Years ago, I attended a reunion of veterans of the 10th Armored Division, my father’s old unit.
The division, 10,000 strong, lost many men in the Battle of the Bulge. The veterans were old men when I met them. They were proud of what they had done collectively.
They remembered their comrades who died in battle — and they were adamant that they had died for something that was so valuable it was worth the awful sacrifice.
But they also reminded me that it’s the responsibility of us ordinary citizens to make this country into something that is worthy of the sacrifice.
My father died this year. He was a teenager when he was drafted. He was one of the last of his comrades.
I think that people of his generation had a belief in collective good that is hard to imagine now. It was a belief forged in world war. They had the sense that Americans could achieve great things, almost impossible things, by working together.
The idea seems almost naïve today. We live in a time when “collective good” is denounced as socialism and patriots are people who are wholly concerned with individual rights, not collective goals.
But without a sense of collective good, there is nothing an individual soldier has to fight for. Without that sense of collective good, there’s nothing in war that makes a soldier’s death a sacrifice. It’s just a senseless death.
Any democracy has the potential for standing for the collective or common good, a union for the benefit of all.
It’s an important idea. We shouldn’t let it fall out of fashion.
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