Great loss. Stupefying, shocking, unimaginable, horrendous, heartbreaking loss.
The adjectives just don’t capture what sent us reeling this week: the beautiful faces of 19 children who were slaughtered in their classroom.
They along with two teachers were massacred Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Another 17 were injured.
We must remember them this Memorial Day and every Memorial Day for sacrificing their lives in the battle over issues of which the children knew little: gun rights, mental health services, free speech and social media, and privacy rights.
It’s time for Memorial Day to evolve into a National Day of Mourning of our great losses, including those who’ve died in our mass shooting epidemic. This week’s slaughter was the 17th mass shooting in the United States since 10 people were killed on May 14 in Buffalo, New York, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which includes all shootings in which at least four people are killed or wounded (not including the shooters). That is 17 shootings in 10 days.
Hundreds have died in mass shootings, and we should remember them all on Memorial Day.
The constant reminders from military organizations and communities that Memorial Day is a day to honor those who gave the “ultimate sacrifice” of their lives in battle tells me there already has been a shift on how we view this holiday.
So does my own childhood experience in a not-influenced-by-the-military community. We visited the family cemetery in a tiny town in Michigan to put flowers on the graves of relatives, including my grandfather’s. He served in World War I but did not die in the trenches.
It made sense to clean up cemeteries and decorate graves in late May when the summer growing season began. It was comforting to do it as a family outing when others in the community were doing the same.
Yes, the day started on May 5, 1866, in Waterloo, New York, as one to remember those who died in the Civil War and was broadened by proclamation in 1868 to become Decoration Day. After World War I, it evolved to honor the dead from all wars and in 1971 became a federal holiday on the last Monday in May.
But it has evolved for many, just as other holidays have.
Broadening the focus of the day to memorialize all our nation’s losses does not lessen the remembrances for those who died in war but recognizes that we have had many struggles that result in great loss. And frankly, we honor our war dead on many other days – 4th of July, Veterans’ Day and Armed Forces Day – as anyone who has attended ceremonies on those holidays would know.
We do not routinely, as a nation, recognize other losses such as the deaths of Native Americans as they were forcibly marched from their lands, those killed during the Civil Rights Movement, Japanese-American citizens who died in World War II prison camps, Native American children who died at government-run boarding schools, those who died in the 1918 flu pandemic and the Covid pandemic, and those who’ve died in our many, many mass shootings.
These are losses we must jointly recognize and jointly mourn because whether we recognize it or not, they have shaped us as a nation. The direct and immediate impact on some communities is great, but the legacy of loss touches all of us as we’ve learned anew during the pandemic. It’s time we recognized that.
We are willing to lock classroom doors, allow our children to practice mass shooter drills and, in some quarters, consider arming our teachers. We’ve added security cameras and alarms in virtually every public place, clad our police officers and others in body armor.
Yet in the case of mass shootings and other non-military combat losses, we leave the long-term mourning and healing to the communities in which the bodies fell.
If we begin to mourn all our losses openly, jointly and honestly on every single Memorial Day, perhaps we will cease to consider them as acceptable collateral damage for our policy failures.
Sue McMillin is a long-time Colorado reporter and editor who worked for The Gazette and Durango Herald. Now a regular columnist for The Denver Post and a freelance writer, she lives in Cañon City. Email her at [email protected].
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