Memorial day reflection

It strikes me that religion and patriotism are very similar. Both provide a faith-based sense of moral clarity, meaning and identity in a world of ambiguity, fear, and loss. They promise the ultimate redemption of meaning and justice. Both religion and patriotism shield us from confronting the possibility that our lives have no cosmic meaning, that our lives and deaths are shaped, sometimes even determined, by complex and ultimately arbitrary combinations of circumstance, and that our great wars are in the end nothing but the grandest expressions of human tragedy. It helps us to cope with the loss of loved ones if we situate that loss in the context of a story which imbues their lives -- and ours -- with clear moral purpose, nobility, and a kind of transcendent meaning. "Freedom isn't free." On memorial day weekend, I was thinking about this in the context of the "Support the Troops" cultural imperative, and the ways in which the social psychology of loss, and compulsion to maintain faith in some kind of ultimate meaning, justice and redemption seems to predispose us toward further losses.

As much as I hate the way the "Support the Troops" imperative is used to suppress dissent and use past losses to justify even more losses, I do believe that we owe our veterans and their families the best medical and psychological care possible, not because of some fantasy about defending freedom against evil, but because they served. That's all, we owe it to them because they served.