This Memorial Day...

 

     ...I would've preferred to focus on the one veteran in my family who died in wartime (of whom I'm aware). I'm thinking about my past a lot, lately, especially as yesterday I'd begun writing my memoirs on the offchance that someone ever wanted to read them.

     I had originally intended on writing about my great uncle Leon, whom I never met, because he was killed at the end of WWII (not in the Battle of the Bulge but another). I know precious little about Leon and by the time my memories started to get preserved for posterity, he was already a fading sepia photograph in the den and a lock of hair attached to it. Also affixed to the picture was a little poem written by his mother, my great grandmother Crawford, the only evidence I'd ever seen, aside from my grandfather, that she existed.

    Leon bore a striking resemblance to my grandfather Crawford because he was his twin brother. As with great grandma, no one ever talked about Uncle Leon except for a brief conversation we had about him with my father. He fought in the European theater during WW II, he was a cook and he died in combat. He was a resident of Kings County in Brooklyn. That's it. I'm hard-pressed to find any mention of him on the internet.

     But the mass shooting at Uvalde and the timing cannot be ignored and even though Memorial Day was created to memorialize our war dead, it would seem a sacrilege if we didn't fold into it the 21 innocent victims at Robb Elementary on May 24th as well as their tragic predecessors.

     They weren't soldiers. They were fourth graders and teachers. But they were thrust into a situation that more closely resembled a combat or wartime situation than any classroom setting. They were killed with a weapon that's commonly used in actual combat and were forced to resort to techniques they innately thought would save their lives from Ramos' rampage.

     Because the cavalry never arrived. At least, not until both teachers and 19 of the students were dead in those two classrooms. One girl smeared on herself the blood of her dead friend next to her and faked being dead herself, the only thing that saved her life. A boy hid beneath a table with a long tablecloth that reached the floor.

     Children were calling 911, repeatedly, from inside the classroom, telling the 911 dispatcher how many children were still alive. In other words, the children were innately better at intelligence-gathering and evasive action than the so-called professional police officers who were huddled outside until Salvador Ramos' gunfire frightened them and they skittered down the hall.

    40% of the town's budget, for this?

    So, considering that these children and their teachers were thrust into a combat situation that they never should have experienced, that the children were forced to act like unarmed soldiers just to stay alive in a small kill box, yes, we should memorialize them on the same holiday we reserve for our war dead. They died, as had so many other schoolchildren and teachers, on the altar of the sickest gun fetish worship by far on the planet earth.

    They died in battles in a war they never had the slightest chance of winning, only surviving. We have seen 14 mass shootings just this weekend alone, according to the Washington Post. That comes out to nearly five a day.

     And, as long as we're talking about 40% of something, keep in mind that's the percentage of all the world's guns that our nation owns. That is, our nation that makes up just 4.5% of the planet's population.

     So, please, think of our fallen veterans who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep us free and safe. Then spare a thought to the victims who weren't allowed to benefit from that freedom and safety because of a sick, twisted mindset of a tiny minority who are alarmingly comfortable with sacrificing an infinite number of childrens' lives so we can keep selling more and more guns in which we're already drowning.