ManicDDaily

My Mom's Favorite Flower

May  8^th.  Anniversary of V-E Day.   Mother’s Day tomorrow.   Anyone who knows my mother (my wonderful mother) knows that this is a thought-provoking juxtaposition.

It seems to me very difficult for young, or even middle-aged, Americans today to conceive of the impact of World War II on the generations who lived through it.  There’s so much tribute paid to the War at this point—the stern stone eagles at the World War II memorial in Washington, D.C., the heavy Samuel Barber music that accompanies so much WWII footage (at least on YouTube), even the high-flying term the “Greatest Generation”.   The bunting of commemoration makes it very hard to see the truly memorable; the grandiosity somehow diminishes the greatness, both of the effort and the suffering.

The magnitude of loss is also something almost impossible for Americans today to understand.   Most of us know a little about the millions of lives lost.  Sometimes smaller numbers are more comprehensible: I read today, for example that the two and a half months of the Normandy Invasion cost the lives of nearly 20,000 French civilians.  As a comparison (not intended to diminish the level of suffering there), it is estimated that 90 Afghani civilians have died since the beginning of this year.

Which brings me to my mother.  (Hi Mom, if you ever read this blog!)

My mother was neither a WAC or WAVE, but had the curious experience of working as a civilian in both the U.S. occupation of Japan and Germany, closely following the end of the War in both theaters.   She is rightfully proud of her experiences.  And she truly was intrepid—she came from a small town in Iowa, a farming family, which was very very far from post-War Japan.  Her dad actually drove her by horse and buggy to catch the train that would take her to San Francisco where she would embark for Yokohama.

While she is proud of her own grit, and the grit of her generation, my mother does not believe in the greatness of war.   When the subject comes up (even sometimes when it doesn’t come up), she speaks passionately of her memories of cities flattened, whether by the Atom Bombs, or incendiaries—she visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Tokyo and Dresden.  She talks too of the massive fields of white crosses in France, the large mass grave sites in Russia, the grim, death-scented, ovens in Dachau.   Her visits to these places impressed her beyond measure, and she is anxious to pass on her memories, to somehow make them as vivid and meaningful to others as they are to her.  Even though she is absolutely certain of the horror of the Nazis, though she loved FDR, though she is very proud of my father, a veteran of both the European and Pacific War, she has no faith in war’s value to solve conflicts; it all just seems like killing to her, killing until people are sick and tired of killing or being killed, something to be avoided at all cost.

I don’t always know what I think.  I consider myself a pacificist, though I’m not completely certain of peaceful solutions in a irrepressibly violent world.  Still, it seems to me useful to pay attention to voices of experience, and, of course, the voices of mothers, even though listening to one’s own is almost invariably a little bit hard.