Paying the Price

Tomorrow afternoon some childhood friends of mine will be giving away free ice cream at the Rivermark Plaza, in memory of one of their military friends who got killed in a foreign country. He allegedly died "defending our freedom". I got invited to it on facebook, and I ignored the invitation.

I do have a good reason not to go. Tomorrow afternoon, if things work right, I'll be hiking with a friend of mine. But even if I were sticking around here, I would still not go to give out or receive free ice cream (even if it were vegan).

Don't get me wrong - early death is a tragedy. It always is a tragedy. But my childhood friends are making this into something more significant than a tragedy. They're making their friend into a demi-god who paid a steep price for them, and whose death they are somehow benefitting from in some profound way.

I do believe there are things that can really be called sacrifice or martyrdom, but those terms are so often misused. Very often martyrdom means "killed while murdering". I'm not calling all U.S. soldiers murderers, so I'm not going to conflate conservatives' use of "sacrifice" and "pay for our freedom" with the way Islamists and Iranian nationalists use the word "martyrdom".

Another way to misuse "sacrifice" and "martyrdom" is to slap them nondiscriminately onto just any murder that wasn't in cold blood. That's how the victims of democide, genocide, and persecution get turned into sacrificial lambs. (And the sacrificial lambs didn't die for any good reason, either.) Jesus didn't make some profound sacrifice for mankind. He was just murdered. The only thing he paid the price for was imperialism.

If the young deceased wasn't killed while murdering, and if his death wasn't an accident, then chances are he was just murdered. My friends' friend didn't die fighting for freedom. He just died. That's all.

Ice cream was his favorite comfort food. Everyone knew it, and he knew everyone knew it. When he saw one of his friends being distraught, he would offer to go get them some ice cream. And that's why my friends are going to hand out ice cream. It would have been good enough if they were doing it just to celebrate the life of a friend who died too early. But no, he was in uniform when he died, so now people have to read some value into his death, and make believe that he actually died for a cause.