. But the wars that define us were about principles. That makes one wonder.
How many of those who fell at Normandy waded into that littoral killing-zone so that a future President could win election with the help of a foreign adversary and then enable its continued attacks on our democracy?
How many of those who died holding Bastogne and the rest of the line that last, brutal winter did so to ensure that a President could hold himself above the law, obstruct justice, repeatedly abuse his power, and subvert our norms?
Were the Marines who fell on Iwo Jima fighting so that an unstable, corrupt sociopath who lies relentlessly and has an ominous fondness for dictators could be the most powerful man on Earth?
And what of the dead of Gettysburg? Did they die to establish the right of a political party to protect such a president? What would those who sacrificed their lives for their country at Antietam make of a political party that sacrifices its principles for power? What of the dead of the all black 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner? Did they lay down their lives to enable a political party to keep American citizens from voting?
And of our dead at Lexington and Concord, at Bunker Hill, at Monmouth, at Guilford Courthouse, how many were fighting to bring forth a new nation dedicated to an aristocracy of wealth?
Donald Trump and Republicans revel in chest-thumping praise for the military, but it’s empty noise. Their actions betray their contempt for the principles for which so many have given their lives. And that betrays their contempt for those lives.
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