Recall the fallen...

...But canonizing the military doesn’t help anyone

We just finished Memorial Day in America, the day when we honor those who died on battlefields defending our country. Parades, speeches and trumpets playing Taps abounded.

My social media feed was replete with pictures of soldiers and everyone’s memories of them, whether or not they died in the middle of a war or warm in their beds decades later. Such attention and gratitude is absolutely right and honorable.

Even I got into the act, posting a picture on Facebook of my mother’s grave with its proud “WWII” etched at the top, indicating that she was a veteran, and its ever-present little American flag in the grass before her tombstone.

But we have gone from pride in the selfless military service of those who agreed to walk through hell for America to canonizing for sainthood absolutely anything to do with the military.

And even my mother, Cpl. Jane Irene Murray, would have said that the government and the country have gone overboard.

This is my Mom when she served in the Army as a corporal., and the medals she earned. The medal second from the right has the head of the helmeted Athena, goddess of war, the symbol of the Woman’s Army Corps. Women were fully integrated into the Army in the 1970s and the Women’s Army Corps disbanded.

Right now, the Trump Administration has proposed a $1.5 trillion budget for the military, an incredible 44 percent increase over an equally jaw-dropping $895 billion that is the current budget, the largest in history. (With supplemental money passed for the Pentagon the true figure is about $965 billion.) The current American budget is more than the combined totals of the next 10 countries which spend the most on the military. The proposed budget would cut programs that help the poor to buy more bombs.

This is utter insanity. It makes the U.S. and the world less safe and vulnerable to presidents with itchy trigger fingers - like the current one. Why negotiate when you can drop a bomb? Why discuss when you can send aircraft carriers to do the talking?

Our military budget is the nation’s biggest jobs program, with projects in virtually every congressional district. So it grows ever-larger and makes it harder to cut.

But the other reason is that we elevate people in the military.

Until Vietnam, it’s safe to say that veterans, most of whom were drafted, were thought simply to have done their duty. Perhaps in retrospect our admiration grew, particularly for those who joined the armed forces during World War II to fight the Nazi menace. No wonder we call them the Greatest Generation. They - my mother among them - helped to save the world.

But Vietnam was so unpopular that vets were shamefully subject to unrelenting insults and vitriol. They were called baby killers, murderers and worse. This, despite the fact that so many who were sent overseas were bewildered boys who were drafted and dropped into a nightmare from which many never emerged. They came home to find peace, and instead were reviled.

That was a disgrace.

But now, Americans have overcompensated. We are told, over and over again, that we owe our freedom to those who serve in the military. That we would not have any rights at all unless people donned a uniform and marched off to battle.

That is a too-narrow viewpoint at best, propaganda at worst, and political opportunism on the part of the government.

I see many people who fought for our rights who have gone unrecognized.

There is little public applause for the aging Freedom Riders who risked their lives to register Black voters in the South in the 1960s, for students vilified for integrating public schools, protesters who marched so that gays not be jailed, injured or fired for their sexual preference, for people attacked for questioning the status quo, for playwrights, journalists and others who shone a light on injustice or lawyers who went to court defending the innocent.

In my view, those people fought for the rights of everyone.

I see zero correlation between fighting for freedom and the Korean War, the Vietnam War (based on a lie), the war in Iraq (based on a lie), the present war in Iran (based on an impulse) and all the military acts that our current commander-in-chief has indulged in: dropping bombs on Venezuela, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia, among others.

Any see-no-evil attitude towards the military makes a bloated military budget inevitable, and it becomes a vicious circle. The size of our military budget is a clear and present danger.

It’s time for a reset.