The following column by Senator Declan O’Scanlon (R-13) was first published in 2000:
Today’s vocabulary word is “perspective.” Occasionally as we make our way through another day, another week, another year, something happens that stops us in our tracks and makes us think. Memorial Day is supposed to be a day that triggers that kind of reflection. Of course even that day has become part of the yearly routine. Almost unnoticed. Certainly not given much thought by most of us.
Memorial Day has become a day of summer’s anticipation during which we consume massive amounts of food and drink and lie in the sun. Thus the connection to this column. This column is about all the pleasures of food and good times. This one week it would be a good idea to put the things we enjoy into perspective. How did we get “here” and who was responsible for making “here” the great place it is.
There are not too many things in history – or traits of the people of our country – that we can look at and say, with much certainty, that they were world changing events or characteristics. The wars fought by the United States of America and the character of the people that fought them are exceptions. Without either, the world would be a very different place.
I write this admittedly goofy column every week about cheese fries and hotdogs and mile long buffet tables without much thought or thanks to those people that made the sacrifices that paid for everything we have today. We as individuals are so proud of our own personal successes that we frequently fail to realize that none of what we have today would have been possible without that big eared kid that waved good-bye to his mom when he shipped off to fight and die in World War II or I or any of the other wars or battles the United States has waged. I know there are those that would argue that the purpose of some of the wars we have waged is debatable. Vietnam always stirs heated debate. But the men and women, sons and daughters, who served and died there were no less responsible for instilling in the generations that have followed them a sense of honor and duty and courage than were those who served in the previous campaigns.
This being a food oriented column I recently spent some time reflecting on the dinners that must have been consumed around this country the night before a member of a family was shipped overseas to die for us. Did their mothers know, via that 6th sense that mothers seem to have, as they served their sons that last meal that it would in fact be that? Did they pay extra special attention to the way their sons held their forks, the huge amounts they ate and that they still had to be reminded to eat their vegetables? Did they send them away the next day knowing they would never see them again?
My generation has not had to go through the fear of the draft or the likelihood that we would – in large numbers – be sent off to die in war. Our mothers haven’t had to face what they knew might likely be our last meal with them. We haven’t had to go through those things because those that came before us were strong enough to go through them for us – and those that go off to war today volunteer to do so, so the rest of us won’t have to. The ghosts of those that have fallen sit next to us at our picnic tables and it is – consciously or not – to them we drink. They sit there I’m sure, reveling in the world they made possible, watching our children playing in the yard, knowing that our children’s young lives hold as much potential as they do in no small part due to the sacrifices our fallen heroes made.
I don’t intend for this column to leave anyone feeling depressed or even solemn. Reverence and joy are not mutually exclusive emotions. In fact I can’t think of a place closer to heaven than a backyard Memorial Day barbecue! We just should make sure we understand who we have to thank for the day off and all the other wonderful things in our lives, and perhaps our lives themselves. Don’t worry loyal readers – next week we’ll dive squarely back into the pool of irreverence. It just never hurts to once and awhile remind ourselves who we have to thank for that ability.