America should be embarrassed on Memorial Day

Soviet leader Josef Stalin said “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” proving himself a consummate collectivist (and creep).

Americans — and actual people under Stalin’s yoke who would later topple his statues across Russia and Eastern Europe — recognize that each death matters because every life matters.

Statistics are necessary in understanding scope, though, and on this and every Memorial Day it’s worth enumerating just how many individual Americans have died in U.S. wars to date. As of Friday, according to Wikipedia, 1,354,664 Americans have perished in our nation’s conflicts combined. Not 1.35 million; 1,354,664 (a working estimate).

We talk a lot on Memorial Day about Americans who “gave” their lives for this country. But in truth their lives were wrested from them in horrible ways against their wills and in the prime of their youths in most cases. There was no rhyme or reason why one American son or daughter made it home and one did not. A step to the left or right often meant the end or survival of an American bloodline.

My father, now 94, used to talk about laying in a shallow foxhole during World War II listening to German artillery shells whistling in the air toward his position. “Each one had my name on it,” he would recall thinking with absolute certainty as a 19-year-old 10th Mountain Division staff sergeant in Italy. All but once he was wrong (thank you, U.S. Army medics).

I asked him to name one fellow solider lost in the war for this column — someone who otherwise might not be remembered. “Albert Diener,” he said. “Four of us were out that evening performing reconnaissance work. Lieutenant Diener was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

One can’t speak for Albert Diener or anyone else who “gave” his or her life for this country. But we can say with certainty that we owe him — he and 1,354,663 others. Our obligation, while we’re alive, is to ensure that our nation remains worthy of their lives — something that for the first time in my life feels in doubt.

This country is better than the way we’ve been treating it. We are no longer a nation working together; we’re a collection of interests obsessed with petty grievances. That’s how we’re acting anyway.

Our political class spends its days doing as much damage as possible to “the other side,” without any consideration of how that dispirits us as a nation. Democrats and Republicans routinely sabotage good legislation so their opponents won’t get credit for it in the next election.

People on social media, including some of America’s best known political figures, spend days and nights trying to think of the meanest things to write about one another in 140 characters. We defend egregious behavior when it’s perpetrated by someone we agree with and discredit valid arguments when issued by opponents. We delight in embarrassing revelations about people we don’t like even when that information comes from Russian spy networks that would have made Stalin blush.

Something’s gotta give, but I don’t what it is.

One thing is clear beneath the vitriol — beneath the rot. The gratitude Americans once implicitly felt simply for being Americans is no longer felt as deeply. The blessings are still there, but we take them for granted — and demand more.

America should be embarrassed this Memorial Day. We aren’t close to living up to the ideal we owe our dead. We have to do better.

William F. B. O’Reilly is a consultant to Republicans.