This COVID Memorial Day, Americans must confront our cycle of unjust mass death as a result of political cowardice and corruption

Memorial Day commemorates those who died while in the military service of their country, particularly those who died due to wounds sustained in battle. One of the first Memorial Day ceremonies was held by formerly enslaved Black people in the South to honor fallen Union soldiers at the end of the Civil War. A war that remains the nation’s biggest mass casualty event, with over 750,000 who died on American soil.

As a war veteran myself, I spend every Memorial Day alone in nature, remembering the young people I’ve lost, and mourning the mass amounts of preventable and unjust deaths that are rationalized under the realm of “protecting and serving”.

This Memorial Day is the hardest one yet as I watch our embattled nation and American families endure a hurricane of crises and wartime-like post traumatic stress here on our own home front.

My friend was killed in Afghanistan in 2015, eight months after then Vice-President Biden’s 2014 deadline to end that war. In addition to their death, I also grieve for the unaccounted for suicides and homicides of working class troops over the past year, like that of Army soldiers Vanessa Guillen and Elder Ferndandes. This year is even more somber with the reality that over half a million people in the United States and millions worldwide have died from COVID. Like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that I was part of, this past year of pandemicide and the explosion of state violence has become yet another wave of death and destruction experienced by my generation, all of it normalized and exacerbated by the negligence, incompetence, and willful slow-moving of Congress.

With every passing day it becomes more clear to the American people that long-time elected officials continually fail to account for endless trauma or turn away from unceasing violence at home and abroad. The deadly global pandemic has laid bare the way we individualize death. It keeps us from having to meet the needs of the harmed and helps perpetually hide the existence of our growing disabled population. While too many in governing power act like it’s all another normal day at the mall, we know what’s happening.

The sprint to “go back to normal” and paper over all of it with thoughts, prayers, and American flag marketing schemes reveals a pervasive desire to live dissociated from our ugliest truth. The American Dream for most is a nightmare. The United States is at war, both internally with multiple national emergencies and externally through perpetual wars none of us voted for. All while those with the most power to enact change are at the mall.

As so many of us mourn mass death in silence and cope in isolation, our ability to grieve or tend to mental health is steamrolled by the unceasing, crippling rat race to pay higher bills and student debt and try to survive a cruel society dominated by the politics of corruption, violence, and greed. Memorial Day should serve as a reminder of the perpetual betrayal and visceral contradictions of a country founded on promises of freedom and justice, all while ignoring how it’s institutions and systems routinely spit in the face of both at every turn.

To truly honor the memories of those taken from us in war, we must be honest about the ways hawkisk and corrupt politicians have brought civil warring, violence, and death to our streets, to our Capitol, and to our families, all while rejecting calls for basic accountability and wrapping themselves in our flag.

I’ve learned the hard way that grief, no matter how painful, is essential to healing. It exposes our humanity and shared wounds, and allows us to live in our honesty about what is hurting us and why. But the biggest lesson I learned in the military, on my deployments, and in war, is that healing and stabilization requires accountability and repair.

On this Memorial Day, I urge us to honor our dead by fighting tooth and nail for the living. I beg us to choose integrity and justice for all by coming together and putting an end to the many layers of preventable suffering short circuiting our livelihood and destinies. To memorialize means to remember; to remember means to ensure we don’t repeat past mistakes and horrors.

Like many freedom fighters and patriots before me, I was willing to die young for this land and for my people. But I don’t want to die without experiencing the bold and honest America my immigrant mother believed we could be. I want us to *live*.