Stop Celebrating Memorial Day!

We need to stop celebrating Memorial Day.

I had lunch with my dad on Memorial Day. We had soup and salad. Unfortunately, I did not take pictures of our lunch. Because I’m on Facebook, I know how exciting pictures of lettuce and chicken tortilla soup can be…

But even more exciting was our Memorial Day conversation, which centered on our recent travels. I told my dad about my family’s Memorial Day weekend trip to the Redwood Forest in northern California on Saturday and our excursion to Crater Lake in southern Oregon on Sunday. That was fun – and we did take pictures!

Ancient Human Sacrifice

How’s that subheading for a segue? Well, my dad then told me about his recent 30 day cruise to Hawaii and some islands in the South Pacific. When he was touring one South Pacific island, a guide told the group about the human sacrifice that the native islanders used to perform. (Unfortunately, I have no pictures.)

“But it’s not what you think,” the guide said cheerfully. “It was a privilege to be sacrificed. Those who were sacrificed brought honor to their family.”

The guide was a native of the island. While reflecting on the statement, my dad stated that she seemed to take pride in the sacrificial practice – almost as if she wanted to bring it back.

Of course, as a Girardian, my mind went straight to René Girard’s theory of sacrifice. Girard says that sacrificial rituals had a uniting effect on the community. Far from being impractical, sacrifice had an effective social function. Sacrificial rituals brought unity to the group. Where there was once conflict, the blood that flowed from an archaic sacrifice brought reconciliation. Unanimity was so important to the sacrifice that it worked best if the victim wanted to be sacrificed. When it comes to human sacrifice, a willing victim is the best victim. As Girard states in his book Job: The Victim of His People, “The victim must participate if there is to be perfect humanity. His voice must be joined to the unanimous voice of condemnation.”

The unanimous voice of sacrifice can be one of condemnation or honor. It doesn’t matter, just as long as the sacrificial voice is unanimous.

That this conversation about ancient sacrifice took place on Memorial Day is significant. My dad’s tour guide romantically memorialized her ancestors by presenting human sacrifice in an honorable, even privileged, way. It may seem grossly archaic to us, but we’re not much different. We still have our sacrificial rituals.

Modern Human Sacrifice

Memorial Day is clouded by the same sacrificial language. It’s a national ritual where we honor those who perform the greatest sacrifice to protect our “freedoms.” But make no mistake, today’s soldiers are the modern form of willing sacrificial victims.

I once made that statement at a conference and one of the presenters became really upset. She said, “But our soldiers wouldn’t see themselves as victims!”

And that’s exactly the point. It turns out that the greatest victim is not just a willing victim, but a victim who is convinced that he or she isn’t a victim at all. The truth is that we can no longer see soldiers as anything but victims of the human propensity for violence. We see the pictures of caskets brought home revealing our war-torn culture of death. We are now fully aware of post-traumatic stress disorder, of the difficulties soldiers have finding employment, not to mention the life-long physical injuries that affect generations.

Stop Celebrating Memorial Day!

We need to stop celebrating Memorial Day. It’s a ritual of war that runs on the sacrificial mechanism that demands unity, including the unity of the victims of war. Don’t get me wrong, we need to care for our soldiers. As the victims of the human will to violence, that’s the least they deserve. But they also deserve for us to stop romanticizing war. Otherwise we doom them, and ourselves, to endless war.

In today’s reign of violence, continued war will only mean the destruction of humanity.