Veterans Must Receive Respect For Sacrifices

To the Editors:

In this calendar year of 2001 alone, our undergraduate institution has chosen to ignore the two chief days of remembrance for the hardship of warfare. Considering the posturing of Oberlin, from “…one person can change the world…” to a series of morbidly partisan displays of opposition to the USA and its military needs, perhaps this should not be a surprise. Still, for a school claiming to nurture both critical and compassionate tendencies, the double failure on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day this year should bruise the sanctimony that has sustained Oberlin from Christian missionary to secular missionary work.
Sure, Commencement trumps Memorial Day each and every May in Oberlin, but would it have killed anyone to mention those Americans slain in war? Our esteemed President Dye honored still-living students who were bold enough to get arrested for challenging the School of the Americas, but gave not one peep of typical humanitarian sympathy for any citizen past who met death in combat. The veteran Marxist-Leninist Steven Volk, presently heading the history department, treated the ommencement audience to a cute reminiscence on community singing. Neither of these venerable Baby Boomers, each a leftist and an accredited historian, seized the opportunity to throw in some generation-late protest about the Vietnam War, and all the Americans it was once upon a time claimed had died needlessly there. Hey, it was only Memorial Day, for crying out loud. They had diplomas to give out, so why spoil the mood by admitting to the importance of the holiday. The coincidence of the two days be damned! Better to save the remorse until the next alarm of war might sound in America.
Surely in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent war mobilization, the teach-ins and the vigils, the speak-outs and the sing-alongs, someone on this blessed campus would have commemorated Veterans’ Day. Aside from falling two months to the date after Mohammad Atta’s aeronautical opening salvo in south Manhattan, Nov. 11 marks the anniversary of the armistice that closed the First World War. Consider the grand symbolism: the war of 1914-1918 had turned its world upside down, leading to generations of soul-searching, grief, vengefulness and criticism. Like a juggernaut, that conflict had consumed the lives of conscripted infantry by the hundreds of thousands before the tactical stalemate began to change even slightly; the false promises of jingoism were broken for all but a few die-hards and demagogues in the wake of World War I. All that, yes, and the veterans of that calamity were still given a day of quiet, somber honor, an implicit thanks and apology from the powers that be for having played God so infamously. There is a touch of the tragic even to things pro-military, and it was not only the Churchills and Lincolns of history who recognized as much.
It is a rich subject of debate and inquiry, especially when approached by a moral community that often represents itself as anti-war and intellectually striving. Veterans’ Day is not an occasion for pride in elite policy, but for dignity reclaimed for those who shouldered enormous and frequently erroneous burdens.
What of our fair school? Nothing. Not one lousy concert in the Conservatory. Not one bleeding notice in The Oberlin Review. No mentions on Oberlin on-line. Special lectures? Nada. What about creative usurping of Veterans’ Day as an occasion to protest war? Not even that much. The complete lack of acknowledgment for the day, even in opposition, speaks very poorly of Oberlin’s intelligence. While we prepare in advance for the commemoration of AIDS, Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day are demoted out of existence. Given this display of disregard, who the hell should ever care what an Obie has to say about war? If combatants are treated as fictional, superfluous or simply beneath mention, then what can this college community hope to ever say with any insight about fighting, dying, or negotiating? All anti-war sentiment that shuns reference to the suffering of the soldier becomes a limited exercise in moral self-congratulation for the civilian protester at best. At worst, it is some bizarre divorce from reality, thinking that one can change the world without exhibiting any conscious understanding of its unsavory features.
For all one hears on this campus about acknowledgment of people’s needs and the fight against ignorance, the non-recognition of Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day reveals an unfortunate blind spot. Just think: a handful of profiteering businesses, which make no claim to important observations on combat, have shown a more sensitive approach. War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention, noted Sir Henry Maine in the nineteenth century. One might add that the inventors will keep failing, refusing to go back to the drawing board after making mistakes. If you seek their monument, look around you.

–Adam Balling
OC’01