Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I feel like the quotes I've chosen for today need some context.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have complicated feelings about Memorial Day. Not its origin or intent, which make sense to me ... but all too often in US culture, sentiments around giving soldiers their due (living or dead -- I see this around Veterans Day as well), and honouring those who died in (military) service to our country, get morphed into jingoistic mythologizing that bothers me. Some of those we memorialize today died ensuring my freedom, or Europe's, or someplace else's, but others died protecting some capitalist's investments or selling newspapers or reducing other people's freedom on behalf of economic interests at home -- most often unknowingly, I think. (Everyone's already read Major Smedley Butler's most famous writing, right?) I agree that these people died serving our country or trying to, but too much of what I see around military-oriented holidays feels like it extends that honour to those who sent our soldiers to die, and that every life sacrificed was a worthwhile sacrifice rather than the waste of a good, young, American life. Some were. Some weren't. Some of our heroes were simultaneously victims. Let us honour those who died in service, but at the same time let us not assume that having heroes means that our great nation is not merely great but also perfect and infallible. Do not let our acknowledgement of heroes great and small lead us to think that war is good because it lets people become dead heroes. Thank the dead, and pledge to create fewer of them going forward.

And now I can step off my soapbox and present today's quotations:

"The moment we stop pretending soldiers died defending our freedom will be the moment we stop killing our soldiers" -- @JC_Christian, 2016-05-28

"We take oath to defend Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Iraq never threatened Constitution that I know of." -- @BeeTraven, 2016-05-28