I’ve heard that many folks don’t remember why we celebrate Memorial Day. I guess that means that it isn’t too important anymore. That’s sad, but I think the attitude a reflection of the lack of history teaching.
Memorial Day was founded to honor the memory of and mourn the loss of the military personnel who had died while serving in the US military. But let’s add some context to their sacrifice.
Somewhere on the interwebs, I saw a brief chronology of life in the 20th century. I don’t quite remember the contents but I’ll put the concept together in terms of my Father’s Father, Joe.
Joe was born in the first years of the 20th century to what was then called working folks. They were immigrants, refugees from the Austro-Hungarian Empire of eastern Europe. They lived in southern Michigan and northern Ohio. He was only a year old when the Wright brother’s first flew in 1903.
At the beginning of the 20th century, infectious diseases were widely prevalent in the United States and exacted an enormous toll on the population. For example, in 1900, 21,064 smallpox cases were reported, and 894 patients died.
Joe’s teen years were taken up with the events of World War 1. Twenty-two million people perished in that war. Then just after the end of hostilities, the Spanish Flu epidemic engulfs the world, running until 1920. While the totals are debated, it is estimated that worldwide between 50 and 100 million people died from the flu in those two years.
Joe went to sea with the US Marine Corps during the 1920’s. He toured the Pacific stopping in the Philippines and China. He missed the US measles epidemic when 470,000 cases were reported, and about 7600 people died; 150,000 diphtheria cases were reported, and 13,000 people died. In 1922, 108,000 pertussis cases were reported, and 5100 people died. Sadly, until the development of vaccines in the 1950’s, these diseases were constantly in the population flaring to some degree every year.
In 1929 the Great Depression began. Unemployment hit 25% and the World GDP dropped 27%. I’m not sure how he managed, but I know that he married the daughter of Hungarian refugees, Velma. Four of his children survived. Through the years of the Depression, Joe and his family shared a home with his wife’s sister and brother-in-law’s family in Toledo, Ohio.
Then in 1939, World War II started in Europe. This war was far away but it brought back memories of the previous war. A couple short years later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the conflict. In the six years of this war 75 million people would perish.
During all this time, in the background, as a regular part of life, polio was maiming and killing. The polio epidemic peaked in the 1940’s and 1950’s killing or paralyzing more than half a million people each and every year. It took a concerted effort to vaccinate the population and finally bring the epidemic under control.
Smallpox was epidemic nearly every year until he was in his 40′s. Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people during his lifetime.
When he was nearly 50, the Korean War started. His only son was drafted to fight in Korea. His son returns unlike the 5 million others who perished in the four years of that war.
In 1955, three years after the treaty ending the Korean conflict, the Vietnam War begins. The Vietnam war lasts for 20 years, taking another 4 million people to their graves.
During the Cold War, Joe and his family lived each day with the threat of nuclear annihilation. In 1963 the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tipping point in the Cold War, almost ended life, as we know it.
The Vietnam War finally ends in 1975; Joe is in his 70’s. He has another decade of life left.
And this happened to everyone who lived through the 20th century. How did they endure all of that?
If you were a kid in 1985 you may have thought your 85-year-old grandparent did not understand how hard you had it. But that was a part of their gift to you. They survived everything listed above–and more–and improved things so much that you wouldn’t have to experience the same horrors they had seen. Perspective is an amazing and valuable gift. Let’s try to keep things in perspective. It looks like COVID-19 will barely be a blip compared to the epidemics of the 20th century. It’s up to you to make sure that you still have the power to make things better for coming generations. Freedom is an amazingly fragile and rare condition in the history of humans; don’t surrender it too easily. It may be cliché, but true none the less, freedom is so easily lost and so hard to recover.