Last fall I moved 60 miles north of New York City into the
entirely different world of New York State. My adopted small town
has a fair amount of history associated with it, going back even
before George Washington’s time. Like many such towns, there is
some tension between longtime residents and newcomers, many of whom
are expatriate Manhattanites who came here looking for a more
affordable place to live. I’m one of them.
The arrival of the Manhattanites has had some predictable
effects, like higher real estate values. Main Street has sprouted
an upscale restaurant and a hipster coffee shop replete with the
usual postings for performances by activist folksingers and for
community groups to get together and save a world threatened by
American militarism, consumerism, and just plain “ism.”
The old timers hold on, though, and there is no clearer sign of
their presence than the hall on Main Street that is home to posts
of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the
Marine Corps League. It’s just a few hundred yards from the coffee
shop. On its lawn are several memorials to America’s war dead going
back as far as World War I. They have a simple and sad eloquence,
and they make a striking contrast to the postings at the coffee
shop, which are homogenous in their hostility to all things
military.
The coffee shop patrons have a right to their politics, of
course, and they are not alone in being upset about the leadership
of the country or the state of the world. But what is missing from
their critiques is humility. You would think they had actually
served in the military and had some better idea how to do things.
Of course they didn’t, and of course the most idealistic of them
(if that is the right word) declare that criticism is beside the
point: they are against standing armies of any kind, against war
and militarism and all that. They live in a country that makes such
illusions affordable, because a small minority paid dearly to
preserve the gift of freedom.
The humility one feels as a civilian who never served in the
military is not easily described. My father served in the Air Force
in the late 1950s and my brother is a Marine reservist, but that is
as near as I’ve come. In college I avoided ROTC and thought of the
military as only slightly more appealing than the priesthood.
Though the son of a passionately patriotic father — who was not
immune to pounding the dinner table to make a point, always on
America’s behalf — I felt no stirring in my blood about the
military other than the fear of duty and death, and the curtailment
of individual liberty.
Humility is not something we go and seek; it comes to us, like
wisdom, if it comes at all. We don’t get instruction in humility as
we do in tolerance and politeness and obedience. We get experience.
If we’re lucky, it’s experience that doesn’t leave us maimed like
some who have worn the uniform of this country. Such men often
count themselves lucky, remembering their even less fortunate
brethren who are buried in a thousand places around the country and
overseas.
In small towns like mine you can hurry past memorials to them on
Main Street, on your way to work, and not think much about it. But
whenever you are reminded that your own work has more to do with
necessity than with duty, honor, or country, an emptiness descends
on the afternoon.
Not to worry — we have our health. Who would be fool enough to
risk that for such abstractions? This is the age of the
individual.
If so, it is only because of those who lie all around us.
Memorial Day belongs to them, though it’s really the country that
belongs to them, as there would be no country without them. There
would certainly be no hipster coffee shops.
So America is stalked by spirits, as any great nation must be.
We do well to be haunted, and would do better still if we were
haunted more often.
Paul Beston is a writer in New York.
