Memorial Day: honoring our dead

Memorial Day is Monday, the time when we stop to consider our war dead, who “ gave the last full measure of devotion,” as Lincoln said at Gettysburg in 1863.

War, we know war. Yearly there are fewer World War II veterans among us and the same is true of those who fought in Korea. Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, Iraq twice and even those who fought the last 20 years in Afghanistan. Our soldiers fought in El Salvador and Nicaragua and have been deployed to Bosnia, Syria and throughout Africa since the 1990s.

In the twentieth century over 640,000 Americans died in conflicts around the globe.

Now, in less than 18 months almost 600,000 Americans are dead, almost all of them on American soil and without a shot being fired. The coronavirus pandemic has been an angel of death touching probably every county and almost every community of any size across the breadth of our country.

In Washington state over 5,700 have died, 73 of them here in Skagit County. COVID-19 is still dangerous in this country and ravaging societies around the world. It was devasting throughout 2020, when 375,000 people died, by CDC estimates. That means over 215,000 of our fellow citizens, family members, friend, neighbors and co-workers have died in 2021 and the year is not half over. And, as in every war, there are the wounded, the sick and the lame. Non-mortal wounds is the Veterans Administration’s term. We have plenty of that with this pandemic, including PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

From former President Trump in the other Washington to Gov. Jay Inslee here, politicians early on used the rhetoric of going to war against the pandemic and winning the battle against it.

We elect our leaders to protect and serve us. When disaster strikes, their jobs are to marshal all forces at their command to save us. From coast to coast, nationally, and on the state level, politicians have employed emergency powers in their efforts to first contain the pandemic and then to bring society into social and economic recovery.

Presidents lead the federal government and respond to national and international emergencies. The failure of presidential leadership last year was wrapped up in deliberate political theater, and the cost to the nation has been immense. Deaths on this scale in this country were preventable. Now in families and communities in every state, people have holes in their hearts and grief they live with daily and they ask why.

As in every war, that is the primary question citizens have a right to ask and to demand that our politicians answer. Why were specific decisions made, specific policies created, specific courses of action followed? The central question is: did the president marshal all the resources at his command and focus with laser-like intensity to get us through and out as soon as possible?

That is our role and obligation as citizens and as families and friends of those who have needlessly died in the pandemic. As citizens, our work continues. Our ongoing task is to hold the politicians who make the decisions accountable.

Near the end of the Gettysburg address, Lincoln instructed us: “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

A year from now we might be mourning one million deaths from the coronavirus in the United States. It is not done with us. Will we, America’s citizens, honor our dead by holding to account those that failed us in our hour of greatest need?