Memorial Day Weekend
Saturday is the beginning of the long weekend, culminating in Memorial Day on Monday. Memorial Day is set aside to remember our war dead. The last war to defend the country from attack was World War II. The others since have been “botique wars” conducted by politicians to assert our interests; Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other conflicts of lesser scale. Some continue today. It has been a long time since the nation has been at peace.
Recently our president seems mesmerized by the totalitarian ruler of North Korea, with whom he has been exchanging insults and threats of nuclear war. Something new for our citizens consideration on this Memorial Day weekend. Our president seems drawn to a summit 
with Kim Jong Un like a moth is drawn to a flame. Do not these two men have much in common?
To celebrate our country and those living and dead who love it I offer some paragraphs from Wendell Berry’s book, The Unforseen Wilderness – Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, published 1991.
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Flowing muddy and full, frothing over its rapids, its great sound filling the valley to the brim, the river is inscrutable and forbidding. The mind turns away from it, craving dry land like a frightened swimmer. The river will not stay still to be regarded or thought about. Its events are too much a part of the flow, melting rapidly into on another, drawn on by the singular demand of the current.
Causes of ruinous attitudes and practices…..have their origin in our life and history as a people here in America. They have their origin in our failure to this day to be able to assign any value other than economic to the land, and to the life of and on the land, and to human labor–and in our complacent assumption that our economy will somehow turn out to be the same as nature’s, that it somehow has something to do with the truth about our life in this world. Of all the illusory enclosures, that of the American economy is the narrowest and the worst. To be blind to everything outside an account book is, as we have been told over and over, to be spiritually dead; it is also as we are slowly learning, to be an accomplice to the death of the world. It is a form of insanity, for even in economic terms it has failed to make sense.
Natural beauty is no more than a byproduct of natural health. Decently and frugally used, the earth will be beautiful; disdained, exploited and abused, it will be ugly, as well as unhealthy, and there will be no way to “beautify” it. When one relates to the world in terms of its “scenery,” then one is apt to go around talking about “beautifying” such things as strip mines and slums. But what is being destroyed cannot be made beautiful. The notion than a process of ruin can be accompanied and offset by a process of beautification is only another illusion of ease….It is another technicolor pipe-dream to keep us ignorant, endangered, and dangerous, shut up in our shell.
If this family is forced out of its home, which has been for them not just a place in which to sleep and eat but a loving task, a hopeful promise, and a joy, they will join the thousands of the American dispossessed who have been driven out to make room for roads and airports and lakes. When people can’t be secure in their homes because of the demands of the public interest, then the public interest is no such thing.
What that household promises to the world is not the possibility of better organizations, but the possibility of a better life.
The effort to clarify our sight cannot begin in the society, but only in the eye and in the mind. It is a spiritual quest, not a political function. We each must confront the world alone, and learn to see it for ourselves.
