Memorial Day: Together we remember - and forget
ON MEMORIAL Day, we remember how easy it is to forget.So begins a remarkable op ed in today's Boston Globe, By James Carroll, it has the title Together we remember - and forget. I urge you to read it. For example, consider this paragraph:
It is said that America is uniquely defined more by the future than the past. Perhaps believing that, Americans have often made mistakes in memory, with dread consequences. To have had the Vietnam War required forgetting Korea. To have had the first Gulf War required forgetting Vietnam. To have the present war in Iraq required forgetting — well, a host of wartime lessons. And to maintain its Cold War nuclear arsenal, America needs to forget Allied terror bombing in 1945, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
We are now in the Sesquicentennial of the war that led to this holiday, originally known as Decoration Day. It should be a defining moment of our national history - from this war in some ways we finally became a nation - in