We just placed my dad, a WWII conscripted vet who lost a brother in that war, into a nursing home on Thursday. These sorts of transitions are very tough on people, as I'm sure many of you know. When the admissions nurse saw that he was a vet, she said she was "happy to have him here just in time for Memorial Day". My dad's reply: "I never have and never will celebrate a military holiday."

My father is not a pacifist. He is what he calls a "moderately conservative Republican" and an intellectual. But he is vehemently anti-militarism, largely because of his experiences of the military and WWII. It might seem ironic to some that an ardent anti-war and anti-militarism radical leftist arrived at the same intellectual place as a moderately conservative Republican WWII army vet about the role military holidays play in a nation's glorification of war propaganda, but there you have it.

Which got me thinking even more about the whole military holiday thing. I personally know a whole lot of military veterans--of wars from WWII on down to today's American invasions of foreign countries. I can't name a single one of them who celebrates Memorial Day (or any other military holiday) as anything other than the 3 day weekend that kicks off the summer season.

So when I logged onto the Common Dreams website today and saw this article by Norman Solomon over at the truthout.org website, and then this article by the US' first Iraq vet who refused to return to combat, I realized how important it is to remember the civilian and veteran dissenters who also make sacrifices to stop the carnage of war, and counter the war propaganda machine on these military holidays.

In today's US, it isn't considered politically correct to call attention to the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the US military machine, the US war propaganda machine, and it is most certainly not politically correct to challenge the cultural myth that the US only fights "The Good War" and only has "Good Warriors" fighting "The Enemy" whomever that might currently be now. As Norman Solomon's article points out, the glorification of current and past "sacrifices" serves to lay the groundwork for the fighting of the next war on humanity by "our men and women in uniform".

There may not be much I agree with my father on politically, but this subject is one of them. I will, in two weeks time, watch a lot of young kids leave their high school, their homes, their loved ones, to go into the 'poor draft' and serve their military indenture. They are being recruited extremely aggressively because "the war" is said to be "going badly". With nearly a decade of college tuition increases (double digit tuition increases at our land grant university for the past four years), financial aid cuts from a decade's worth of conservative political idealogues slashing taxes, and piss poor prospects of getting a living wage by going into a workforce that can't assimilate them, they don't have many options. Upon graduating, they won't have health insurance or any chance at vocational training if they don't go into the military.

They are this generation's economic conscripts--poor cannon fodder for the red, white and blue politicians and "family values" Christian fundamentalist inquisitors, waging their holy wars. I don't ever want to see the kids I have come to know over the last four years "memorialized and remembered" for the "ultimate sacrifice". Every year, this military holiday comes just before high school graduations across the nation. That is no coincidence, in my opinion.

A lot of the kids who have enlisted are having second thoughts, now that this month has, once again, seen a very high casualty incidence in Iraq. The military recruiters put a full court press on them this weekend to make sure the propaganda has the desired effect: to get them to boot camp as quickly as possible, before their loved ones and friends can talk them out of their decision, or they begin to have second thoughts about signing up.

That is what this military holiday is truly about. The future conscripts of America's genocidal wars on humanity.