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Memorial Day is a day full of memories, many different kinds of memories for many different people. Happy, sad, horror filled, proud, poignant. It is a loaded day.

What are your childhood memories of Memorial Day? I remember that as a child I would march with my Girl Scout troop as part of the Memorial Day parade. I was so proud to be in the parade and have people see me in my uniform.

As a teenage I played in my high school band and we would march in two or three parades and then end up at the local VFW hall where they would serve us hot dogs and soda. I was proud of that uniform too.

Memorial Day weekend was a fun filled weekend of parades and barbecues and trips to the beach; a day that marked the beginning of summer.

When I was a child I used to love war or what I was told about war. I consumed every television show and every movie about war. I would get up late at night after my parents were in bed and put on TV to watch. I can still here the theme song of 12 O’clock High and the drone of prop planes on their way to another bombing mission.

As an adult I looked back and wondered – what was so captivating about war? Why was I so taken with it?

As a child I did not associate death and destruction with war. I had no idea of what it was like to live in a country where a war was taking place and I had no idea what the cost was to the men and women who took part in war.

What had captivated me was a romanticized version of war. That was the war we as children were fed: the sentiment, the proud and valiant men who waged war to promote peace and democracy to free other countries from bad men.

The stories I was told were the stories of the loyalty of soldiers to each other, their comradeship and patriotism. We were the good guys. We rode into villages and liberated people and handed out chocolate, we lifted up children and crowds cheered us on. We were Americans – we were loved the world over. I was proud to be an American.

As a child I was taught to love war. I wanted to go to a military college and wear a uniform and serve my country. I used to ask my father about WWII.  He spoke about how he had gotten into the Navy and how he had loved the navy and the good friends he had made but decided it was not for him if he wanted a family. My father never spoke about war.

As a seventeen year old off at college, I encountered war again. This time I understood that people were being killed and what dead meant. I was afraid my brother would be drafted.

It was the late 60’s and the US was again abuzz with the fever of war. I watched as my sister’s boyfriend enticed by promises of being part of some ARMY track team- enlisted to avoid Vietnam. He was promptly sent to basic training and then off to Vietnam.

My family was spared the agony so many families endured. My brother received a very high number and was never drafted. My sister’s boyfriend returned alive and whole. That was not everyone’s experience – I know.

It was a time of great anxiety and confusion in this nation. Was it a just war? Was it even a war? Does being a patriot mean supporting the war, the willingness to die for your country, obeying any order?

It was a time of questions not answers that satisfied.

My father served in the Navy during WWII. He was an enlisted man. As I now know he served most of the war in Brooklyn NY as a storekeeper at the Naval Yard. He also spent time in the Philippines where he was the paymaster. My father never shot anyone. It is something he is embarrassed about.

Other men went off to war. And returned ashamed. Ashamed that they were afraid when they were being shot at. Ashamed that they ran. Ashamed that they didn’t follow orders. Ashamed that they did. Ashamed that they found within themselves the ability to kill. Ashamed of what they did. Ashamed of what they were trained to do.

Some of us stayed home. Some of us protested the war. Some of us protested soldiers. Jeered at them. Some of us are ashamed that we did not understand the difference between being against war and being against soldiers.

Memorial Day was created to remember the Civil War. But what does it mean to remember? Mother’s day too was created to address the civil war. Julia Ward Howe (a Unitarian) wrote a Mother’s Day proclamation that I read as our opening this morning.

We remember – lest we forget. We remember lest we become too complacent- and forget the horror which war really is.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said – “It is on this day that our dead come back to live with us.” (Memorial Day by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., An Address Delivered  May 30, 1884, at Keene, N.H., before John Sedgwick  Post No.4, Grand Army of the Republic. )

We remember their patriotism. The brave young men who set out for a cause – willing to die for their country and the ideals for which it stood. During WWII they fought a war to end all wars. They fought to stop aggression.

Today those brave men are not necessarily young – but they still fight and die for ideals they believe in.

We remember the heroism and loyalty and nobility of which we as humans are capable.

But we also must remember that there is a shadow side to patriotism. We in the name of patriotism and war have conducted vicious campaigns against pacifists, we have interned Japanese Americans – we have wiped out Indian nations.

It is 2006 and our country is celebrating another memorial day. In 1884, people were apparently asking why were we still celebrating because Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. started out his Memorial Day address saying:

“To the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies in the most impressive form the belief that to fight out a war, you must believe in something with all your might. More than that you must be willing to commit yourself to a course, perhaps a long and hard one, without being able to foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of you is that you should go somewhere as hard as ever you can. The rest belongs to fate. One may fall at the beginning of the charge or at the top of the earthworks, but in no other way can we reach the rewards of victory.”

“I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

“But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life not death.”

I think it is time that we stop simply celebrating the patriotism and sacrifice of soldiers with ceremonies and days off from work.  I think they deserve better. I think we need to grow up.

In the play blood brothers – two twins are born and to a poor woman. She keeps one to raise herself and the other is given away to a wealthy family. Through their young lives they meet on many occasions but are unaware that they are brothers. At one poignant point in the play – they meet – this time as young adults One a poor struggling man and the other a college student home on holiday. The poor brother points out to the other that it is his wealth that frees him from having to grow up. He can stay and adolescent, carefree and jolly because of his wealth.

We Americans are known to be optimistic people – people with a can do attitude. We also have a sense of entitlement to the lifestyle that we live. We somehow thing we deserve it.

We have also been educated with a lot of half-truths about America and the good we do in the world.

I think that we foolishly swagger around the world because we are ignorant adolescents. We are plagued by self- righteousness. We have the foolish belief that we know what is best for everyone. We are big and we will take what we want.

I think that what we owe those who died, or were maimed or broken by war is to grow up.  I think we need to put the same passion and long hard struggle into becoming a nation that actualizes the values we espouse.

I think that the when we capture men and women we need to treat them humanely. I think that we need to play by the same rules that we expect from the rest of the nations in this world.

I think we need to decrease our nuclear arsenal. I think we need to charge our prisoners or release them. I think we need to cease our covert actions in other country to privatize their land and water and oil so that we can buy it. I think our nation is far from righteous and that we as citizens need to stand up and call it to account.

We like the fallen soldiers need to be willing to commit ourselves to a course of action – to work as hard as we can.

To write and call our representatives and demand that they take human rights for all people seriously.

We need to demand civil rights for all US citizens.

We need to demand that they have campaign finance reform.

We need to use our rights as stockholders to join with others and demand that companies pay fair wages around the world.

We need to live more simply so that we reduce our consumption and we need to teach others how to do this.

Our tasks would be much simpler if our own people had health care and education. And so we need to work to make that a reality.

We need to educate ourselves. We need to mix with people who are not like us – who do not have our wealth to better understand our world and our part in it.

What would these dead ask of us? I imagine it is to remember them.

And by remembering I mean protecting the ideals that they fought to protect and defend.

Our nation needs to learn how to wage peace.  We will not free the world from terrorism by being terrorists.

My prayer this morning is that the dreams that we dream, and the lives that we live be worthy of the price which so many have paid.

Amen and may it be so.