This week marks the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy.
We have peculiar attitudes about the subject of death.
We tend to avoid discussing it. We don’t want to think about it. We view the misfortunate on the verge of death as already dead, as if they’re walking skeletons with nothing to contribute to our greater understanding of who we are, or what life means. How tragic and this mindset is.
This needs to change.
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy. Thousands of young men with their entire lives ahead of them died way back then, a small fraction of the millions overall who perished during that terrible war. Indeed, millions ended up dying unnecessarily. Yet, I’m willing to bet that most of us don’t remember a single name, nor revere the sacrifice of a single soul, during that war, the 20th century’s most meaningful conflict.
I ask you — how can you (or I) not remember ONE NAME from that colossal conflict, when good confronted evil and ultimately triumphed? After all, we remember who scored the winning basket, or who threw the winning touchdown pass. But we don’t remember a thing about something far more important.
How’s it possible to be so far removed only a couple of generations away, and yet we forget all those names, all those faces, all those soldiers, all those who stood in the line of fire and never came home? Perhaps we never knew them at all, nor ever cared. Shame. Shame on us.
I implore you to think about how tragic that fact is — that you can’t remember nor care to think about it. This doesn’t make you a bad person necessarily, given the chances are that out of 50 million people who died during that war you can’t name anyone who fought the good fight. It’s not your fault that American culture instantly forgets our dead and kicks everything to do with one of the most pivotal moments of world history onto the History Channel at 2 am. Then again, even that channel has been taken over by duck hunters. We shun the graves of those who sacrificed decades of happiness for the future prosperity of strangers.
Fact is, we’re the ones who are sick, while most of the rest of the world gets it right.
In my travels across the Atlantic, I was moved immensely by the very different attitudes of Europeans about life and death. Here history is embraced. We have a lot to learn from them. Take for instance, that France continues to care for the graves of Allied servicemen who fell during battle. Say what you want about the French, who get beat up by American right-wing xenophones who have never seen the perfectly manicured graves in American cemeteries. Anyone who bashes the French should visit an American gravesite sometime, and then contrast that memorable experience with dilapidated veterans cemeteries here in the U.S. If I ever hear another idiot bashing the French, I invite them to take a look at all the green pastures with pristine white crosses, immaculately manicured and cared for with such reverence.
Take Normandy.
Yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the greatest battle invasion the world has ever known. France, and many other nations, paid tribute to the sacrifices of our ancestors in a manner that was most appropriate, given what all those deaths meant to a free Europe. I wonder — how many Americans even knew that yesterday was the 70th anniversary of D-Day? How many people in our nation visited a grave, or stood on a street in a parade, or even thought a millisecond about those brave men who stormed the beaches, and fell in the sand as their blood dissolved into seawater?
When I was in Holland late last year, I learned something very special about the culture of the Dutch. It could just as easily apply to the Belgians, or the French, as well. Try this on for American “exceptionalism.” There are countless graves scattered throughout these countries. In each nation, schoolchildren adopt local cemeteries and even go so far as to care for the graves of men who fell in battle. Imagine, 8- and 9-year-old schoolchildren touching a white stone, inscribed with a name they do not know, but entrusted with the honor of nurturing those graves. Some schools even make the children write to the descendants of the fallen. You tell me — what does that teach these children about death? More importantly, what does that teach those children about life? What does this teach children about history?
Holland and other nations care for those graves because the cultures understand and revere their history and ours, and very much understand that life is very much part of death, even when death comes tragically and far too early.
By contrast, this culture ignores death completely. Other than the occasional window dressing of a Memorial Day moment which is nice, the graves and the names and the memories and the sacrifices are forgotten. Graveyards here are treated as scary places, little more than props for Halloween. How many schools or children in this nation know about World War II, or visit graves, or care for the sites of the dead? The answer to this question is a cultural embarrassment. A disgrace.
It’s time that we embrace death, which is not the same thing as welcoming it. This means recognizing that death is part of life. Yet we still fail to anticipate the inevitability of our death or that of others. At the very least, our children should be educated about it. We should learn a few of those names and care for those graves ourselves.
If children in Holland and France and Belgium can adopt graves of Americans who fell in battle, why can’t we? What does it say about our culture that we so badly ignore our own?
It says a lot.