Memorial Day Address 2021

I apologize. I just posted the address I gave in 2022, but then found this one and wanted to post it, as well. Obviously, I feel strongly about recognizing the humanity of our heroes.

As Mayor, I should be writing about what we are trying to accomplish for the town. That is my plan. Because government begins at this level, it’s important to push responsibility and dedication up the line from the people in their homes to their most visible public SERVANTS in D.C.

But, as we approach Memorial Day, history weighs more heavily on my mind and soul. We don’t read enough. We don’t listen well. Logical debate is silenced. History is lost and considered unimportant. In denying it, the pathos is lost, the most important lessons we could ever grasp are lost. We need to remember not just the men who fought, but why they were compelled to give their precious and irreplaceable lives.

To be brief, let’s remember the dying voices of my father’s generation. World War II and The Bataan Death March were real. The Holocaust was real. The lives distorted and destroyed were real, and they mattered. The lives of our men who fought to quash those grievous evils still matter. I live only because Dad, a Marine fighter pilot in the South Pacific, survived to return to his young wife, as others did not.

A million human stories are important. My high school Government Teacher, Oswald Blatt, an Austrian Jew who alone at age 18 escaped, on skis over the Alps from the advancing Nazis. Repeated trips back found no records of his family’s fate. Gone, simply and horribly gone. Walter Storozum, whose son Sidney was my veterinarian in Lynchburg, gave lectures remembered by those who saw his tattooed numbers. His stories languish in dusty shelves and the newspaper archives. I was visited at my business one Sunday afternoon 10 years ago by Marcel and Ania Drimer, a lovely couple of Holocaust survivors. Born in south-eastern Poland, which is now Ukraine, Marcel will be 87 on May 1, 2021. They serve as docents at the Holocaust Museum. Marcel was 5 when the Nazis came through. Following several short-lived hiding attempts and miraculous near-fatal escapes, a Christian family hid him and 12 other Jews crammed tight in the attic and an underground cellar at their farm until the Soviets liberated them in 1944. So long did he spend malnourished and in the cramped darkness that his growth was stunted and he had to relearn to speak above a whisper and to walk at age 10. Real, all real.

I am reading yet another book about the lives of real people, “The Brothers of Auschwitz” by Malka Adler. Why did the Jews of Europe allow themselves to be taken? Who could understand the danger? Who could believe that such evil existed in the world? Who could fathom their neighbors, their own kinsmen could be so blind that they would wait, unarmed, expecting to be saved by outsiders or by a messiah who didn’t show up? Who could imagine that victims would turn against one another in the name of self-preservation?

Understand this lesson. Humanity is flawed, as it has been since Biblical times, and how quickly we forget. The persecuted have long included the Jews, but not them alone. Christians have been persecuted from the beginning, even today in many lands, and in more subtle ways in the U.S. today. The different sects have persecuted each other. Blacks, Slavs, Gypsies, Celts, Visigoths, Asians, Indians (both American and Indian), and Muslims have suffered suppression and genocide. Virtually every people, at various times has been either the suppressed or the suppressor in turn, in the name of God, Allah, the State, the King, the Tzar, the Pope, the Fuhrer, the Proletariat, the Union, the Klan; pick your cause. A good name with a good cause can be twisted into something quite malevolent by an evil, power-hungry individual or group. And innocent people are frequently tricked to foster their power. This is why war continues to spring up, not because people are intrinsically evil or racist, but because they are willfully naïve and can be preyed on and played upon like a Stradivarius in the hands of a master fiddler.

Remember who we are and what we have at stake. We are Americans, born of generations of people who wouldn’t accept the shackles of tyrants, people for whom liberty for their progeny was more important than their own lives. We are the recipients of their valor. Honor them and the gift their blood gave us.

Pacifism is a lovely word, but dangerous concept. Remember to stand up for yourselves. Stand up for all of us. The story of humanity is not over. Please don’t allow the story and honor of our nation to fade with the memory of those who gave everything for our freedom and for our Democratic Republic. Remember to celebrate the real reason for Memorial Day. Honor the men who marched, flew, parachuted, and waded into Hell, being perforated and blown to bits as they advanced to save not only those in immediate peril but to stop its spread, to prevent evil from overtaking our entire world.