Finneran: Would you Fight - and Die - For America?

Friday, May 22, 2015

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

The words “happy” and “Memorial Day weekend” have always seemed incongruous to me. The somber memory of young lives lost in the nation’s wars does not lend itself to joy. Yet I suppose that those young people might speak to us from their graves, encouraging us to celebrate all that is special about America---our freedoms, our bounty, and our way of life. Thus, pools will be opened, grills will be fired up, beers will be chilled, and families will gather to celebrate the unofficial start of summer.

In the midst of those happy traditions we might pause to offer a quiet prayer for the Gold Star Mothers. For sad and lonely widows. For heart-broken children. And for fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends who always think of the empty space at their tables and in their hearts. They have suffered unimaginable pain.

A larger question haunts me as I ponder America today…….Who would fight—and die—for America?

The question was pretty much irrelevant in the first half of the twentieth century. World Wars I and II were fully manned by the nation’s youth who responded in droves to the nation’s call in the midst of peril.

Vietnam changed that. Dramatically. As has the “volunteer army”. As has technology. Very few people today even consider military service as an important choice. We are served-and protected- by an ever smaller armed forces whose killing power is awesome but whose service is taken for granted. When a neighbor’s son or daughter went off to fight, war was relevant to every single family on that street and in that community. When little Johnny , the boy next door who mowed lawns and painted houses, was marching through France or slugging it out across the Pacific, everyone knew what was at stake. Little Johnnny was one of theirs and they desperately wanted him to come home safely and in one piece.

When there are no more little Johnnys serving in uniform in bad places, then a neighborhood can ignore the world’s evil doings and just reach for the remote. Such seems to be the state of affairs in America today---more and more Americans giving no thought whatsoever to military service of any kind, all the while protected, at least for now, by a shrinking number of volunteers.

Two Presidents made significant blunders regarding military service to the nation. LBJ’s rank political decision to grant college deferments to the youth of America during the Vietnam War was a mistake of epic significance. It badly divided the nation between “haves” and “have-nots”, between white collar families and blue collar families. While Wellesley skated, Southie and Roxbury fought and died. And it sent a signal across the land and around the world that we were not terribly serious about certain things, including the lives of our youth.

It seems almost too obvious to state but a nation that goes to war cannot exempt huge chunks of its soldier-aged population. If we’re in then we’re in, and everyone serves, including the sons and daughters of Presidents and Congressmen. Taxes too. The notion of fighting the nation’s wars on a credit card is truly deranged. All in means all in. The world’s evil men would tremble if America ever got serious about paying for and winning its wars. But LBJ calculated that a guns and butter politics would better serve him and he unleashed a national nightmare.

George W. Bush made a similar mistake, not at the scale of LBJ’s blunder but certainly psychologically damaging to both armed forces personnel and to civilians alike. In the aftermath of the September

11th attacks on the nation, and in response to a question asking “what the American people should do” in this new age of terrorism, President Bush’s reply was that “they should go shopping”. Such a response is nonsense on stilts, sending a terrible message of frivolity to the larger population as well as a message of devaluation of the causes for which Americans would fight and die.

I think of the rag-tag radicals who recently “occupied” certain sections of certain American cities and who coined the phrase “we are the 99%”, while mocking and scorning the wealthy 1% of America’s population. Right in our midst and hopefully uppermost in our minds are the real “1%” crowd, the few, the proud, and the brave members of the United States armed forces. We, the remaining 99%, are being carried on their backs and we are oblivious of their service.

May God bless their work. And Happy Memorial Day.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.